The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Thu, 27 Feb 2025
Support Tommy Robinson’s Give Send Go: https://www.givesendgo.com/Tommy-Robinsons-children Jordan Peterson sits down with human rights activist, political writer, and founder of Rebel News, Ezra Levant. They discuss Ezra’s first hand experience with the World Economic Forum, the antithetical turn toward authoritarianism in the United Kingdom, and Tommy Robinson’s ongoing and wrongful imprisonment. #FreeTommyRobinson Ezra Levant is a Canadian human rights activist, political writer, and father, Ezra Levant is the host of the Ezra Levant show and founder of Rebel News – the largest online independent news network in Canada. Ezra’s great grandfather emigrated to Canada in 1903 from Russia, establishing a homestead near Drumheller, Alberta. Ezra spent his early life growing up in a suburb of Calgary, where he attended a Jewish day school before making the switch to public school. This episode was filmed on February 8th, 2025. | Links | For Ezra Levant: On X https://x.com/ezralevant?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Website https://ezralevant.com/?_sm_vck=6Dk0T7k5R2NWQTwwtTqs55WtJ754DTN27JZwMqFF2tff7QM4tJDs Rebel News on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@RebelNewsOnline Rebel News website https://www.rebelnews.com/
Chapter 1: What is the battle over Tommy Robinson about?
There's a battle between Tommy Robinson and the government of the United Kingdom over what is true.
They've got Tommy in isolation.
That's their strategy. Do you know how he's doing? He's deteriorating. That's another thing about being in jail I've learned from Tommy Robinson is you are at the mercy of these guards.
How would you describe the World Economic Forum?
When I go to the UK, I see what our future will be five years down the road if we don't change course. Let me tell you what's terrifying about that.
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Chapter 2: How is Tommy Robinson being treated in prison?
Hello, everybody. I'm sitting here in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada today, and my guest is Ezra Levant, and Ezra Levant is the perpetrator of Rebel News, which was an early adopter of social media technology on the news front, one of Canada's earliest adopters, and really one of the earliest adopters in the world, and he's been rabble-rousing for decades.
like a good depends on how you count it but 10 to 15 years and we first came to each other's attention when i was participating in a free speech debacle at the university of toronto just after my comments about canada's infamous bill c-16 my well-reasoned comments i might add uh came to wide public attention and caused a furor that never ended and uh
Rebel News backed me in that enterprise and helped publicize what was happening and supported my research financially for a year or so at the University of Toronto when the federal government decided that I wasn't worth supporting anymore despite my stellar research background and unbroken history of previous funding.
Anyways, I got a chance to talk to Ezra and so we did a bit of walking down memory lane talking about, well, the strange situation that obtains in Canada, not least with regard to the new likely liberal leader, Mark Carney. We talked about the WEF and their machinations. We talked a fair bit about Tommy Robinson, a political prisoner in the UK. I did two interviews with him, and Ezra worked.
Tommy Robinson was a journalist working for Rebel News for a good while. And we talked a lot about Tommy, who's in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in the UK for a civil crime, which was distributing a film called Silenced, which is probably the most well-watched documentary that the UK has ever produced. So that gag order didn't work very well.
We talked a fair bit about Australia. We talked about the political situation in Canada and the UK. We talked about the trucker convoy and about the transformation of the news media from the corrupt government-funded legacy media in Canada, say, exemplified by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC, and the rise of the new media, apart from wandering down memory lane.
And so, oh, I should mention something too. Even though Ezra was too shy to mention it during the podcast, which is not something that you'd normally say about Ezra Levant, too shy, he's got a new book coming out too, which is called Deal of the Century, The America First Plan for Canada's Oil Sands.
And so, well, keep an eye out for that because there's a lot of oil in the oil sands and there's every reason to use it. despite the myriad of reasons that were force fed about not using it. And so, you know, Ezra's a battler for the Alberta economy and for Western energy independence and the utility of being grateful, let's say, for the fossil fuel industry that stops us from
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Chapter 3: What experiences has Ezra Levant had with the World Economic Forum?
freezing to death in Winnipeg, for example, in the middle of the winter when it's minus 30 and everyone's warm. And so that's deal of the century, the America first plan for Canada's oil sands. In any case, join me today for my discussion with Ezra Levat, head of Rebel News. They also, by the way, did a lot to publicize the trucker's convoy. Looking forward to it.
So we have lots to talk about today. We can talk about our mutual friend, Tommy Robinson, and whatever the hell is going on in the UK. We can talk about the WF, because I know you've sent journalists there and been there yourself. We can talk about the stunningly dismal state of the political situation in Canada. But I think I want to start with two other things. I want to remember how we met.
And I want to talk to you about what's happened with Rebel News since then. So I want to hear how you think we met and what happened when we first began our association.
I saw a courageous professor, and those words don't go together very often, standing outside the University of Toronto making the case for freedom of speech while people tried to shout him down. And in fact, Antifa types brought loudspeakers to blast white noise. And we had our cameras there, and we said, who is this? And doesn't he know that he's going to get squashed?
Doesn't he know to bend the knee? And... And this was almost 10 years ago. It was 2016 in the fall, yeah. And we were citizen journalists just finding our legs. Rebel News was only born in 2015.
Lauren Southern was there.
That's right. And that was before the great— demonetization and cancellation of politically incorrect videos. It was the golden age for YouTubers. So things that were raw and interesting and real just zoomed on that channel. That all came to an end in early 2017 because all this bubbling, frothing conversation helped put Donald Trump in the White House in 2016.
And Silicon Valley woke up and said, we did that. And so you saw Facebook and YouTube and Google learn about community guidelines and throttling and boosting, something that has really been going on to this day.
Well, it's still going on, except it's increasingly invisible. We have no idea how these giant corporations, Google in particular, manipulate behind the scenes to ensure that the right slant is brought to bear not only on the content, but on the viewership and the dissemination, which is even YouTube, for example, took us like about six months to figure this out.
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Chapter 4: How did Jordan Peterson and Ezra Levant first meet?
I think it's actually closer to 30, and that's just through one particular program. And 99% of Canadian journalists are on that program. The CBC itself, the state broadcaster, is larger than... than all other media combined, all other news media combined.
Yeah, but Ezra, they do get hundreds of views on their YouTube postings. Hundreds.
But that's the paying for a certain message. What is fascinating and terrifying is to see how U.S. government and now Canadian government money and U.K. funds so-called fact-checkers. For example, NewsGuard. Yeah, fact-checkers. I don't know if you've ever heard of NewsGuard. huge contracts with the U.S.
Air Force for some reason, and they review any website and give it a rating, and that rating is plugged into browsers, and it basically says this is safe and this is dangerous. And it's purely political. I mean, they rate us every year. It's a BS exercise. They ask us— Questions about Trump, they ask us questions about transgenderism, and they ask us questions about vaccines.
You can see they're pushing a very particular message track. And they censor us for our opinions, not our facts. These things are all funded by the government.
Yeah, well, the thing is, if it was an easy thing to separate out opinion from fact, the world would be a much less complex place. You know, today's fact is tomorrow's opinion, and today's opinion is tomorrow's fact. And partly we're exchanging information all the time to distinguish between the two, but it's not like it's easy a priori. And so many preposterous things have turned out to be true.
You know, I... I think the thing that shocked me most, two things that I discovered in the last 10 years, I suppose, were kind of at the list, at the top of the list of shocking realities.
And one was that the public education system in North America, and in Europe, and in Japan, for that matter, was literally created by fascist industrialists in the late 1800s to make unthinking workers available for use in factories. They based the public education system on the Prussian military model. And the Prussians had decided they were going to train rural people to be soldiers.
And the last thing they wanted them to do was think. And so that's like, I just don't even know what to do with a piece of information like that. But nothing's changed in a hundred. Well, that's why it's rows of desks and there's factory bells. And, you know, there was some reason for it. Rural people were pouring into the cities. Their kids were very likely to work in factories.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of censorship on social media?
Because eye movements are very, very indicative of attentional focus, right? They're almost a perfect window into the soul, which is why we look at each other's eyes when we talk, right? So these cameras on your phones can track your eyes with no problem. Well, and then the AI systems will know more about what motivates each of us and all of us than we will. They probably already do. So, yeah.
So Musk's take on that is, well, better him than the Chinese. If it has to be someone, and it seems like it has to be, because what, are you going to stop AI? Good luck. There's no stopping it. There's not even hypothetically a way to stop it. Because you can't even define it, really. Like, what are you going to do, make the mathematics illegal? That's all statistics, by the way, so that's gone.
No, that's not going to happen. Let's go back to 2016. Okay, so, yeah, so that was a shock to me that day. That was a free speech. um, protest. Now that was advertised as mine, but it wasn't. I was just invited to speak by a bunch of students and I'd never been involved like anything, anything like that on campus.
I wasn't a controversial figure politically by any stretch of the imagination, you know? And, uh, Yeah, these bloody radicals showed up. Well, first of all, the trans mob. So they were fun. And these serious radical types. And yeah, they brought these white noise blasters to drown me out. And I can't remember if I unplugged one or if there was a rough guy there who unplugged it.
And then there was a bit of a skirmish around that. It's like, because I don't know, it's a tricky business. Do I have the right to speak in public? Does someone have a right to drown me out with white noise generator? Well, it's not exactly obvious whose right triumphs in that particular instance. It felt like a struggle session, in a way.
Oh, it was a struggle session. Like a Maoist. Bloody Maoists, yeah. They were trying to put the hat on you and make you confess. Oh, definitely.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah, that didn't go so well. I mean, if I recall, your grants, you always... Yeah.
And those were... It wasn't the university that did that. That was the federal government. Yeah, well... Yeah, so one of your requirements as a professor, essentially, is to generate enough grant funding, usually from federal agencies. It's probably not a good idea, by the way, to keep your lab running to fund your graduate students.
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Chapter 6: How does government funding affect media integrity?
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.
Yeah, you were early adopters of that. Yeah.
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.
It's happened in the universities, so... And in the UK, they're Ofcom.
They have a... Right, right, right. Especially with media, that's how you can kill it.
Yeah.
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.
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Chapter 7: What is the future of free speech in Canada?
That's the truth. That's the new definition of truth, fundamentally. So... You know, that was a canary in the coal mine. You fought that for how long?
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.
Before viral was a thing, really.
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Chapter 8: What can we learn from Tommy Robinson's case?
Well, thank God for that. That's an amazing thing in and of itself.
That's the miracle of the story. That's for sure. Thank God. Now, we sued them, and they actually settled. They settled because they harassed a bunch of our people. They paid a bunch of our different journalists a certain sum of money. And then they wrote a letter, sort of a grudging, ironic apology. But it basically said, well, we didn't know who you were.
And you always had your journalistic rights. And we sued the Montreal police. They paid our people. The people who were roughed up, they arrested Menzies. Yeah, of course. And it took him to a crappy jail. Seems like his fate. Yeah, you know, Menzies, he's stubborn in a good way. And you don't want everyone in the world to be stubborn in a good way, but you want a few.
I always like to say he's one in a million. Pause. Thank God.
Yeah, right. It's a joke.
He's actually a national treasure. There's only a handful of journalists... who are on the street. A lot of journalists just sit at their desk and Google. How about get out into the world? You never know what you're going to see. And that's the rebel style. We love to travel also. We're from Canada. We got a fella in Melbourne, Australia, Abiyamini. That was a real lockdown center too.
Yeah, right. Just about as crazy as Montreal and Toronto. That's right. But we travel. For example... Every year we go to Davos, Switzerland. That's this town that the World Economic Forum takes over.
Yeah. How would you describe the World Economic Forum for everybody who's watching and listening?
It sounds super boring, doesn't it? World Economic Forum. That sounds like, you know, economists studying the world. Yeah. Sounds good. It's not. These are... The masters of the universe. I call them the VVIPs. Yeah. These are prime ministers, presidents, royalty, pop culture stars.
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