May 7, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| (upbeat music) | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and we are live on the YouTube with another Friday panel extravaganza for you. | ||
| Today, we're gonna be talking about what's going on up north with our neighbor in Canada. | ||
| It seems like there's a lot of strange things happening up there and we're gonna unpack all of it. | ||
| And joining me to discuss are the host of the Michaela Peterson podcast, Michaela Peterson, good title for a podcast, the founder of Rebel News, Ezra Levant, and lawyer turned YouTube commentator, Which is the best thing you can possibly be. | ||
| Viva Frye! | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report everybody! | ||
| Good afternoon, everyone. | ||
| Great to be here. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| All right, I've got three Canadians, two in Toronto, Michaela and Ezra, and Viva, you are in Montreal. | ||
| There's a lot of weird stuff happening in Canada. | ||
| We're gonna spend the half hour talking about it. | ||
| But just briefly, when we all connected, each one of you have your own story about a little bit of tech censorship, demonetization, that sort of thing. | ||
| Ezra, you're in the middle of a massive battle right now. | ||
| So let's just spend like, Two minutes discussing how we've all battled through that. | ||
| Ezra, can you just update what's going on with the rebel and PayPal? | ||
| Cause it doesn't sound great. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| On Friday at 6 PM. | ||
| So after work hours, we get a terse email from PayPal, just cutting us off. | ||
| They don't say what we did wrong, what rule we violated, what action we did. | ||
| We've done over 150,000 transactions with them over 8 million bucks. | ||
| Perfect customer relations. | ||
| We've never had a complaint. | ||
| And for five days we've tried to get them on the phone or by email. | ||
| Our lawyer's been so friendly. | ||
| What went wrong? | ||
| Can we fix it? | ||
| Stonewalling us. | ||
| So yesterday we decided, all right, that's enough. | ||
| We're going to sue for breach of contract and interference with economic relations. | ||
| We are going to sue PayPal in Canada because the way they're conducting their business is just too high-handed. | ||
| So wish us luck. | ||
| Yeah, well, you've got luck from me, and I think from these guys, you're gonna need a little more than luck, so it's good you've got a lawyer, and actually, I'm talking to a lawyer right here. | ||
| Viva! | ||
| Does this guy have a chance? | ||
| Can you fight PayPal and win? | ||
| Well, from what I understand, PayPal has arbitration clauses, so they may have to go through arbitration, but it's egregious. | ||
| It's over-the-top. | ||
| People say private enterprises can do what they want. | ||
| They still have to behave fairly, and they have to, on the one hand, respect their contracts, And they have to have fair dealings with their customers, especially when you have a business relationship and not just a platform like YouTube where, you know, they tolerate you. | ||
| But Ezra's problems are next level compared to most of us. | ||
| You know, I've had the occasional video demonetized and it's random, it's arbitrary. | ||
| Some might say it's politicized. | ||
| But, you know, but for that, it's a little lost revenue that I know YouTube is still making revenue off of. | ||
| But, you know, that's been the extent of my problems. | ||
| Although all content creators are just sort of walking a line on YouTube. | ||
| You want to get your message out, you want to speak, but you don't want to be shut down and have your voice shut off. | ||
| Sure, and the demonetization thing, of course, is a soft type of censorship because it's not direct censorship. | ||
| They're not stopping your videos. | ||
| Although when your videos get demonetized, we know that hurts them in the algorithm, so less people see them. | ||
| But I would say it's soft in that we all have to make a living. | ||
| And you know that if you talk about certain things and can't make money on it, well, then you may talk about those things less. | ||
| Michaela, you've had some problems with that too, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Last year, last July, I got COVID and I released a video about my experience with COVID, which was like 18 days of a flu. | ||
| And about a week after that, my entire channel was demonetized and I didn't get any messages. | ||
| It was just demonetized. | ||
| I contacted YouTube. | ||
| I was dealing with other things at the time, so it wasn't high priority, but I was just remonetized last week. | ||
| without warning for no reason. | ||
| I have no idea what was going on there, but I'm happy to have monetization back. | ||
| But that was like almost a year, the entire channel. | ||
| So basically eight months of not being able to make money on the podcast, that is your main vocation. | ||
| Yeah, so I think everyone gets that. | ||
| But let's shift to the main focus here, which is Canada. | ||
| So you guys all know this. | ||
| I've spent a bunch of time up in Canada, I toured with Michaela's dad up in Canada. | ||
| I love visiting Canada. | ||
| I think the people are wonderful. | ||
| There's an expression of freedom up there that's great, and it's just a great country, and you've got room, and there aren't a lot of people, which is nice. | ||
| It's all just wonderful up there, except something ain't right, guys. | ||
| Something has happened in this last year. | ||
| Ezra, I'll throw to you first. | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| We're gonna show some video in a moment, but what would you say the general temperature is in the North at the moment? | ||
| Well, our political class has become uniform. | ||
| What do I mean by that? | ||
| There are ten provinces, each has a government and an opposition, but all the governments and all the opposition parties, even if it's a liberal government or a conservative government, They're all in favor of the lockdown. | ||
| So you have no political dissidence at all. | ||
| Whereas in the United States, you've got a Ron DeSantis on one side and a Gavin Newsom on the other side. | ||
| You have 50 different approaches. | ||
| In Canada, it's uniform. | ||
| Secondly, the media is completely into the lockdowns. | ||
| They're cheerleaders for it. | ||
| Finally, travel in and out of Canada, even to the U.S., which used to be so commonplace, is extremely restricted. | ||
| And I think they're making it difficult on purpose. | ||
| Fourteen day lockdowns when you come home, you have to go to a COVID jail, basically stay at a COVID hotel quarantine center for three days. | ||
| They're trying not to let people travel. | ||
| So add in complete political uniformity, media uniformity, and no one can see what America or the UK are like. | ||
| This country is like a hermetically sealed lockdown North Korea. | ||
| And I know that sounds insane, but there was just a study the other day that showed that Canada is in a strange league of countries like North Korea and China for extreme lockdowns. | ||
| There's no political diversity here. | ||
| And we don't have a Ron DeSantis up here. | ||
| We don't have skeptical media. | ||
| It's the agreeableness of Canadians, which is normally so nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is a terrible time for everyone to be so agreeable with such a bad thing. | ||
| Right, and I think perhaps your problem with PayPal might have a little something to do with the fact that you actually have been reporting on this stuff over at Rebel. | ||
| Viva, you're in Montreal and I've seen some just absolutely crazy videos about lockdowns and, you know, times that you have to be indoors and just all sorts of banana stuff. | ||
| We say it's a slippery slope. | ||
| It's a slippery slope until you hit the edge and then it's a free fall. | ||
| And you have in Quebec, our Premier Legault in January declared a four-week curfew. | ||
| And I'm putting four-week curfew because we're now into month four of it. | ||
| And it was imposed at the time to stem a rise in cases, not to overwhelm the hospital ICUs over the holidays. | ||
| We're four months later. | ||
| From what I can tell now, the number of people in the ICU and hospitalizations Or lower than what they were at the time. | ||
| And the discussion is not even, how are we still in this curfew? | ||
| There's no discussion as to how long this curfew is going to last. | ||
| It just goes from reactionary to preventative to permanent responses from the government. | ||
| And some people protest. | ||
| Some people are objecting to this. | ||
| But a great many aren't. | ||
| What Ezra says, you know, the media's in the bag of the government. | ||
| I listen to daytime radio. | ||
| They are beyond cheerleaders. | ||
| They are getting everyone to, you know, agree to accept this is going to be the new norm. | ||
| It's not so bad. | ||
| It's for our own good. | ||
| And when you realize that, you know, the federal government funds the CBC to the tune of a billion dollars or something a year, they're not going to bite the hand that feeds them. | ||
| In Quebec, our government is paying for COVID awareness, which is radio placements, television placement, advertising. | ||
| Radio and television, which are starved for ad dollars, they're not gonna complain about this. | ||
| So it's this incestuous relationship where the government funds the media, the media props up the message of the government, and proverbially shuns anybody who dares to disagree. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Michaela, are you shocked how quickly, even though, as Viva said, you know, Canadians, or sorry, as Ezra said, you know, Canadians are nice, Canadians are friendly, they're open, they're decent, they're tolerant. | ||
| But are you still, despite that, shocked how quickly it seems like so many people have just folded? | ||
| Well, if you look on social media and on the response to this, I have seen the negativity towards it growing. | ||
| So before when it was like, Hey, you know, the reason we're still in a lockdown is because you're going to visit people like stay at home. | ||
| So people were angry at each other for, for not staying at home. | ||
| And I've slowly vaguely seen that change into, you know, this has gone on long enough. | ||
| How long is this going to continue? | ||
| We've been in a stay at home mandate for months. | ||
| Like the downtown area. | ||
| I live in a condo downtown and it's a mess. | ||
| There are tents everywhere. | ||
| There are some parks that have outhouses in it because there are so many people in tents. | ||
| If you walk down Queen Street, a whole bunch of the stores are boarded up. | ||
| It's really sad and really depressing and people are scared. | ||
| But I think people are slowly starting to get angry. | ||
| But I mean, it's taken. | ||
| Way too long. | ||
| Like we're way past what's reasonable at this point. | ||
| So yeah, I'm like, I'm saddened and surprised. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I, I mean, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to go to Toronto so that I could interview your dad and they weren't even allowing international travel. | ||
| And do you guys know, is that, is that still the case? | ||
| I'm guessing it is right. | ||
| The court, the court just upheld the, uh, the quarantine mandate at these government designated quarantine facilities. | ||
| The court says, you know, said, It is a reasonable measure to protect against the risks of international spread of the virus. | ||
| That was the other thing, by the way. | ||
| Media supports the government that subsidizes them, and the courts thus far have not been courageous enough to say at some point, we either live in a free society and we either have a constitution or we don't. | ||
| But when these infinitesimal risks can warrant or justify forcible confinement in, they call it a hotel, but it's a prison located in a hotel. | ||
| The courts are sanctioning this. | ||
| And so, yeah, they're still in effect and the courts basically gave it the blessing. | ||
| It's just extraordinary. | ||
| So I do want to point out, though, that you guys aren't the only three people fighting back because even though Canadians are nice and smiley and welcoming, we're seeing tons of it on the street in terms of pushback. | ||
| So we're going to throw to a compilation video right now. | ||
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unidentified
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This is all corrupt! | |
| Shame! | ||
| Shame! | ||
| What are you doing there? | ||
| Shame! | ||
| Shame! | ||
| This is an assault! | ||
| This is an assault! | ||
| I was on public property! | ||
| Never die! | ||
| Protesting is not an essential reason. | ||
| I don't have a problem! | ||
| Why don't I have the right to speak? | ||
| What's on my heart? | ||
| She's just carrying a sign, that's all. | ||
| That's unacceptable in Canada. | ||
| What was her name, ma'am? | ||
| Kasia! | ||
| Oh my God! | ||
| Kasia! | ||
| [Music] | ||
| This is a demonstration to wear a face covering. | ||
| You are all in danger. | ||
| Please get to a nearer shelter. | ||
| [Music] | ||
| I mean, it's just evil stuff. | ||
| You guys have seen this. | ||
| I'm sure most of the people watching, I hope most of the people watching, have seen some of this. | ||
| Ezra, you guys, if it wasn't for Rebel, I probably wouldn't have seen half of the amount of stuff that I've seen. | ||
| And I have no problem saying, like, this is Nazi-style tactics. | ||
| When you have people that are just following orders, arresting people for expressing themselves, Can you give me a sense of the types of people that are out there? | ||
| I know the media will probably, these are far-right wingers out there, right? | ||
| They must be racist people or something, and they're far-right wingers, but I suspect that's not really the case. | ||
| You know, it's so interesting. | ||
| I see a realignment when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., when Naomi Wolf, who is typically being regarded as progressive, are worried about this. | ||
| You have people who are more into natural health. | ||
| You have people who love working out. | ||
| You have small business people, people who opened their dream was to open a restaurant. | ||
| Lots of working class folks for whom the lockdown isn't great. | ||
| There's a lockdown class. | ||
| They love it because they've got a nice big backyard. | ||
| Maybe they got a country home. | ||
| It's a big staycation for them. | ||
| Watch some Netflix, order in fast food. | ||
| But what if you're in a small apartment with no backyard and yet you're not allowed to go out because there's a curfew? | ||
| In Montreal, a city built for going out and about. | ||
| And so I think that Calling them right-wing, there are some conservatives who are skeptical of the state, definitely. | ||
| I would call myself that. | ||
| But I have never worked with more people on the left who are against police, you know, out-of-control police. | ||
| And let me just go through, I was just thinking of a list of people who would normally oppose police brutality. | ||
| You would have the opposition, silent. | ||
| You would have the media, silent. | ||
| You would have courts, silent. | ||
| You have law professors. | ||
| You would have our version of the ACLU, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, silent. | ||
| And now you have the Canadian government introducing a YouTube censorship bill called Bill C-10. | ||
| And I'm thinking, why? | ||
| Why now? | ||
| Because that last vestige of individual dissidence is on social media, including our own YouTube channels. | ||
| The police in Montreal track our guy, Yankee Pollock. | ||
| They call him Jew media. | ||
| They've issued him dozens of tickets for thousands of dollars. | ||
| They've slammed our people against cars, handcuffed them, taken them to police stations. | ||
| Where is the left? | ||
| And so I think that things are actually... There's some Canadians who love this authoritarianism. | ||
| They find it thrilling. | ||
| And Ezra, over the winter, I was at the park where they had just put in a new toboggan run, and there were some journalists there. | ||
| And speaking of the people who love this, I overheard the journalists having a discussion, you know, talking about the lockdowns and then saying, well, what are you doing this weekend? | ||
| Oh, I'm going to my house in the eastern townships. | ||
| And there are people who support it because they're benefiting from it, because it doesn't harm them as much as other people. | ||
| But I, in my own day-to-day discussions with people who I don't say that I'm on the right, but I know these people are on the left. | ||
| They start to turn around quietly. | ||
| The problem is nobody wants to bear the brunt of the public, you know, opposition of this. | ||
| So, you know, they support quietly and they encourage quietly, but they don't want to have their faces on this. | ||
| And it goes beyond not being an opposition. | ||
| Aaron O'Toole, the conservative opposition of Canada, you know, won't trigger an election. | ||
| So that we can at least, you know, duke this out in the election side of it. | ||
| And he's as much supporting of these measures as anybody else. | ||
| So yet you don't have any politician except for Maxine Bernier from the People's Party of Canada fighting these measures or at least openly protesting these measures. | ||
| And I don't use the Nazi analogies. | ||
| I don't like them. | ||
| They always, they're easily misunderstood. | ||
| But Jason Kenney, the premier from Alberta, I think it's like two or three years ago, tweets out something very, you know, critical of China. | ||
| of how a human shield being built around a church, and this is how you fight communism. | ||
| And three years later, he's literally putting up barricades around a church | ||
| and imprison locking up for over a month, a pastor, a Christian pastor, | ||
| all because he's holding services. | ||
| And so you fight the demon long enough, you eventually become the demon. | ||
| And it seems our politicians have become the demons. | ||
| Yeah, so I wanna get to the pastor in a second, 'cause it's just an insane story. | ||
| But you mentioned Maxime Bernier, and I did a couple events with him in Canada, and one of them went really viral when there was this elderly woman in a walker trying to cross the street, and they're yelling at her that she's a Nazi. | ||
| And of course, it turns out that her husband actually fought the Nazis in World War II. | ||
| But his ideas and the ideas of the People Party of Canada are looking pretty good right now, because two, three years ago, they were screaming about freedom. | ||
| But Michaela, Ezra mentioned Bill C-10. | ||
| I think you could probably link some of this stuff back to Bill C-16 that your dad was talking about four or five years ago, because he didn't want the government to compel speech. | ||
| And in essence right now, you have the government cracking down on people's speech. | ||
| Yeah, and this one is, I would say this is far worse than the bill my dad was fighting against, because that was just a little area of Freedom of speech that he was focused on. | ||
| And this is YouTube. | ||
| YouTube censorship for the country of Canada. | ||
| It's absolutely absurd. | ||
| I hope it's not going to go through. | ||
| I don't see that going through, but I'm also way more positive, I think, than perhaps the other two guys in this conversation. | ||
| What's the reason for the positivity? | ||
| Like what's the thing that you see in the distance that gives you hope? | ||
| I can't imagine that people in Canada want their YouTube censored. | ||
| You'd think that people could self-censor. | ||
| If they don't want to watch a video, then at least they should have the option to say no. | ||
| I just don't see that holding up in court. | ||
| What do you guys think? | ||
| Do you think that's actually going to go through? | ||
| Well, actually, Dave, for the benefit of your audience who might not know what Bill C-10 is, it's an act to amend the Broadcasting Act, which would impose the obligations on digital streaming The same obligations that are imposed on traditional media, radio and television, which is a certain amount of it has to be Canadian-created, Canadian-themed, you know, failing which there will be certain penalties or sanctions. | ||
| So, originally, Bill C-10 was intended to exclude user-generated content on social media, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. | ||
| The Liberal government, discreetly, quietly, in the midst of a pandemic, removed the original exclusion that they had included, so now Bill C-10 would in fact govern User-generated content on platforms like YouTube. | ||
| So if, you know, I'm a Canadian, I could not create any more Canadian content except I talk a lot about American stuff. | ||
| So in theory, I could be required to talk about a certain amount of Canadian materials or my channel could be suppressed or deprioritized because it's not in compliance with this Bill C-10 and the regulations, the requirements. | ||
| Well, look, the CBC, this was alluded to earlier, is the largest news organization in Canada. | ||
| radio and television. | ||
| Right, so in essence, I think we're probably all in agreement that Mikhailo's right. | ||
| The people don't really want this, but I think what you're all sort of saying here | ||
| is you have a political class that actually doesn't really care. | ||
| Ezra. | ||
| Well, look, the CBC, this was alluded to earlier, is the largest news organization in Canada. | ||
| It gets a government budget of about a billion and a half dollars a year. | ||
| So extrapolate that in America, that would be like a $15 billion a year grant | ||
| to let's say PBS. | ||
| It's larger than all private news media combined. | ||
| So it's the dominant player. | ||
| Still that wasn't enough for Justin Trudeau so he put all the newspapers on a bailout. | ||
| So about 99% of the media in Canada are either owned by the government or subsidized by the government. | ||
| That last 1% are the grassroots independents and I put us in that category and a few other small guys. | ||
| But that so irks the PM, because as long as there's one voice, it can snowball. | ||
| And that's C10, which would seek to regulate YouTube. | ||
| It would be like if the FCC in the United States regulated, the same way they would regulate Howard Stern when he was on Terrestrial Radio, if they could regulate your YouTube channel. | ||
| But it goes further. | ||
| Give me 30 seconds on this, Dave. | ||
| We have a heritage minister. | ||
| I call him the censorship minister because in his official mandate letter, like his job description for the prime minister, the first point is give money to broadcasters. | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| You can look it up. | ||
| The second point is bring in enormous financial punishments for social media companies that don't take down harmful posts within 24 hours. | ||
| That is literally the second priority for the heritage minister in Canada. | ||
| So what happens if you have a 24-hour period? | ||
| Any accusation, you can't have a due process. | ||
| The government compelling Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Instagram to take harmful, not illegal, harmful things down within 24 hours. | ||
| And the minister said that includes taunting politicians. | ||
| And he said, he said this, that one possible remedy he calls the nuclear option, he said this at a Canada 2020 conference, includes the ability to block people from even uploading things. | ||
| This sounds like North Korea. | ||
| That is what Justin Trudeau proposes to Canada. | ||
| It's a reminder that he always loved Castro, that he said China was the country he most admires. | ||
| Dave, Justin Trudeau has been telling us who he is for years. | ||
| He really is that guy. | ||
| He really does want to regulate even private communications, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| But Ezra, he wears cool socks. | ||
| Isn't that enough to be prime minister? | ||
| Michaela, what do you think people actually think about this guy? | ||
| Like, do you meet people your age that are like, oh yeah, Trudeau's doing a good job? | ||
| Or is it simply because his suit fits nicely and he wears colorful socks? | ||
| I don't think people are very happy with him at the moment, especially with the stay-at-home mandate. | ||
| No one likes the stay-at-home mandate at this point in Ontario, so people aren't happy with him. | ||
| I do think that he's operating out of a place of fear, though. | ||
| I told you, I'm more positive in my way of thinking. | ||
| I don't necessarily think there's something truly evil going on. | ||
| I would err on just plain stupidity and fear. | ||
| Um, because I, I think that's the clearest option forward. | ||
| I, I think I've heard our premier talk about, you know, if I do anything else, it's political suicide, you know, it's causing actual suicides, but for him it's political suicide. | ||
| Um, so I think a lot of people are operating on fear. | ||
| And I think because Canadians are such a polite people that like these guys said, people are scared to be the bad guy and they're just waiting, waiting for it to end, but it's headed in a, Hopefully it recovers when the vaccine rollout eventually happens, if that happens. | ||
| It's not like they had a year to prepare for anything else. | ||
| They had a year to prepare, but they blame a disruption on the rollout on a four-hour protest in Montreal last weekend. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I don't worry about the intentions of the political leaders. | ||
| I don't know if it's incompetence or malice. | ||
| The outcome is the same, so the intent doesn't matter. | ||
| I did a live stream with our journalist George Samueli the other day, and we were talking about Putin. | ||
| And we were talking about the trial of Navalny in Russia. | ||
| And my audience was saying, oh, that that trial was a sham trial. | ||
| And George Stameli was saying, yeah, the trial was OK. | ||
| And here I'm sitting like thinking, our politicians, what separates them from other dictators in the world is only the level of politeness with which they come down with these edicts. | ||
| But but for that, the outcome is probably worse here. | ||
| And the measures here are worse on the general population than they are in other parts of the world that we have traditionally regarded as totalitarian or fascist regimes. | ||
| And it comes down with a smile, a nice haircut, and a nice set of socks that can distract us from the tyranny. | ||
| Well, it seems like the politeness part of Canadians actually can only be pushed so far because an estimated 100,000 people showed up in Montreal to protest the lockdowns. | ||
| I mean, that's an incredible amount of people for a country that usually is not protesting its government. | ||
| But I wanna touch on the pastor Let me just read this to you. | ||
| A pastor from Alberta, Canada awaits a May trial in prison after refusing a bail agreement that would have forbidden him from preaching. | ||
| James Coates, who pastors Grace Life Church in the Edmonton area, was first arrested in February after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police repeatedly flagged his church for refusing to abide by public health orders That capped attendance at 15% capacity. | ||
| Guys, I'm not a scientician, but 15% means that COVID can't spread, right? | ||
| That's the magic number? | ||
| And that's why he should have abided by it, Ezra? | ||
| Dave, fact number one, there was never a single case of COVID in his church, let alone an outbreak. | ||
| Fact number two, He served 35 days in a maximum security prison because of that. | ||
| By the way, 400 inmates from the same prison were let go for COVID reasons because they were in danger. | ||
| They put the actual criminals out of the prison, the pastor in, 35 days. | ||
| And by the way, being convicted of this health order, not closing your church, does not even carry with it a jail term. | ||
| So he was jailed out on bail waiting for a trial, the worst consequences of which would not involve him going to jail. | ||
| Riddle me that one. | ||
| When he got out of jail, the police were so worried that the church would reconvene that they did a dawn raid on the church, erected a large fence around it, and have since then expropriated the church and had a continuous 24 hour a day garrison of heavily armed police because they don't want the church retaken. | ||
| It looks like an outpost in Afghanistan. | ||
| The police permanently occupy this church. | ||
| Now, I should tell you one last thing that's the craziest of all. | ||
| Not the 35 days in a maximum security prison, not police expropriating and turning a church into a base, but this church meets every Sunday, Dave, in secret. | ||
| In an underground church, in a secret location. | ||
| That's China stuff, Dave. | ||
| That's Pakistan, that's India. | ||
| A secret church, in hiding from the police, in Canada, in 2021. | ||
| And by the way, I expect, as soon as tomorrow, another pastor in Calgary named Arthur Pavlovsky. | ||
| Maybe you've seen the video of him saying, Get out! | ||
| Get out! | ||
| He has an order that takes effect, well, today, actually. | ||
| And if he doesn't shut down today, he risks being jailed as soon as, well, today or tomorrow. | ||
| Can you mention his name again? | ||
| Because these videos are absolutely incredible. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's a Polish name, Arthur, A-R-T-U-R, Pawlowski, P-A-W-L-O-W-S-K-I. | ||
| And we've actually, I should tell you, we're crowdfunding his legal defense. | ||
| He's got a bunch of lockdown tickets. | ||
| And we crowdfund civil liberties lawyers for them. | ||
| So I have an interest. | ||
| We're trying to help Arthur Pavlovsky. | ||
| But he is very stubborn. | ||
| The pastor in Edmonton who went to prison for 35 days, he did so, he turned himself in. | ||
| They would have let him go anytime, he just would not in his conscience stop calling people to church. | ||
| But he was very peaceful like a dove. | ||
| This, Arthur Pawlowski in Calgary, is more like a lion. | ||
| You heard him roar. | ||
| He will not go quietly. | ||
| I think it's insane, but you are about to see a second pastor In free Canada in 2021, imprisoned using public health as the excuse. | ||
| That's what Canada's looking like today. | ||
| So the videos of him are absolutely incredible. | ||
| And actually we'll link to the GoFundMe down below and I'll donate to it and I'll promote it on Twitter as well. | ||
| I mean, it's just incredible. | ||
| But that, Viva, to something you said before, that is why I don't mind actually calling these guys Nazis. | ||
| Not that they want to necessarily round people up and put them in camps. | ||
| yet, I suppose, but I understand why you don't want to just, everyone labels everything Nazis and all that stuff, but the actions, the way that these people, I'm just following orders. | ||
| I mean, we know that was the excuse that the Nazis used in the Nuremberg trials, right? | ||
| And it's like, you watch these people and they're doing bad things in the name of just following orders. | ||
| Well, I just, I don't use the analogy just because, you know, it, it, it evokes certain reactions, which are exactly why people use them. | ||
| Arthur Povlosky uses them and he, coming from, you know, where he came from, you can't argue with him when he's going to use this because he has seen the, I guess, the repression from free into tyranny. | ||
| But Ezra, you forgot one thing. | ||
| In the church, I think they put latrines, you reported they put latrines, port-a-potties on the front steps of the church. | ||
| And, you know, it's like disrespect, disregarding and crushing of the spirit. | ||
| And like Ezra said, you know, they locked up the pastor for 35 days. | ||
| The underlying charges never themselves carried any jail time. | ||
| So they get him on the breach of bail conditions, which is the only infraction that results in prosecution that could result in jail time. | ||
| It's the classic, if they don't get you on the substance, they're going to get you on the procedure. | ||
| And you would have been safer at his church statistically than elsewhere. | ||
| But you still have people saying, just follow the rules. | ||
| It's religious people thinking that they have special exceptions. | ||
| I'm not religious. | ||
| But if you forget the fundamental sanctity of religion, then you are one step closer towards justifying pretty much anything. | ||
| The trial you mentioned of that pastor had happened this week, and our reporter Sheila Gunn-Reed covered it. | ||
| There was a moment in the trial she told me that was incredible. | ||
| The public health inspector kept going to this church in Edmonton. | ||
| They were extremely peaceful. | ||
| I've been there. | ||
| They're just all love and hugs and everything. | ||
| And she went there several times and she testified under oath she was not afraid at all. | ||
| But then one day she came back with a bunch of heavily armed police. | ||
| And the lawyer for the pastor said, why did you do that? | ||
| Were you afraid of the church? | ||
| She said no. | ||
| She said she did it for the media. | ||
| She testified under oath that she brought armed police to the church as a sort of shock and awe to please the media, the hyenas of the media who wanted to see this church knuckle under, and to intimidate those within the church. | ||
| She did not need to bring armed police to the church. | ||
| She chose to. | ||
| And one of the problems here, Dave, is a year ago, I think most police would have been uncomfortable being ticket writers for public health matters. | ||
| In fact, you saw the New York Police Department and other departments saying, we're not going to be your masked police. | ||
| We're going after the real crime. | ||
| But in Canada and in some parts of the UK and Australia, police that had qualms about it, well, now a year later, that cement has hardened. | ||
| And they love this new policing. | ||
| Taking batons to the head of guys who don't wear a mask. | ||
| Oh, you're not social distancing, I'm gonna hit you with a police baton. | ||
| The cops who said, no, this isn't policing, they've either quit, been reassigned, or just have taken a back seat. | ||
| The cops who are out there, police I mean, enforcing health orders, that is not a crime. | ||
| That's a serious problem. | ||
| That is a move literally to a police state. | ||
| Policemen have no legal authority to implement public health laws. | ||
| They never have. | ||
| You didn't have actual cops with guns giving restaurants, you know, or we see a mouse under your fridge. | ||
| You were shutting your restaurant down. | ||
| It wasn't an armed cop. | ||
| We have militarized this pandemic. | ||
| And where are the civil libertarians, Dave? | ||
| Listen, I mean, this is consistent with sort of what I would say is the general collapse of the liberal left in America. | ||
| But I'm glad you mentioned this idea of, you know, what the cops would have done or wouldn't have done a year ago versus now, because it's like I keep telling people a year and a half ago, We were all living our old lives, and wouldn't we love to go back to that, but it just ain't coming back, and people forget what happened two weeks ago, and then it just kind of keeps moving. | ||
| I want to give you all a chance to give a closing statement. | ||
| Michaela, you've been sort of the most Pollyannish, the most positive about this, so after listening to these two guys, are you still there? | ||
| To be a little bit more positive about the police situation, when they announced the second stay at home mandate in Ontario, the Toronto police did tweet out, they said that the police had the ability to stop and question people about why they were outside their house. | ||
| So you could potentially get questioned about why you were outside your house, which is ridiculous. | ||
| And the Toronto police on Twitter did tweet out, we will not be doing that, which was a kind of a direct response to this is what the police should be doing. | ||
| No, we're not going to do that. | ||
| I still have some hope there, but then there have been instances of police officers ticketing children in parks. | ||
| So it's a bit of a disaster. | ||
| Closing statement, I really hope they roll out the vaccines properly and everything goes back to normal, but I don't, I'm skeptical about the direction America is heading into. | ||
| Like North America, I don't know how things are going to look in the next couple of years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I don't, I have no idea, Dave, I have no idea how things are going to She's positive but skeptical. | |
| Viva! | ||
| Well, I am positively skeptical, but I keep saying, you know, it has to get indescribably bad. | ||
| It has to get intolerably bad before the silent majority who are there just hoping things get better quickly realize that they have to be more proactive in their voicing and be proactive as far as elections go. | ||
| But it has to get bad enough that even the people who are in the middle Realize that the world is shifting around them and whether they like it or not, it's going to continue unless they start to make changes at the ballot box and make changes in terms of public sentiment. | ||
| But when I hear our health director, or I forget who it is, talking about a QR code for proof of vaccine, you know, I think we're heading in the wrong direction, but you have to head too far in the wrong direction before you realize you have to turn back. | ||
| And I think most people are going to realize that sooner than later. | ||
| And I just can't wait for the next elections. | ||
| Yeah, well, it starts with a QR code. | ||
| Next thing you know, they're ripping your eyeball out and replacing it with something that they can scan. | ||
| Ezra, bring us home. | ||
| You know, almost a century ago, Detroit was America's leading city by some measures. | ||
| Highest industrial wage, cultural capital, Motown. | ||
| It was the place to be. | ||
| Now look at it. | ||
| That's bad political decisions. | ||
| Toronto, Canada, the fourth largest city in North America, a great city in many ways. | ||
| But Justin Trudeau just announced he's planning a pandemic response well into 2024, and the lockdowns are getting harsher and harsher. | ||
| You can destroy a city, a province, a whole country. | ||
| Look at Argentina, look at Venezuela. | ||
| I am deeply saddened what's happening in Canada. | ||
| I don't see the sunrise. | ||
| Compare Toronto with Miami. | ||
| Miami, healthy, free, growing, modern, upbeat. | ||
| Toronto, sullen, snitch culture, informants, brutal police. | ||
| I think that Americans should know what's going on north of the border. | ||
| It is an experiment. | ||
| It is a laboratory experiment. | ||
| And if you don't be careful down south, my friends, the bad ideas up here could take root down there. | ||
| And I'm sorry to be so black-pilled, but our reporters have been jailed for what we've talked about here today. | ||
| So I'm not feeling optimistic. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, listen, you guys are all doing great work. | ||
| We are going to link to the crowdfunding for the pastor. | ||
| We'll link to that down below. | ||
| And Ezra, I'm going to help you in this fight against PayPal in any way that I possibly can. | ||
| I thank you guys. | ||
| I'm going to continue. | ||
| And don't worry, even though you blackmailed everyone there, I'm going to spend the next two minutes trying to get everybody into the pleasant weekend mode. | ||
| That's what I do around here. | ||
| I'm sorry I did that. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Look, it's real. | ||
| And that's why I wanted to do this. | ||
| And the fact that they're pushing, you know, all of you good-natured Canadians, you know, into becoming, you know, crazy radical freedom extremists. | ||
| Maybe that's the silver lining. | ||
| Maybe that really is it. | ||
| Well, I thank you guys for doing the show. | ||
| Have a good weekend. | ||
| And I'm just going to finish up. | ||
| By myself over here for a moment. | ||
| So look, you know, I think Ezra really just nailed it right there at the end. | ||
| And that's exactly why I wanted to do this show. | ||
| I truly love Canada. | ||
| I've been to Canada probably maybe two dozen times in my life. | ||
| And Jordan and I did a bunch of shows up there. | ||
| And as I said, I did some events with Maxime Bernier two, three years ago, who leads the People's Party of Canada. | ||
| Which in essence is their libertarian party. | ||
| And he was warning about all of this and warning about cancel culture and warning against, about Antifa and identity politics and all of these things. | ||
| And it's all here. | ||
| And now there are these draconian lockdowns. | ||
| And as I said before, I don't like to do the, oh, these people are Nazi thing, right? | ||
| Because we all get these horrible labels put on us. | ||
| But at some point, you know, the Nazis didn't just show up one day. | ||
| It wasn't just, oh, congratulations, here we are. | ||
| We weren't here yesterday, there was no sign that any of this was coming. | ||
| It's like, what allows for that, the Nazis, who were the National Socialists, by the way, right? | ||
| We've got the Democratic Socialists, they were the National Socialists. | ||
| It's a slow creep of people being quiet about things, everyone knowing something's wrong and no one doing what's right. | ||
| So these are just a couple of the people that are up in Canada fighting for what's right, and rebel especially, I just think, Just doing great stuff. | ||
| And this PayPal situation, I mean, think about it. | ||
| What Ezra's telling you is his company, which has existed as an independent journalist outfit for the last eight years, I think it's about eight years, and he said they've done about $8 million, 175,000 transactions on PayPal, something like that. | ||
| Just out of nowhere, PayPal can just boot them. | ||
| Sorry, you're gone, that's it, no recourse. | ||
| And it's like, now you gotta fight legally. | ||
| And maybe the legal means are all we have left. | ||
| Anyway, I wanted to do this because I think it's important to talk about other countries outside of the United States, obviously. | ||
| And the things that are happening in every Western country right now are happening across borders. | ||
| And we live in a time with social media that what happens there, wherever there is, it doesn't stay there. | ||
| It comes here and we export. | ||
| We, from an American perspective, export a lot of this nonsense. | ||
| And we gotta fight, guys, and I hope you will fight. | ||
| And all that being said, I am hopeful because people are waking up. | ||
| As Viva said there, you can push and push and push and push, but then eventually people push back. | ||
| And I did sense this week that there was a little bit more of a pushback. | ||
| Chris Ruffo, who's doing some great work with some lawsuits, fighting in the states to get critical race theory out, of some of the state curriculums. | ||
| They got a couple wins in the last week or two. | ||
| Like there are some good things happening, but those good things, they start and they end with us | ||
| because it ain't gonna be the politicians that fix this. | ||
| On that note, guys, I want you all to have a great weekend. | ||
| Actually, my brother is visiting this weekend, so we are not doing a show on Monday. | ||
| I'm taking a rare day off, like an actual day off. | ||
| We will not have a live stream on Monday, but I'll be back on Tuesday, and then I'm going to Dallas for a couple days, gonna do some stuff with the Blaze, but I'm just gonna eat some good food, and drink some good drink, and relax this weekend. | ||
| I hope you'll do the same, and I'll see you next week, and thanks for watching, and have a good day. | ||
| Oh, and if you wanna see what I'm eating, and what I'm drinking, The other stuff that I'm doing, RubinReport.Locals.com. |
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