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
Well, he hasn't indicated that he won't. Let me tell you what's terrifying about that. Likely to. So that's a future crime.
So how do you defend against a future crime? Now, there are some future crimes in our criminal code uttering a death threat, I suppose, is a future crime. Attempted something, something. But likely to what? Punch someone, that's very measurable. No, likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt. So you're going to do something that's likely to cause him to have hard feelings about himself.
And how do you measure that? And what's likely to?
And truth is not a defense. What's truth got to do with it? You caused him to have hard feelings about him.
I was... pursued for 900 days. And the apex of that was we managed to convince the interrogator for the Alberta Human Rights Commission to allow us to make a record of my interrogation. Now, we didn't say radio, so it was in my lawyer's office. It was on a Friday afternoon. And we managed to convince the interrogator to come to us. So we had set up—it was conspicuous. It wasn't hidden.
We had set up a camera. This was before smartphones. This was—I had never used a camera before. And we set it up in the room. So the interrogator comes in. She looks at the camera. You can see she's sort of hesitating for a second. But it's Friday afternoon, and we had been negotiating this meeting for months. So she just sits down, and she proceeds to grill me. Yeah, yeah.
And what do you think her first question was? It was, Why did you publish the cartoons? Now, the thing is, if anyone else had asked me that question, I probably did 100 media interviews. I would try and be the most reasonable version of me I could be. I would try and explain it. Separation of mosque and state. It's the central artifact in a news story. We have to talk this out.
I would try and be as reasonable as possible. I talked to a lot of Muslim folks, and I tried to say, no, please understand why this was. I was trying to appeal to their reason. But when the government asks you the same question, you can't answer in the same way. Because the government is not asking out of curiosity or out of intellectual growth. They're asking because something turns on it.
Punishment turns on it. If you don't appease them and say the right answer, you will be punished. And so you can't answer the same way. And so I remember what I said. I said... because it's my bloody right to do so. And I'm not trying to convince you and wiggle through. I want my maximum freedom. And I recorded this on this video camera and I went home that day
And I managed somehow to edit that video I'd never done in my life. And I set up a YouTube account. I'd never done that in my life. This was when YouTube was pretty new. There was no social media back then. There was no Facebook, no Twitter or anything like that.
And I uploaded the video of my interrogation because I knew no one would believe me if I said a magazine publisher was just grilled for one hour about my political and religious views for publishing this. Crucial case. And people, that went viral.
The asymmetry. There were more than a dozen bureaucrats and lawyers for the Alberta Human Rights Commission coming for me. And the complainant, this radical imam, didn't have to pay a cent. And his complaint was so laughable, he cited as legal basis, he was citing passages from the Quran. He said he personally was a descendant of Muhammad and I had offended him.
And I thought, oh, for sure this is going to be thrown out. No, it was not. A dozen people, I mean, human rights is the middle name of the Alberta Human Rights Commission. They were anything but. I would have been flattened. I would have been flattened. But the internet saved me. Blogging was a thing back then. And PayPal was new. So that's how I funded my lawyer.
The Western Standard Magazine came to an end, as all magazines sort of did around then. So I didn't have the dough to fight this. Do you know what it cost you? You know what? It was close to $100,000. And that's in 2008.
It was fascinating to deal with them. They are so used to making deals with rational business people who say, there's no way I'm going to win here. Just pay it out and get it over. They offered me, they said, if you pay that imam, I think it was like eight grand, and give him a page in the magazine to write whatever he wants, we'll let you go. And they assumed I would take it.
And any rational decision maker would have taken that deal. Instead of fighting, you're not going to win. Look at the law. It depends on what you mean by win. Well, that's right. And we can talk a little bit more about my friend Tommy Robinson and how, in a way, he is irrational, too, if the idea is to save yourself. Like, he was in court in the UK.
I sat there and I watched the judge say to him, will you take down that video? Shortly after you interviewed him, he put up a video on Twitter. A judge said, don't do it. Don't do it. He did it. He was brought before the judge. I'm switching gears now. And he was in the dock. And the judge said, I'm going to give you the maximum sentence.
million times, the judge said, you take it down now, I'm going to lop months of... Silenced? That's right. And Tommy wouldn't bend the knee.
Well, I visited Tommy in Spain and came back with him on the flight because we thought he would be arrested the minute he landed. They waited a few days, and they picked him up strategically so he could not attend a rally. Oh, yeah. And let me talk about that moment just for one second. Tommy has flaws, but he also has within him a gleaming diamond that is rare. And let me tell you what that is.
The video had been seen 55 million times. The judge was saying... If you take it down now, you'll go home to your family months earlier. And I'll confess, I said to Tommy, I said, look, brother, you've had the most watched documentary film ever produced in the UK. That's the biggest win of all time. Take it down and don't be away from your family. And I said that to him as a friend.
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