Ezra Levant
speaker
549 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 13 Apr
Ezra Levant’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I think so. It's 80-20, by the way. And I think people— I don't think a lot of grassroots people think about government grants for scholarship and academia, but they could see that you were being punished for it in a way that was designed to hurt you. So severely normal people said, well, we're going to – we did crowdfund sort of a replacement for that. Oh, yeah.
Rebel News has met some colorful characters over the years. That's for sure. You're one of them. That's for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think you've— You guys have roused a lot of rabble. But I think that's healthier than the alternative, which is a conformity. In these controversial days, air it out. Hear it out. Let the both sides clash. And that's what YouTube was like.
We got rolling with what we called citizen journalism. I remember we called it that now.
I used to be with a real TV station called Sun News Network. There were 200 folks. It had real studios across the country. My studio in Toronto was a million-dollar studio with five people working in the control room. It was a real operation. And a billionaire named Pierre-Carlo Pelladeau put a ton of dough into it. But it was sort of euthanized by Canada's TV regulator, the CRTC. How?
Well, in the end, the TV network had to do deals with different cable companies. Will you carry it? What channel will you carry it on? How much will you charge customers for it? How much will you pass on to Rebel News? And all of these things are regulated. And so the regulator basically euthanized it and said, we're going to give you a few... Regulators turn into censors at the drop of a hat.
They have a... Right, right, right. Especially with media, that's how you can kill it.
And they killed Sun News. And I resolved that I would never put myself in a position where a government regulator could do that to us again. So we went all internet. We didn't try and do anything in a real TV or real radio environment.
Well, yes, because I had a YouTube experience that I'm going to say saved my life maybe five years or almost 10 years earlier. Let me tell you the story really quick. I was the publisher of a print magazine called the Western Standard. You know, we would print it on paper and mail it out every two weeks. It's even hard to imagine such a thing existed now.
And this was when the Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad caused such a fuss overseas. I think that was late 2005.
So there were riots around the world. Over 200 people killed. And every mainstream media outlet panicked and refused to show it. The Wall Street Journal, CNN, New York Times. And so that actually added menace to it. Wow, they'll print anything. They won't show what these cartoons are like. They must be awful. No, in fact, they were pretty banal.
Nothing more controversial than what you'd see on the political cartoons in any major newspaper on any subject. Yeah. Yeah. So we had this little magazine called The Western Standard, 40,000 subscribers, based in Western Canada. And we were fortnightly, so we're not hot on the news. So I thought, okay, by the time we published, I thought, everyone else will have shown the cartoons.
So we're not going to go with, ta-da, here's what they are. We'll be more analytical. And we made the point you just did, not all Muslims hold that you can't depict Muslims. We did sort of a think piece kind of thing. The cartoon was not on the cover. It was tucked inside.
But by the time this came off the printing presses, it was clear we were the only people in the country that were going to do this.
And our phones rang off the hook. A lot of people who called... at the time were Muslim, I would say, exiles who said, I didn't come to Canada to have Sharia law follow me across the world. I found that very encouraging. And mostly people just appreciated the fact that we let them decide. And we didn't show the cartoons saying we agree with them.
It was more like a prosecutor puts evidence to a jury.
It was obviously news. Exactly. And if you're in the radio business, you paint a picture with your words, but when you have a printing press, you show it. So we showed it, and it was wonderful. But then the Alberta Human Rights Commission, which is a government agency— Another commission, by the way, that does nothing like what its name says it does. Exactly, exactly.
Because there's no such thing as the right not to be offended. That's a counterfeit human right. That's actually, you're torturing the language. That's a power to silence.
It's my right to control your tongue. We have the right to be offended. And just stop and think about that for a minute. In some parts of the world, you're not allowed to be offended by things. You're not allowed to express your outrage at things. You have to suck it up. In Canada, we have the right to be offended, not the right not to be offended.
Where does hatred come from? Because I was charged, I still to this day remember the wording of the law under which I was charged by the Alberta Human Rights Commission. And it is against the law to publish anything, quote, likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt.
Very closely.
Showing 321–340 of 549 · page 17 of 28
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