 You're listening to The Crunch with Cam Slater, right here on RCR, Reality Check Radio. Ezra Levant is a Canadian conservative media personality, political activist, writer, broadcaster and a former lawyer. Ezra is the co-founder, owner and CEO of what the elites call a far-right media website, Rebel News. He's affectionately known as the Rebel Commander, though I'm not sure how to look in an orange flight suit or maybe flying an X-Wing fighter. He's here in New Zealand to help launch Avi Mini's new book before jetting out to Melbourne. It's his first time in New Zealand, so here's a warm welcome to New Zealand from Reality Check Radio. Welcome to New Zealand, Ezra. Cam is great to be here. Is this your first time in New Zealand, Ezra? It is, and I'm looking forward to it. I visited Australia before, but of course New Zealand is an entirely different world, and I'm delighted to be in Auckland today. We're going to Wellington later. Hopefully I'll have a chance to tour around a little. So it's not a very long visit, but I'm already having a great time. It's great to have you here, and I've been following yourself in Rebel News and the growth and also the trials and tribulations that you've been through in Canada and also Australia with Avi for quite some time. So it's going to be a real pleasure to finally meet you in person and at Avi's book launch on Friday night. Well, thanks very much for your kind words and the feelings mutual. I know it's tough to be a citizen journalist like you are when you're competing against not just the corporate media, but increasingly the government media, not just government funded, but in many ways government directed. And to be nonconformist, to be contrarian, to be skeptical, those used to be traits of all journalists, but it's sort of being drummed out of the profession. So I salute you. You're one of the few lonely voices in this country fighting back against what I call the regime media. That's appropriate because I labelled the Ardenne government as a regime because of the excesses under COVID of what they had very similar to what you had in Canada and almost identical to what Dan Andrews did to Victoria that Avi and Rukshan had to deal with. And they really were regimes. So I think it's the only way that we can describe it in this global creep of controlling information. The internet was supposed to give us freedom of information and now they're seeking to control it. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned Avi and Rukshan. They really were lonely voices in one of the worst lockdown cities in the world, Melbourne, Australia. And as you know, Avi was literally arrested, stomped to the ground, thrown in the back of a police truck driven far away. I think it might have been even five times altogether. And eventually they apologized to him, but not until after we took them to court, which most people don't have the financial ability or even to know how. How do you see the government? It's an impossible thing. And so Avi fought back. But for every guy who fought back, there's got to be 10 or 100 who couldn't fight back, didn't fight back. And the whole reason they went, they go after guys like Avi is to make people think, wow, if they can do that to Avi, they can for sure do that to me. So it's sort of a demoralization tactic to really make an example out of non-conformist. So I listen, I mean, you don't want to be contrarian just for being contrarian's sake. Although frankly, I like people like that because they force you to check your biases. But these days, there's such a conformity. I use the phrase regime media. Some people say legacy media. I don't even know if I'd say mainstream media anymore. But they're really trying to censor citizen journalists because they really want to control the narrative. And you're right. The internet is the main way they're doing that. And they've totally colonized Facebook and YouTube and Google. And it's only since Elon Musk took over Twitter that we've realized the depth of the colonization by what's sometimes called the deep state, FBI, CIA. I presume Australia's government has a hand in things in Australia and New Zealand. What we know, Jacinda Ardern said during the early days of the pandemic, basically she said, trust us, trust everything we say will be your source of all the news you want. And we know what's true. I know I'm paraphrasing there. But she really was shocking in terms of her hubris that only she knew the truth. Yeah, we used to mock the podium which she stood behind and called it the podium of truth. But she actually said not to trust anybody else other than government and that we're your one source of truth. That's the exact wording. I've seen that clip so many times. And the shocking thing, Cam, is how many New Zealanders said, OK. I mean, I'm not blaming New Zealand. Canadians, Americans, Europeans, they did the same thing. I mean, there's an instinct in all of us. I think it probably dates back to prehistoric times, probably even to caveman times. Stick with the herd and you'll be safe. You can see it in nature. You know, fish swim in a school, buffalo run in a herd. It makes you safer from the wolves, from the sharks. And I think that in a time of crisis and danger and fear and risk, there is a human instinct to just obey authority, stick with the herd, do what everyone else is doing and you'll be safe. And I think that really came out during the pandemic. And we saw people lusting for more government control. There were freedom fighters to count you amongst them. But for every freedom fighter, I have to say there were more people who sort of liked the comfort of having an authoritarian regime. And I find it a little embarrassing. Canada went that way too. I mean, we in the province of Quebec, which is the French speaking part of Canada, they had actual curfews from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Whether you were vaccinated or not, whether you were sick or not. And some people loved it. And no court ever struck that down as unconstitutional. That's another thing, is that the checks and balances in our democracies, they failed. Think about the checks and balances that we've held on. Opposition parties who didn't oppose. Courts that didn't strike these things down. The media were absolute propagandists. They weren't skeptical. Colleges of positions and surgeons, like the regulators of doctors. Any doctor who had a, quote, second opinion, that doctor was investigated. Or cancelled. You know, they were victimized just as much as the ordinary citizens were. In fact, more so probably. Yeah. And it was to enforce a conformity. Give the illusion that everyone was fine with this. Because look, there's not a single doctor who objects. Yeah, because you've suspended the ones who don't. And. I don't know. I think it showed some real cracks in our. Intellectual. Democratic. You know, ability to think through crises. And some people, I see news in America. That they're talking about bringing back masks again. In fact, we see the first. Institutions talking about masks just for 14 days. And I know that too many people will embrace that. More people will be skeptical that this time, but there will be people who embrace it. And look, Dan Andrews was reelected if I recall. And. You know, I don't know enough about New Zealand politics to comment, but in many Canadian jurisdictions, the locker downers were reelected. Justin Trudeau, who many people have compared to Jacinda. Yeah. Our dream. Justin Trudeau was reelected. And in the Canadian provinces, the ones with, with the, you know, one exception, the ones who were the locker downers were reelected. So they believe not only were they right, but they believe that the people support them. And I have to say there's some truth there is that maybe we're not as freedom loving as, as like, I really want to believe that human beings yearn for freedom. But I think what the pandemic showed us is that many of our citizens and neighbors yearn for quote security. They yearn for control. And, you know, we saw this here in New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. We've got an electoral system that was designed, you know, was designed actually at the end of World War Two to prevent majority parties taking complete control of the parliament in Germany. New Zealand adopted the MMP system. And, you know, for 30 years we didn't have one party getting a majority. So they had to form coalitions. You know, people were sold on the story that they would then be collaborative. And it would be all, you know, motherhood and apple pie. And the politicians would get on together. Well, Jacinda Ardern, the lockdown princess, managed to get the rear feet of an absolute majority under MMP. And then she really went to town with, which obviously culminated in the parliamentary protest, where she decoded the trucker's convoy that you had in Canada. And, but that actually in New Zealand was the beginning of the end of Ardern because that protest of those courageous people who had lost jobs, had lost their houses, their friends, their families, their careers, had nothing left to lose, all turned up at parliament and protested. And that's when Jacinda Ardern started to realise that not everyone was on board with her kindness, you know, that she used to call it. Yeah. And some of these leaders started to convince themselves that everyone agreed because, first of all, they weren't going out and about in regular gatherings. They weren't on the hustings. They weren't at town hall meetings because the gatherings were all shut down. So the only person, so in their defense, and I think that a lot of them knew exactly what they were doing. But in their defense, if I had to explain things from their side, I would say they were in these cocoons where everyone agreed. And perhaps you're right, perhaps seeing those protesters shocked her. So, oh, maybe not everyone agrees. And in Canada, where the trucker convoy was, I estimate that there were tens of thousands of truckers, maybe 100,000 other people who protested in solidarity. But fully one million people observed firsthand part of the trucker convoy. They literally came out on the sides of highways just to watch and be part of a grassroots movement. They wanted to see with their own eyes, not through the filter of their cell phone. Yeah. And it was breaking that false consciousness of unanimity. We were told everyone agrees. Everyone loves this. And it was only when, and by the way, just like those protests, you say they were the beginning of the end for Ardern, in Canada, the trucker convoy was absolutely the beginning of the end lockdown. In Canada, Trudeau overreacted. He brought in a form of martial law called the Emergencies Act, which by the way, he hadn't even invoked during 9-11. So 9-11 was not a crisis. An act of terrorism. Yeah. Act of terrorism wasn't, you know, the airspace over the continental United States and Canada shut down completely. But no, we don't need to use the Emergencies Act for that. But these pesky people who are protesting, yeah, we've got to subject them to the awesome and fearsome powers of the state. And that's exactly what Jacinda Ardern did here. She'd had enough of the protesters peacefully camped on the front lawn of Parliament and brought in the stormtroopers, you know, and all their black gear, their helmets, their shields, their batons, their tear gas. They even had baton rounds, you know, they call them sponge rounds. But these are less than lethal but hurt, nonetheless, firearms that the police were using against unarmed citizens. And they dreamed up, you know, the media was in and on, you know, they would put a press release out and say, pitchforks have been seen at the protest. After the protest, when everything was wrecked and destroyed by the police, there was no firearms displayed, there was no weapons displayed, there was no pitchforks displayed. Normally, you know, when you see the police do a raid on somebody, they display all of the evidence that they've gathered. We had none of that. We had all these people prosecuted for trespassing in a public area. It was incredible. You know, it's the same in Canada, there was a trucker convoy, there was not a single violent act ascribed to the trucker convoy. There was one shooting, but it was through those Mounties shooting our reporter, Alexa Lavois, with one of those less than lethal riot guns. So there was a single shooting during the entire trucker saga, and it was a cop shooting our reporter. And I have to think, what are the odds? A million people participating in some way, 100,000 in a deeper way, maybe 10,000 actual real truckers, and the only shooting was a Trudeau Mountie shooting a rebel news reporter. Maybe it was just coincidence, but boy, it sure felt personal. What astonishes me, Ezra, about this whole pandemic nightmare, really, is that how quickly Western democracy succumbed to totalitarianism. If we never learned anything from the 1930s, a scant 75 years ago, 80 years ago, and we've totally forgotten all of those lessons. And I've commented often that use of gerbils must be cackling in his grave, that his treatise on propaganda had been picked up by Trudeau, by Dan Andrews, by Jacinda Ardern, and implemented flawlessly, and we all fell for it. Well, that's the thing. I mean, Nazi Germany, well, Hitler came to power in 1933, and he had to change many of the laws and the culture of Germany to bend to his plans. The Nuremberg laws were 35, if I'm not mistaken. The enabling act. Yeah, and so it was a series of things. It took really six years to get into the Second World War, and the Holocaust itself didn't really get fully underway for more years. I mean, Germany was really one of the most enlightened, progressive, educated, liberal places in the world. I mean, obviously, thank God, TAN in the United States, Australia and New Zealand did not, obviously we didn't go full Nazi, but boy, we sure went to lockdown and mandatory vaccinations and people accepting the fact that churches and synagogues were locked down, and limits on funerals and weddings, and you know, of course, we didn't go the whole distance, thank God, but boy, we sure went a long way, very quickly, and I'm not comparing them other than when you go down the road of authoritarianism, I think we went rather quickly. And part of it was our, I think there's a, I think people always think that their modern era is the most enlightened, and somehow there may be even genetically more moral people than those in history, but that's clearly not true. If anything, I don't think we're as literate in the philosophy of freedom, and of course the media is much more controlled. Goebbels could never have dreamed of controlling the media in the manner that social media companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google, et cetera, did, I mean, literally automated machine learning censorship of, and if you read the Community Guidelines of YouTube to this day, they don't say violating the quote science, because what does that mean? They say violating health orders of different authorities. So basically it's a political censorship, and by the way, a lot of their so-called science or Community Guidelines were later proved to be false. And Goebbels never had that control. The Soviets had enormous control in Romania. They had to literally register your typewriter with the police. They would take a typing sample, because each typewriter had a slightly different fingerprint, and they would keep those on file in case they found anti-government Samizdat, and they would try and see who's typewriter was used in this. That's how authoritarian and controlling they were, but they had nothing on the modern, high-tech social media censorship industry. Goebbels could never have dreamed of the censorship that the modern era has. And this is the thing that shocks me to my core, and people say, well, why do you say shock, Ken? That's really strong language you're using, but I never could understand why the Jewish community never fought back in Nazi Germany. I could never understand how it ended in the camps and the death and the destruction of that and how they got there, and it wasn't until I visited Jerusalem in 2014, and I went to Yad Vashem and that museum is incredible, because it teaches you as you journey through the galleries precisely how it happened, and how it happened in an incremental way. The death camps didn't just happen. They were the end of a very long process that started with segregating people on the basis of something, in this case, their Jewishness. Wearing a gold star. And we very quickly, in modern society, ended up with the modern equivalent of a gold star, which was the worst of that, but the vaccine passes and preventing people going to see shows or going to restaurants or congregating together unless they had their pass. Go ahead. I was criticised for drawing that parallel. And the reason you were criticised is because... They criticised me for saying that, but I said that these are all the hallmarks. We are closer and closer to totalitarianism and no one's fighting except a few of us. The reason you were criticised for making that analogy was because it hit home. And by the way, after the Second World War, the Nazi doctors who committed atrocious experiments on concentration camp inmates, a lot of the Nazi doctors were put on trial. And one of the verdicts of that trial has been called the Nuremberg Code. And it codifies how you need a patient's consent before doing medical experiments on them. And it's called the Nuremberg Code, and you can find it quite quickly. It was part of the verdict on these Nazi doctors. And the Nuremberg Code talks about informed, continuous consent. The consent that can be revoked. Informing they have to know the risk in advance. The Nuremberg Code was violated. And anyone who says, oh people have a choice, if someone has a job that they need to feed and house their family and you say take the jab or you'll be fired, that is not free consent. That's not real consent. And by the way, don't think for a second that we had full informed consent. How could we, since the drugs were experimental and still are by the way, they're required to be under testing for years to come. We don't know what the long-term effects are. So the fact that people would say, how dare you compare it to the Nuremberg Code? Well, because it's exactly what the Nuremberg Code was designed to militate against. And I think yes, it was the incremental, incrementalism. People said, oh well, I can get along without that. Okay, so we have to have six feet of separation. Okay, so we have to limit. I think you mentioned that the vaccine passport was analogous to the Jewish star. I would say in a slightly different way the mask was. Here's what I mean by that. Wearing the mask perpetuated a psychology of fear and crisis, where there was not. The fact that the mask has been proved endlessly, not to be particularly effective and in some cases to be actually retrograde was beside the point. The mask was the flag of the pandemic in two ways. It kept everyone reminded that we are in a crisis. If there were no masks and you had no media, you wouldn't believe it's a crisis at all. You'd say, oh, it's a bad flu season. But the mask was a way of constantly terrorizing you and making you nervous. And it was also a flag that you flew if you were a supporter of the new way. Where's your mask? If you're not blind. Yeah. And so the Jewish star obviously had the reverse. It was segregating you, was putting you into the hated group. But having the Jewish star also perpetuated the normalization of segregating and demonizing minorities. So, you know, there's some Jews who are visibly Jewish. They would wear traditional black hats and yarmulkes and whatever. But by forcing every Jew, the most secular Jew, for example, to wear a yellow patch that normalized segregation in the larger community. It was a psychological warfare, not just against the Jews to have them internalize their minority status. But for the rest of society, oh, those are bad people. Those are different people. This is normal that we segregate against them. And so it was a psychological weapon of mass propaganda. And the bringing the masks back in has exactly the same impact. And the fact that some people to this day embrace the masks as part of their personality, I find deeply sad. It's incredibly sad. But I don't know if you ever saw Jacinda Ardern when she, I won't say she was confronted, it was more of an ask by a journalist in a rather benign way. And he said, well, hang on a second, you know, by having these vaccine passes and having, you know, regulations in place that prevents unvaccinated people from doing things. Aren't you creating two classes of citizens, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated? And she just cackled towards this journalist and said, yes, that is what it is. That's exactly what it is. And she, without even a shred of humility or embarrassment, just laughed it off that, yes, we were going to segregate people and we were going to do it this way. And this is what astonishes me the most is that the people who were the happiest at imposing segregation and breaching civil rights and doing all of the things that we've just talked about were actually the political left who typically fight for human rights and civil rights. And now they were actually, you know, Jack booted little statists that were dancing all over those rights. I couldn't believe it. And to this day, I still can't believe that they did that. Well, in Canada, we have a variety of political parties and for example, the NDP that's our socialist party. They believe in union members and solidarity forever and collective bargaining, but that party sold out their union members by agreeing to require vaccines in their collective agreements without a renegotiation, without a strike. Many of them refused to grieve their members being firing. So those people were politically homeless. The Green Party, which was about skepticism of big pharma and natural health. Suddenly they were for big pharma and a mandated jab. The Liberal Party in Canada, which is sort of the mainstream left, slightly left party. Their central credo is my body, my choice. Keep your hands off my body. You know, they're talking about abortion and other things like that, but suddenly they were fine with a mandatory jab. So yes, every party sold out their heritage to join in this madness and you know, it reminds me of that poem by Kipling called If, and I bet you know that poem. It's a very famous poem. Let me read the first line. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you like that's the very first line in the poem. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting too and it's just such a wonderful poem. It's a little bit zen and but people didn't keep their head. They panicked and there was a collective madness and every party sold out their base, I think and in the United States you had some states led by some courageous dissenting politicians Governor DeSantis of Florida being a key example at least in the United States you had 50 different approaches and their Supreme Court weighed in. There was one wonderful case, the state of California banned stinging in churches because they thought that would spread the virus and that was quickly appealed and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on it quite quickly and it's a beautiful decision. I don't have it in front of me but you should find it and it's a very easy decision to make. There's a lot about the U.S. Supreme Court decisions is how easy there's not a lot of jargon in them and there was this one line about how if the governor could have exemptions for shows like American Idol and America's got talent that involves stinging they had to give the same exemptions for churches. The Supreme Court said that yes the governor has the power to limit freedom in a crisis and so whatever leniency he's giving his Hollywood friends he has to give to the churches. Obviously the ruling was much more judiciously written than that but isn't that the truth? So you had some pockets and some countries frankly countries that were poor countries that couldn't afford the luxury of shutting down the economy they had some of the best health outcomes believe it or not and Sweden had one of the best health outcomes. I just think though that I don't think most countries learned the right lessons from all this. Anyway I'm talking we've talked a lot about the pandemic but I tell you just look at the headlines today the United States of America it seems like almost they all saw the bat signal together and they're moving back towards masks again it's madness. Yeah just touching on that Supreme Court decision that you mentioned Justice Amy Coney Barrett actually said if a chorister can sing in a Hollywood studio but not in her church California's regulations cannot be viewed as neutral. Good for you that sounds like you found the exact That's beautiful. And it's not a very long ruling I recommend everyone read it you'll find it very thoughtful and what's the date on that Cam? That's fairly early. Yeah that's February 2021 that's pretty quick that's like that's with remember they didn't yeah so that's less than a year. Yeah by the way Canada things got desperately worse in 2021 and 2022 was the invocation of that martial law called the Emergency Act so sorry in 2022 that was February 2022 was the worst so America started to at least march in America started to pull out of the madness earlier. This is the thing that astonished me in New Zealand. The first lockdown that we had when the Prime Minister came on the television told everybody that they were going to be locked down that you weren't allowed to talk she actually said not to talk to your neighbors stay in your house do this and we had the police commissioner come on television and saying that if you don't stay in your house in our house with a little rye grin on his face it was myself and another journalist Barry Soper who leaked the internal police legal opinion of the lockdown orders that said that the first lockdown was illegal and we were hounded abused we were putting people at risk by doing that information the Government denied that the legal opinion existed even though I actually had a brave person inside the police leaked that information and the internal correspondence to me so then I was able to actually ask the documents because I knew what the file name was of them but they still denied initially that this existed and then when a qualified lawyer took the Government to court the court said well yes alright it perhaps was illegal but it was the right thing to do and they just glossed over law breaking by the Government and the same thing happened with Avi's case again I was leaked documents that showed there was a political angle to trying to stop him coming to this country and they were even using international resources to try and do that with Interpol and when I released those documents again I was attacked that these are fake it's not real you know and we had conversations you and I and Avi about these documents and we proved that they were real that it was using the Interpol you know secure system but they just broke the law and they didn't care yeah they didn't care and listen I mean I think that freedom was on the March in the 90s I think the early the early years of the internet were some of the freest places and occasions in world history and unfortunately it's swinging back you know Rebel News we recently published Avi's autobiography we also published another book recently we did not write it's 1984 by George Orwell that book is in the public domain now because the author is being passed away for a certain period of time so like Shakespeare his works are in the public domain so we republished 1994 we commissioned some new illustrations to make it a beautiful version I really recommend that people re-read that book I think a lot of people read that book in high school but really haven't seen it since then 1949 so after the the horrors of the Nazi regime but also as the as the reality of the Soviet regime was becoming known this was four years after when the had decided to stay in Poland and Romania and Germany etc and so Orwell saw the similarity between national socialists and the international socialists and he saw the tools he talked in the book about what he called telescreens TVs that were always on always pumping you propaganda but also watching you well how is that anything other than the prediction of our own phones he talked about newspeak a kind of language that was hidden double meanings and there was really well remember he called the ministry of propaganda the ministry of truth he called the ministry of rationing the ministry of plenty the ministry of war was renamed the ministry of peace so Orwell saw it he saw it early he saw that it was right and left and he saw the power of conformity and he saw also this is wonderful theme in 1984 of how intellectuals often were the vanguard of evil and he had that phrase the pros would say yeah this is in the proletariat because there are some ideas so crazy only a PHD can believe them and again who saved us in Canada the truckers were class truckers and ordinary people saved us whereas you find me a professor was there a single professor in New Zealand who who had intellectual authority and you know professors are quoted on TV all the time they're kind of intellectual priesthood tell me I don't know the answer this single yeah there was establishment intellectual academic who spoke out yeah there was a couple but the problem with speaking out is that they only ever got to do it once and then they were never invited back on to the on to the mainstream media and so then we had you know a conga line of approved professors we had you know of course we had the famous Dr. Susie Wiles the woman with the pink hat who is a micro biologist who studies glowing plankton and here she was telling people you know about masks and masks are important and vaccines and vaccines are important and they had the useful idiots that trotted out fanciful computer scenarios that were all based on that flawed imperial college model that they used that you know had huge numbers of people who would die if we didn't do all of these things and scared everybody but there were some honorable ones like Professor Dez Gorman who said this is kind of crazy it doesn't kind of match the science that I'm seeing and all that well he was just sidelined we had doctors that came out and said something they actually had to form their own organization and you know doctors speaking out about science and things like that but they were marginalized and it was only the advent of voices for freedom you know a protest group organized by three ladies who have been attacked constantly since doing that you know described by the disinformation project the the mandarins appointed by the government to point the figure and say this is misinformation or just they describe these people as all their knitters and their traditional wives and they braid their hair and they put this crazy stuff that's supposed to identify conspiracy theorists who are going down the rabbit hole and and that's the pandemic might be over but the lessons that the governments of the world learned are still being applied and they're creating these disinformation projects they're trying to change laws in the United Nations in the who in New Zealand we've got the Department of Internal Affairs that wants to monitor and control news media only have people who are registered licensed news media who submit to the regulations of the state being able to obtain funding it's all about control and they've just moved and they've moved from the pandemic into climate change now and they're going to try and apply the same rules again none of the science is supported what you're talking about licensing journalists if you are a government approved journalist and they use the word trusted journalist trusted you by whom the answer is always trusted by the regulators which means trusted by the government and we're all supposed to be fact checkers every journalist is a fact checker in their own way and the thing is even once they have done their work it's up to us as citizens to be the final arbiter of what's true or not and that sounds difficult but think about it that's what really an election campaign is you have two clashing world views and by the way they both can be legitimate but you have to be able to disagree with one guy's fact is another guy's misinformation I do believe that there is objective truth in the world I'm not a complete moral relativist who says things are only what you imagine I believe there is truth in the world physics and math but on social sciences and matters like global warming and matters like the pandemic we don't have all the information the truth is not yet found out I believe in the theory of gravity I believe that is absolutely true but very few things in politics are that clear and so we have to allow humans ordinary citizens to be the judges of it and not quote experts experts who got so many things wrong and that's what terrifies me about these so called misinformation units they're not made by super humans they're not superior beings and they would just be called journalists or pundits or opposition war room political tricksters but they call themselves misinformation units to give them some sort of special status they're not they are no better than you and me but they have some sort of power over the rest of us or at least they seek it yeah and it's spreading that we're seeing this constantly now whenever it's like us here at reality check radio the mantra of all of the hosts that are on on reality check radio is to explore all sides of an issue and to let people talk and to have what I call you know at the start of this show what I call courageous discourse where you can discuss something and disagree with somebody but not be so polarized as to put your fingers in your ears and start screaming la la la la which is what we are seeing constantly now in the United States certainly in Canada in New Zealand and Australia in the UK where this polarization of society into an us and them and there's so many us's and so many them's that they all sort of overlap each other but what it's leading to is the loss of the ability to accept that somebody else may believe something different you know Cam I'm I'm 51 years old so it's been a while since I was in college but when I was in university about 30 years ago there were debates all the time students loved to watch debates on the issues of the day and it wasn't it was sort of expected that you would attend such a debate if you were in with a political club or a debating club and if you said no I'm not going to debate you I'm not going to spoil sport you were a chicken you were not participating in the social you know ebbs and flow the social process but those days are gone think about transgenderism think about climate change on both of those there is a censorship you're called a quote denier or you're called a transphobe or you're called a racist so whereas when I was in college 30 years ago there were rollicking debates all the time and you were sort of if you were a serious person if you wanted to be taken seriously as a thinker as an activist you loved these debates you wished you were invited if you weren't invited you were set your own up that is gone and now you have brittle students who not only don't see any debates but they don't believe debates are a good thing they certainly couldn't win a debate or participate because that involves having your own ideas challenged and formulating defenses and using logic and facts what I see now is just people repeating mantras and it's actually amazing to see what happens when people who go through the woke academies are subjected to criticism or skepticism or another point of view they have a sort of breakdown they lash out with name calling and sometimes they call for police and I think that that's part of the problem let me say this about the lockdown scam that was a long time coming there were a lot of erosions in our checks and balances that had happened years or even decades earlier that allowed that to happen our lack of understanding of the importance of fundamental freedoms our lack of commitment to free speech our lack of you know there's a lot of things that had to go wrong a lot before 2020 for us to make the mistakes we did and I think some of them can be traced back to education and that we you know we have an idea of trigger warnings instead of saying kids go to school and you will be triggered you will hear uncomfortable thoughts you will meet people who shock you with their ideas and now you're going to practice responding to it but universities are conformity factories, high schools are becoming that way and they're even reaching earlier so a lot of these problems go it was a 30 year 30 years of the wrong direction goddess into these problems it's going to take 30 years to get us out camp I think it's going to take longer than that I'll give you a classic example just two days ago the government here the Labour Government announced a new approach to education particularly for important subjects like mathematics and this is a direct quote from what they're wanting to achieve just to give you an example it's quoted as a critical maths pedagogical approach uses maths to develop critical awareness and a social environmental political, ideological and economic issues critical maths recognises the importance of understanding interpreting and addressing issues of power, social justice and equity in the community and the wider world then it uses the Maori word for students a conga are encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses and assumptions including that maths is benign and culture free that's what the government of New Zealand wants to happen in the maths curriculum in New Zealand that's very interesting I just I'm worried about if you're taking a cultural Marxist approach to things like math I fear for that I'm worried about our bridges and our tunnels and our airplanes in the years to come I don't care what race or religion my doctor is or my pilot is I just want them to be the best at it I'm nervous about that and frankly our geopolitical competitors must be laughing I think of China where they're very much emphasizing I reckon they're fomenting it it wouldn't surprise me because it undermines the west it's obvious it's like the military when the military only in personnel decisions but in doctrine and priorities to have a climate friendly military I remember Barack Obama's CIA director telling Charlie Rose that one of the reasons they didn't attack the ISIS oil trucker tankers is because of climate change because of the environment I'm not even kidding you can find that on Charlie Rose just Google Charlie Rose and it was Obama's CIA director he just said that with a straight face that he would rather not blow up an ISIS oil tanker because these were murdering terrorists the worst people in the world but we can't have an explosion because that's against global warming that I don't know if that's true but the CIA director said it was true I have trouble believing that the CIA actually thought that way but if the director said they did maybe they did that's crazy and America is going to lose a war one day if that's how it is because China is not messing around they're not messing around they don't care they have got a thousand two thousand ten thousand year plan and all we do in the west is focus on electoral cycles of three four or five years and the Chinese just laugh at us but you know you've arrived here in New Zealand right in the middle of an election campaign you must find it kind of amusing that in 2023 we've got a governing party the Labour Party that's using a slogan that the NDP and Canada used in 2019 unsuccessfully I might point out they've got exactly the same slogan you might not have seen it yet yeah I haven't seen it yet but I'm not surprised I think one of the attributes of left-wing parties is that they have a globalist approach you know I mean Jacinda Ardern was as you know the head of a socialist international youth in her day and a WEF graduate I was just going to say those were the next words out of my mouth is buddy Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern and so many of these and Emmanuel Macron is they really synchronized with other leftists and they do on issues whether it's global warming or censorship that's what scares me Jacinda Ardern is not done in fact she's on to bigger things she wants to be a global censor she wants to export that and there are going to be governments like my own that are receptive to it but that's why I'm glad you're fighting the heart the good fight Kim and I think everyone can be a citizen journalist and Twitter thank God gives us a platform for it and hopefully it will not become a 1984 future we're already halfway down that road but you got to keep up alive and as they used to say in Germany in the war hope dies last but there's another slogan that I think that we need to do for those of us who are freedom fighters those who are of us who are truth seekers the Soviet Union used to have a slogan that they would indoctrinate people with was if you see something say something and I think we need to learn that from history that if we see the state doing something that we say something about it that we actually do what journalists are supposed to do and speak truth to power and not become the mouth pieces of the regime because the path that we're on now with censorship with control with regulation with all of those things they just lead to subjugation of citizens and we don't need to prove that that's the case we have ample examples in history where great civilizations have succumbed to bad ideas over time and and that's what I see it's important for us here at reality check radio and for you guys at rebel news that we are the ones that are actually doing the journalism not the regime journalists the regime media that are doing it for the money that they get from the government well let me say this cam to all your listeners if you've got a cell phone guess what you can be a journalist it's that easy you've got a camera you can report the news you can give your opinion you can upload it to twitter like you can be a journalist and never before in the history of man has the barrier to entry being so low in earlier eras you on the tv side you would need expensive cameras and a broadcasting hub and a licensor I mean you don't need that now and on the on the written side you would need a printing press and a distribution service you don't need that now you can be a journalist today for free with the tools that you have and you can do it as a living or you can do it as a hobby outside you I would frankly recommend starting off people start off with it as a hobby because you know it's very difficult to make a living out of it but you can in fact now twitter is paying contributors based on the amount of traffic they get so you act I've seen some people actually make a living wage just out of tweeting if they're interesting and entertaining and informative so I would encourage people and people ask me all the time how do I do it how do I start wake up in the morning and put your slippers on and get into it that's right my number one piece of advice would be do it every day because first of all if you don't have something to say every day maybe you should know that maybe you just need to scratch an inch if you are good at it you'll get better every day and people will I think if people will know that you're doing it every day people will start to form a habit they'll say oh what's he saying today I know he's got a hot take I'll take it today and by the way twitter is great for that because it doesn't have to be long it doesn't have to be a lengthy thing it can be very short so it's go ahead yeah well we're seeing that right now in New Zealand where there's a guy who uses pseudonym because he's in a job that he doesn't want to risk and so he has to use a pseudonym his twitter handle is and he seems to be very well connected seems to know how to use the official information act very well and he has revealed in the last couple of days a concerted campaign by the New Zealand government to purchase content that suits a narrative that they want to push out and that narrative is quite broad in what he has been exposing through these through these documents and I sent you a link before we we got started on this interview but basically the New Zealand government has approached the television station about a special partnership about climate change that they started on in May 2022 and then finally signed it after negotiations so that they could time it with COP 27 now you've sent journalists to COP 27 so you know what I'm talking about they've spent $400,000 or so with this is just one news organization that we know about and the second one stuff the largest internet news site in New Zealand and they've been paying for content to push an agenda that also involved government ministers appearing on television shows to push that agenda and you know what's really strange about this Hezra? The only people talking about us people on Twitter or reality check radio, another independent media outlet called the platform the mainstream media today I would have thought that would be big news but here we have cash for content arrangements in place with media the New Zealand Herald said nothing there's nothing on the stuff the major TV channels have said nothing the major commercial radio stations have said nothing about it, total silence and first of all I'm shocked but not surprised because the same thing is happening in Canada and we did an access to information request in Canada making the list of all the the media companies that received special bailouts and payments from Trudeau and the list there were 1500 companies on the list, Cam I didn't even know there were 1500 media companies in all of Canada everyone in the entire industry went to get their payoffs some it was tens of thousands some it was hundreds of thousands some it was millions it was the one thing these 1500 titles have in common not a single one reported it because why would you disclose to your own viewers that you're really running infomercials for the regime and if listeners are having trouble realizing why that's bad imagine if it was oh I don't know, ExxonMobil and they just said wink wink we have a particular view on global warming taxes or imagine if it was a tobacco company well what about oh I don't know, Pfizer yeah, well that's a huge and obvious one and you know what, Cam it's funny you say that I don't know if you saw but in January Avi Amini and I with a couple of the journalists went to Davos Switzerland for the World Economic Forum and we literally chanced upon Albert Burla the Pfizer CEO on the street and I couldn't believe it we jumped into action we walked with him for about three minutes until he managed to duck out and we peppered him with questions he didn't really answer them although I think he could have like it surely wasn't the first time he heard those questions but he just thought himself above answering them that video was the first time I think that Albert Burla was scrummed like that by anybody he does media interviews all the time not so much today but back then he did and so what that showed was not just people pummeling Burla with questions and I thought some of our questions were good but it was a wake up call that hang on why has no one else ever done this to Burla we were not rude we didn't I saw the videos you know you were very I mean it's the thing is you're always exceptionally polite I just agree with that but there were substantive questions polite to the me you've put it that way well we poked him he didn't say anything but the fact that Abbey and I pummeled him for three minutes was the reason I tell you that that was our most popular video we have ever made in our nine years that video has been seen more than any other of our videos 20 million times alone on Twitter and the reason I say that is you would never have seen those questions on by the New Zealand Herald by stuff by in America CNN's CNN's or even Fox or even Fox they would have been much more careful because you don't bite the hand that feeds you and there was a multi-billion dollar sales effort going on and Pfizer is a major sponsor of media major advertiser major sponsor and if you wonder why you never saw Albert Burla scrummed by anyone else other than Abbey and me and myself two citizen journalists neither of whom went to journalism school neither of whom worked for a big raising media it's because of what you just pointed out here in New Zealand these secret payments and of course Cam this revelation is not being reported because they're all in on it they are all in on it and you are not invited and this is a criticism that comes up about yourself because you were able to do those things through fair means or foul people say that rebel news is controlled media that you were actually given access at Davos and it was just so that they could look like that there was some opposition media there and that actually you're just grifters how do you cope with those constant criticisms of rebel news your business model how you do interviews like that where you're trying to get Albert Burla to talk and you're accused of being controlled media that are actually on the side of the state I mean it would a hell out of me if it was said to me I saw a few people say that about that burly interview like I said 20 million people saw that on twitter alone and I saw a few people saying that must have been set up well let me just give you some background we went to the world economic forum in Davos we were not given credentials we were standing outside the security perimeter we were not allowed to go in all the VIPs are in it's like a castle with a drawbridge really and we are out on the street it was cold it was very cold and basically what we did all day was wait and try and catch people as they came and went I catch we caught John Kerry very quickly we caught Brian Kemp the governor of the state of Georgia in the United States we waited for two hours as Greta Thunberg tried to outweighed us she walked with Greta for 10 minutes and talked to him for 10 minutes I saw that one too yeah and I thought her answers were silly and frustrating but at least she talked to us it was absolutely good luck that we caught burla because the name tags are fairly small you've got to spot people or spot their name tags and then you've got to very quickly think of questions like Tony Blair I bumped into Tony Blair the British PM if you had five seconds to think of questions for him could you do it you'll notice one in the video of me scrumming burla I sort of ran out of questions after 30 seconds and luckily Abbey jumped in because I I wasn't ready to think okay what should I ask find her I think that was Albert Burla's worst day of the year and anyone who thinks that was set up I think that's a I mean watch the video I remember the questions I asked I said why did you keep it secret that your virus didn't stop transmissibility right I said you knew it before you before you admitted it why did you decide to keep it secret I'm sorry that's a devastating question if I do say so myself we said why did you lie about the efficacy you said it was 90% to 90% so we said will you apologize how was that serving Pfizer's interests I think one of us said something like you know you need a yacht or something what do you think about when you're on your private jet or you're yacht I think Abbey said something about returning money for you know faulty products we asked we peppered them with the most vigorous by the way if someone has a tough question that they can think of that we didn't ask I'd like to hear it that we pummeled him and I think he made it look worse because he didn't talk and we had and he tried to escape us as you saw he tried to get out of the public street the whole thing was about three minutes long but it felt for him I'm sure like three hours that was a combination of luck patience we waited and waited and we had no idea who we could get and we had to sort of spot their name tags I mean I recognize Alba Borla because he's on TV so much but many of the names I just wouldn't I wouldn't have known Brian Kemp the governor of Georgia I just don't know what he looks like so we had a team there whose job was to sort of spot name tags and again this was only for people who left the security perimeter out in any of the official venues there are some sort of kiosks outside the official venues where we were allowed to go but I walked into the Black Rock venue and they basically shoot us out of there and they called security now I didn't I mean I left the building I didn't want to trespass I didn't want to be charged by the way I should tell you that Swiss police are very respectful of civil liberties we were stopped a couple times by Swiss police we just said we're journalists we have not broken the law and they said you're right I'm used to arguing with police in Canada in the United Kingdom and I've seen Avi do it in Australia these Swiss police were as gentle as you could imagine and they absolutely did not stop us from scrumming anyone there were heavily armed police where we met Greta where we met Albert Burla and they didn't do a thing whereas I promise you if that and it happened in New Zealand Canada the UK you're right and so let me say one more thing it's hard to get to Davos you have to fly to Zurich then take the train the WEF books every single hotel room in the town of Davos you cannot even stay in Davos you have to stay one or two towns away and take the train or drive in every day they make it very hard to get there from New Zealand it's probably $3,000 to get there and good luck finding an Airbnb but if you get there it really is a festival of VVIPs it really is the greatest gathering of big shots in the world and you're not going to get into their sanctum but you will get on the street so again if there's a citizen journalist out there I know what I just said about $3,000 to get there that's a huge obstacle but we crowdfunded and so you talked about crowdfunding Cam the way I see it is there's three ways you can run a media company one is you can do what the New York Times and the Washington Post does that's right the richest man that's right Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon owns Washington Post or Elon Musk for that matter so a lot of oligarchs buy media as like a play thing so you could work for a billionaire and that's great as long as you do exactly what he says you'll be fine another way is to work for a large corporate media trouble with that is they have ads to sell to Pfizer and they're often exposed to public pressure through other companies and they're conglomerate so you can go to work for a corporate media company but prepare to be very vanilla on all sides for the rest of your life they'll be very woke another way is what we do that's right and Rebel News, the average donation to Rebel News is $58 and so that means we have a lot of people chipping in there's no one donor who's so big that he can call me up and say Ezra, fire Avi and if someone tried to phone me up and say fire Avi I would say now I know that Avi's hitting the target and no one tries to do that because they know I'll react the opposite way I didn't always work for a citizen funded company I did work for an oligarch so I worked for a TV station for a few years owned by a billionaire named Pierre Calpelado the company was called Quebec Orb and it was wonderful I didn't have to worry about making payroll I got well paid it was a great job I knew there were a few things I wouldn't talk about because it would upset the big man but I was actually given a lot of freedom listen I loved it, it's great work if you can get it but just be prepared that if you if your oligarch boss disagrees with you you are going to be silenced now maybe for some people they don't care they just want a job maybe they're talking about sports or the weather and they're really not controversial but if you are a political commentator or a news reporter if you're trying to speak truth to power if you're trying to tell the contrarian side of the story if you're a skeptic about anything mainstream don't work for a conglomerate and maybe you can find an oligarch who supports your point of view but I'm not sure I don't know a lot of them that's right and I work a lot harder now because we have to crowdfund every day that's a lot harder than just showing up to work in a luxury studio but I'm a lot freer and it feels great and I would encourage people you know to express themselves that way I would warn them against trying to make a living out of this I would warn people start small start as a hobby but I would say it's been wonderful and as long as I stay with the people they're going to stay with me that's what I believe yeah and I'm exactly the same position you know my audience are the ones that I value not any advertisers or secret funders not that I've got any I just value the contributions that my audience provides me and it can be as small as a comment saying thanks for saying that thanks for interviewing Ezra those are the things that matter the most to me we've got subscribers they're the people that I listen to and if they stop subscribing that means I'm doing something wrong and that's my guidance that I have if I look at the subscribers if it's going up I must be doing something right if it's going down I must be doing something wrong and I go and correct it and that's how newspapers started that's the thing I was involved in a court case where I was being sued and you know this very well you've been sued several times like me I had the person, the protagonist up against me said was claiming I wasn't a journalist and I had to prove that I was a journalist to the judge and then when I did writing here's this here's that explained that pamphlet here's then started with typewriters got printing presses and etc. I'm just using the modern tools like you talked about before cell phones and things like that and the protagonist then said but you're not a good journalist and I said to the judge there's no requirement in the law to be a good journalist you just have to be a journalist and I actually had to get a court judgment that declared that I was a journalist and that set all the argument but I should never have had to have done that in the first place well that's the times we're in these days they want to regulate journalism as a kind of priesthood or profession so they can stop citizen journalists from talking back well Cam, it's a pleasure to see you in action and to be on your show and it's great to be in New Zealand I'm not over the jet lag I just landed this morning but you need a rest and I've taken up more than enough of your time but you enjoy it's a pleasure though you enjoy the rest of the day and we'll catch up in person on Friday for Harvey's book launch I'm really looking forward to it looking forward to meeting you in person looking forward to meeting New Zealanders who are contrarian who are non conformist who want to know the other side of the story and who believe in freedom and I believe that New Zealand historically has been a place for freedom and frankly for non conformist and I hope that spirit can be rekindled and that's the whole ethos of reality check radio and I think there's a good alignment with what we're doing with what rebel news is doing and that's the reason why I wanted to have you on the show today well I'm very grateful to you and thanks for being such a supporter of Harvey and what I would say to your listeners is even if you don't agree with that the fact that he's there is healthy for public discussion and it's in the public interest to have contrarian trouble making journalists and it keeps politicians on their toes it challenges sacred cows and every once in a while we get something right and it makes a difference more often than not Israel we get things right more often than not well thanks very much for this canvas appreciate it thank you very much Ezra cheers Ezra has made a career of challenging the mainstream and politicians and rebels fight against the excesses of the Trudeau regime in Canada is vitally important that's why he's here in New Zealand to share details of that fight join us at Harvey's book launch in Auckland tomorrow and meet the three amigos in person do you think the same? don't forget to send comments to inbox at realitycheck.radio or text to 2057 this is The Crunch with Cam Slater conversations with a side of controversy right here on RCR