Speaker 1: You know, this is another reason why Canada the United
Speaker 1: States can't unify, because you know you have these problems right,
Speaker 1: it's incompatible technical issues. Ask not what your country can
Speaker 1: do for you, Ask what you can do for your country.
Speaker 1: Mister garbach Off, tear down this wall.
Speaker 2: It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Willings, joined by Steven
Speaker 2: Hayward and we're going to be talking to ezra Levant
Speaker 2: about what oh Canada, so let's ever sells a podcast.
Speaker 3: This may be my last day here in this office,
Speaker 3: but I will always be boldly and unapologetically Canadian. My
Speaker 3: only ask is that no matter what the world throws
Speaker 3: at us, you always be the same.
Speaker 4: Why are you running away from simple questions? Just answer
Speaker 4: a question? If you talked to President Trump yet, and
Speaker 4: I pushed me, when was the last time you answered
Speaker 4: a question that you didn't know what was coming.
Speaker 2: Welcome everybody, It's the Ricochet Podcast. To number seven, one
Speaker 2: hundred and thirty two. I'm James Lyleax in a beautiful
Speaker 2: proto spring day in Minneapolis. I'm joined by Stephen Heywood
Speaker 2: in California. I presume, unless, of course, you're off in
Speaker 2: Bruges or Peru or somewhere, you parapatetic fellow.
Speaker 1: No, I'm at home today and where it's pouring rain,
Speaker 1: so you have better weather than I do.
Speaker 2: That's good. Charles W. Cook is not with us due
Speaker 2: to a joyous family occasion, So in his absence we
Speaker 2: will attempt to say things in that accent that somehow,
Speaker 2: that somehow makes us sound smarter than we actually are.
Speaker 2: And that's the only thing I envy Charlie four, among
Speaker 2: many other things, like the fact that he's in Florida
Speaker 2: and the fact that well he doesn't have to confront
Speaker 2: perhaps what we are going to confront right now today. Stephen.
Speaker 2: I'm almost tempted to say that I could just make
Speaker 2: something up about what's being proposed, or what's happening, or
Speaker 2: what's being criticized, and by the time this gets out,
Speaker 2: and by the time next week happens, it'll be true.
Speaker 2: It will have happened. The continue blizzard of stuff that
Speaker 2: follows from this administration. One of the things that interested
Speaker 2: me last week is the proposal to cut taxes for
Speaker 2: anybody who's making under one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Now,
Speaker 2: I support this, but I should also know that I
Speaker 2: am the author of How to Make exactly one hundred
Speaker 2: and forty nine and ninety nine dollars a year. So
Speaker 2: I kind of have a vested interest in this, But
Speaker 2: on another level, I do not. I kind of want
Speaker 2: everybody to pay taxes, and I would think that in
Speaker 2: your striking while the iron is hot mode here, this
Speaker 2: would be a great time to say, you know what,
Speaker 2: we're going to abolish the entire irs. We're going to
Speaker 2: have a flat rate tax, right, and everybody's just going
Speaker 2: to fill out a postcard and that's that. Let's say, no,
Speaker 2: I'm in complete agreement. We don't want we don't We've
Speaker 2: already skewed the income tax to the upper brackets already,
Speaker 2: a contrary to what you hear repeatedly from Elizabeth warrens
Speaker 2: of the world. And you do want people to have
Speaker 2: a stake in the government. I've long thought that even
Speaker 2: low income people should pay a little bit so they
Speaker 2: have skin in the game. And so no, it's going
Speaker 2: the wrong direction to do it that way. And yes,
Speaker 2: the flat tax is the right solution. The usual complaints
Speaker 2: about the fat fact the flat tax, of course, is
Speaker 2: you mean to say that Warren Buffett would pay the
Speaker 2: same rate as his secretary, to which I would say, yes,
Speaker 2: that's precisely and exactly what I have to say, because
Speaker 2: that seems to me in our democracy where we're searching
Speaker 2: for equality, I know that equities replaced equality would still
Speaker 2: bear me out. I'm an old guy. It would seem
Speaker 2: to be that there's something fundamentally unfair about a series
Speaker 2: of laws that are skewed adjusted and according to how
Speaker 2: much money make or property you have. I've always wondered
Speaker 2: exactly how they got the constitutionality of a progressive income
Speaker 2: tax passed the Supreme Court? Can you explain? I know nothing,
Speaker 2: I know nothing, So could you tell me exactly how
Speaker 2: that happened? Well, they did.
Speaker 1: They required a constitutional amendment because Congress did pass as
Speaker 1: an income tax in the eighteen nineties and the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court struck it down for violating the so called direct
Speaker 1: tax clause of Article one. It's a little weird what
Speaker 1: a direct tax means, but in practice it meant that
Speaker 1: you could not do direct taxes on individuals without doing
Speaker 1: a portioning it according to population by state. A lot
Speaker 1: of reasons why they did that, and it's kind of strange,
Speaker 1: but so the tax incomes directly required the sixteenth Amendment. Now,
Speaker 1: the amendment says nothing about the progressivity of the rates.
Speaker 1: If you go back and look at the debates in Congress,
Speaker 1: some people said, well, first of all, the opponents said, oh,
Speaker 1: it would be a very modest tax on just the
Speaker 1: very high upper income people. You know, start five percent.
Speaker 1: Most people won't pay it, which they didn't for decades.
Speaker 1: And the alarmist said, you know, we don't trust you.
Speaker 1: We think the rate might get as high as ten
Speaker 1: percent someday. Right, So that's how I got it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but the Buffet thing. Look, if you say the same
Speaker 1: rate as his secretary, Harry, if he makes ten times
Speaker 1: the amount of a secretary, he'll pay ten times a tax. Now,
Speaker 1: the odd thing about this proposal is, you know, Buffett's
Speaker 1: a strange guy. He takes a very tiny salary from
Speaker 1: Berkshire Hathaway. I think it might even be one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand dollars, and he's, you know, he always
Speaker 1: just let's just the value of his company is this
Speaker 1: sort of main compensation which is not taxed until he
Speaker 1: sells it. So I'm tempted to say the opponents of
Speaker 1: this should say, somebody wants tax break for Democrat billionaires
Speaker 1: like Warren Buffett, just for the confusion in Mayhem, it
Speaker 1: would cause.
Speaker 2: The other tax that people grove about is the consumption tax. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that we get away do it with the iris
Speaker 2: entirely and fund the government by tariffs and or consumption taxes.
Speaker 2: And I've heard that argument back and forth, and I'm
Speaker 2: always you know, I hear the argument and I say,
Speaker 2: you know what, there's a lot of sense to that.
Speaker 2: There really is of the counter argument and say, you
Speaker 2: know what, there's a lot of sense to that too.
Speaker 2: I'm not crazy about a consumption tax for a variety
Speaker 2: of reasons. I don't like I mean, it strikes me
Speaker 2: like the VAT or something gets something gets built in
Speaker 2: and ends up creeping its way into every single aspect
Speaker 2: of a product's construction manufacturer until eventually the price of
Speaker 2: everything goes up. And you can say, well, yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean the price of everything would go up, but you
Speaker 2: you know, need to have more money because you wouldn't
Speaker 2: be taxed at this user, at this this exor rate
Speaker 2: by the federal government. And I just there's just something
Speaker 2: about the absolute simplicity of a flat tax and the
Speaker 2: ability and the idea that you could just like do
Speaker 2: your taxes in a trice without really thinking. Because here's
Speaker 2: the thing. Everybody knows this. You do your taxes right,
Speaker 2: you send them in and then if you get them wrong,
Speaker 2: the government will tell you what you got wrong. And
Speaker 2: I always every April fifteenth, as I mailing it away
Speaker 2: and or you know, March, when I'm dropping it off
Speaker 2: with the tax preparers, I always say, look, if they
Speaker 2: know what I owe, why don't they just tell me?
Speaker 2: Why do I have to go through this whole thing?
Speaker 2: And then bite my nails out of fear that I've
Speaker 2: got something? So maybe become the fifteenth. We may talk
Speaker 2: about that more as the culture, but this is really
Speaker 2: the did you ever see?
Speaker 1: Of course he's passed away now, but Don Rumsfeld used
Speaker 1: to send in a letter to the IRS with his
Speaker 1: tax return every year saying, here's my tax return. I've
Speaker 1: signed it like you require, but I cannot vouch for
Speaker 1: the accuracy of it because no one can because you
Speaker 1: call the By the way people have done this, you
Speaker 1: call the IRS a helpline and if you get through,
Speaker 1: they'll tell you one thing. You call it again and
Speaker 1: get through, you might get a different thing. You can't
Speaker 1: even get consistent guidance from the irs. But I'll say
Speaker 1: this about the consumption tax. My fear is that we
Speaker 1: would get both right, We'll end up in the income tax,
Speaker 1: and I think that's what the left really wants. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the value added tax. The problem with it is it's
Speaker 1: a hidden cost. It's usually twenty percent or more mutually
Speaker 1: a sales tax.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I have thought once in a while, as a theoretical
Speaker 1: or a talking point, that maybe we ought to there's
Speaker 1: some reasons why consumption tax is a better tax, for
Speaker 1: tax efficiency reasons and so forth. But I like the
Speaker 1: idea a little bit in theory because it would connect
Speaker 1: the cost of government to all citizens. And if citizens
Speaker 1: were actually made to pay for all the government they get,
Speaker 1: they might want less of it. So my point is
Speaker 1: is that there's a small window. Maybe, and listeners will
Speaker 1: tell me I'm out of my mind, and they're probably
Speaker 1: right that the case for broader based consumption taxes on
Speaker 1: everybody would actually change the body politic in favor of
Speaker 1: much less spending. Maybe that's too optimistic.
Speaker 2: I think it is too optimistic because a lot of
Speaker 2: people just won't make that connection, and they won't figure
Speaker 2: out and besides, they like what they're getting. I mean,
Speaker 2: look exactly how we've seen about twenty thirty forty percent
Speaker 2: of the population absolutely shriek because DOGE has gone and
Speaker 2: taken away and demolished one agency, one agency. Right, I
Speaker 2: was rooting today, I mean Columbia. Do you think Columbia
Speaker 2: is going to get its four hundred million back this
Speaker 2: year or because they've made a whole bunch of changes,
Speaker 2: shall we say, they've they sort of retrospectively decided that
Speaker 2: they acted poorly before when it came to the protests,
Speaker 2: and now they're cleaning house because apparently the prospect of
Speaker 2: hanging has concentrated in their mind wonderfully. Do you think
Speaker 2: they'll get their money back? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think here we want to borrow the old Reagan
Speaker 1: slogan from the Lake Cold War Trust, but verify. I
Speaker 1: want to make sure they go through with the expulsions,
Speaker 1: that they go through with enforcing new standards including no
Speaker 1: one protesters can wear masks on campus and so forth,
Speaker 1: And so I think you want to keep the pressure
Speaker 1: on and actually build the pressure. I mean, look the
Speaker 1: problem with Columbia, and I think they've already put their
Speaker 1: middle Eastern Studies program in receivership. The problem with Columbia
Speaker 1: these other places, as in as Stepman put it, lives
Speaker 1: there in Manhattan, is that these universities have become madrasas
Speaker 1: I mean almost literally so in these Middle East Studies
Speaker 1: Department and some college presidents are going to have to
Speaker 1: wake up and say, the problem is not just our
Speaker 1: rules of enforcement on protests, it's the stuff we're teaching
Speaker 1: and the faculty we're hiring, and they need to get
Speaker 1: rid of them wholesale. Well.
Speaker 2: Political had a headline yesterday that said a Republican have
Speaker 2: long hated universities and now finally there's their chance to
Speaker 2: show that by dismantling them, which I don't know. It
Speaker 2: brings to mind the old of Dodge that the right
Speaker 2: knows the arguments of the left, but the left does
Speaker 2: not know the artright the right. I mean, yes, I
Speaker 2: mean we swim in a culture where it's inevitable that
Speaker 2: we're going to hear the arguments of the other side,
Speaker 2: but they don't, so let me explain it to them.
Speaker 2: It is not that we are a bunch of bou
Speaker 2: boisie idiots who don't want none of that book learning
Speaker 2: and think everything can be found in the good book
Speaker 2: and perhaps at the you know, the at the foot
Speaker 2: of your pappy telling you some folk wisdom from six
Speaker 2: generations ago. No, that's that's not in at all. We
Speaker 2: actually are quite fond of history and culture and great
Speaker 2: art and great literature and science and the rest of it.
Speaker 2: The problem is that all of these things have been
Speaker 2: politicized out of recognition by the people who made the
Speaker 2: long march through the institutions. We would be very happy
Speaker 2: if the if the English Literature Department was concerned with, oh,
Speaker 2: I don't know, English literature as opposed to find the
Speaker 2: latest example of wok re to trot out some gender
Speaker 2: queer notion of this that or the other, some marginalized experience.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, you could have that in there, you
Speaker 2: can require part of it. But if you're telling me
Speaker 2: that a sort of ideological conformity has not taken over
Speaker 2: the universities in the arts, in the science and in
Speaker 2: the sciences, then you're just not paying attention. Let me
Speaker 2: send you some links. So that's it. It's not that
Speaker 2: it's not that the right hates book learning and smart
Speaker 2: folk and feels inferior to them. No, it's the fact
Speaker 2: that this anti civilizational, anti Western civilization mindset seems to
Speaker 2: have taken place. And uh and frankly, it's no good,
Speaker 2: no do like it, and we're sick of it.
Speaker 1: Oh no, you're absolutely right. I could go on way
Speaker 1: too long about this. I'll just say that the rotten
Speaker 1: humanities is just it's unbelievable. And then you notice here
Speaker 1: and there, And I know a lot about this because
Speaker 1: i'm you know, I'm in the higher education world most
Speaker 1: of the week. You will find that where there is
Speaker 1: a good, great books program that teaches the humanities and
Speaker 1: philosophy and history the old fashioned way. Often you'll find
Speaker 1: these little programs tucked away at major liberal universities.
Speaker 2: They're wildly popular with.
Speaker 1: Students because they're not teaching jargon and woke ideologies and
Speaker 1: all that kind of nonsense.
Speaker 2: They teach it the old fashioned way.
Speaker 1: Let's read Shakespeare instead of implying our own theories about
Speaker 1: the social order today and say that, oh, Shakespeare was
Speaker 1: a closet gay with father issue, whatever the heck, some
Speaker 1: Freudian thing right that was popular for a while. Let's
Speaker 1: just read him and let him speak to us directly,
Speaker 1: and then talk about it like in normal human beings
Speaker 1: that's done so little. But on the other hand, like
Speaker 1: I say, they're very popular when you do it that way,
Speaker 1: and more universities should get a clue.
Speaker 2: Absolutely so.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: The problem is, of course, when they're losing all this
Speaker 2: money in John Hopkins I think got eight hundred million,
Speaker 2: is that they have to start letting some people off.
Speaker 2: That's really hard to do. I mean, eventually it'll all
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Speaker 2: to the podcast From the Great North. As a Rule
Speaker 2: Evant co founder and CEO of Rebel News, and he's
Speaker 2: an author of many books, including the just published Deal
Speaker 2: of the Century, the America First plan for Canada's oil sands. Welcome, Ezra,
Speaker 2: how you doing great?
Speaker 4: You know today the new Canadian Prime Minister was just
Speaker 4: sworn in about an hour ago, and he's Trudeau two
Speaker 4: point zero. In fact, he's worse than Trudeau. But he's
Speaker 4: also a little bit smarter than Trudeau. So that's bad news.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm here in Minnesota, which is practically Canada, and
Speaker 2: I'm afraid he's gonna make rumbling noises about annexing us
Speaker 2: and being the next province. But tell us more about
Speaker 2: this guy. He's come out of nowhere, and we here
Speaker 2: in the States on the conservative side, we were poised
Speaker 2: to see Pierre Pounds and replace Justin but now it
Speaker 2: seems as if the conservative movement in Canada is on
Speaker 2: the back foot thanks to a resurgence of nationalism. Economic nationalis.
Speaker 2: Tell us more about this new guy and what you
Speaker 2: expect out of him.
Speaker 4: Sure, his name is Mark Carney, and he's been out
Speaker 4: of Canada for decades. He was the head of the
Speaker 4: Bank of Canada, which would be like our federal Reserve.
Speaker 4: But then he went and he became the head of
Speaker 4: the Bank of England, which is sort of weird. For
Speaker 4: a Canadian and he's been away from Canada ever since.
Speaker 4: He has three passports now. He's a globalist in the
Speaker 4: true sense of the term. He was on the board
Speaker 4: of the World Economic Forum in Davos, that sort of
Speaker 4: crypto government. He made a gazillion dollars as an oligarch.
Speaker 4: He was the chair of Brookfield Asset Management, which is
Speaker 4: like a mini Blackrock. And there's nothing wrong with being
Speaker 4: a big shot investor at all, except for like Blackrock,
Speaker 4: Brookfield had an eesg obsession, so they had all these
Speaker 4: assets under management, and they basically compelled they ordered, They
Speaker 4: demanded that any company they invest their investors' money in
Speaker 4: subscribed to woke dei methodology, including a huge emphasis on
Speaker 4: net zero anti energy ideology. He literally said he was
Speaker 4: a fan of Greta Tunberg. This is supposedly a serious
Speaker 4: global policy maker and investment manager, saying he was guided
Speaker 4: by Greta Tunberg. He has come back to Canada. I
Speaker 4: don't think he actually lives in Canada. His wife lives
Speaker 4: and works in New York. Brookfield Asset Management just moved
Speaker 4: to New York. He's got three passports and again, I listen,
Speaker 4: there are people who fly around the world all the time.
Speaker 4: That's great, but they don't generally say I now want
Speaker 4: my next thing to be Prime Minister of Canada. And
Speaker 4: it happened immediately. Let me just give you one last detail.
Speaker 4: Justin Trudeau was a deeply unpopular prime minister after nine
Speaker 4: years of scandals. So his party basically said we're going
Speaker 4: to get rid of you, and you can do that
Speaker 4: in a parliamentary system through what's called a vote of
Speaker 4: non confidence. So all the MPs would gather in the Parliament,
Speaker 4: they would be a vote, and the government would fall
Speaker 4: and they would be an election. The writing was on
Speaker 4: the wall. He was doomed. So the minute before that
Speaker 4: could happen, he ran to what's called the Governor General,
Speaker 4: who is the King's representative in Canada, and said, please
Speaker 4: dissolve the parliament immediately. Lock the doors immediately, and the
Speaker 4: King's Governor General agreed. It would be like on the
Speaker 4: eve of a vote to impeach a president if the
Speaker 4: president somehow managed to lock all the doors to Congress
Speaker 4: and just nan, I'm not letting you in. So for
Speaker 4: three months Trudeau governed without parliament. In fact, parliament has
Speaker 4: still not been recalled, and in this interregnum, the Liberal
Speaker 4: Party had its leadership vote. But here's where it gets
Speaker 4: super crazy. Four hundred thousand people signed up for the
Speaker 4: Liberal Party in basically a primary, but two hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty thousand of those votes were disqualified and we have
Speaker 4: no explanation of why. And of the one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty thousand who voted, they allowed children as young as
Speaker 4: fourteen to vote, and they allowed foreign nationals to vote
Speaker 4: as long as they were permanent residents. So most people
Speaker 4: who were registered were not allowed, and amongst those allowed
Speaker 4: were children and foreign nationals. And I won't get into
Speaker 4: other bizarre things people being excluded. And anyhow, Mark Carney
Speaker 4: has been installed, selected, appointed, parachuted in I don't know
Speaker 4: what words you would use. He's not even a member
Speaker 4: of Parliament, which I can't even remember the last time
Speaker 4: that happened. We have a Prime Minister who is not
Speaker 4: allowed to sit in the Parliament because he hasn't doesn't
Speaker 4: have a seat. I think that he hasn't even I
Speaker 4: would be surprised if he's even been to every Canadian province.
Speaker 4: We have just had a kind of soft coup and
Speaker 4: final detail before I corkt. It's just it's incredible. In
Speaker 4: recent elections, the Chinese Communist Party has had an exerted
Speaker 4: effort to influence local elections in Canada. And this isn't
Speaker 4: a rumor. This has been reported by Ceases. That's our
Speaker 4: CIA and the Mounties, that's our FBI. They targeted eleven
Speaker 4: districts and they really tried to destabilize those and they
Speaker 4: bust in voters like it was quite an operation. And
Speaker 4: in we had a judicial inquiry about this, and the
Speaker 4: Chinese Communists have a huge interest in manipulating Canadian democracy.
Speaker 4: And so all of a sudden, I look at those
Speaker 4: four hundred thousand votes in the quarter million that were nuked,
Speaker 4: and it was an all online voting process. Of course
Speaker 4: it could be hacked. You have an illegitimate prime minister
Speaker 4: selected illegitimately, when there's an illegitimate prorogation and dissolution in
Speaker 4: the House. We are in the worst of times now.
Speaker 4: There is a great Conservative leader in canadaamed Pierre Paul
Speaker 4: of Unfortunately Donald Trump yank in the chain of Trudeau
Speaker 4: and saying I want to annex you, I want to
Speaker 4: make you the fifty first state that has hurt the
Speaker 4: pride of a lot of Canadians who have recoiled against it.
Speaker 4: So the unintended consequence of mocking Trudeau has been to
Speaker 4: pump up the Liberals. Anyways, that's my update. Sorry for
Speaker 4: going on for so long. That's the state of affairs
Speaker 4: in Canada.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's fascinating and appalling. And what I question is
Speaker 2: why this guy. I mean, if you have this cabal
Speaker 2: that is going to foist upon the country somebody that's
Speaker 2: going to do their bidding exactly, wouldn't you at least
Speaker 2: find somebody malleably who could dress up in the raiment
Speaker 2: of Canada and politics and patriotism and the rest of
Speaker 2: it and make him sound like he's one of the people,
Speaker 2: as opposed to finding somebody who is just a cardboard
Speaker 2: cutout cliche of the transnational globalism. I mean, it's so blatant.
Speaker 2: I don't get why it was in.
Speaker 4: Well, he's campaigning as Captain Canada.
Speaker 2: In two ways.
Speaker 4: He is saying accurately that he was the head of
Speaker 4: the Bank of Canada a couple of decades ago. That's true,
Speaker 4: so he can claim, well, I worked for Canada, I
Speaker 4: helped us guide us through economic storms. That's what he's saying.
Speaker 4: And because Donald Trump is you know, Trump's got that banter,
Speaker 4: He's got that Manhattan, you know style nicknaming people. Let
Speaker 4: you know, he even did it to people who are
Speaker 4: now his allies and friends. Little Marco Rubio, Lion, Ted Cruz,
Speaker 4: Now these people are his allies. Trump's got that style
Speaker 4: which is a little harsh to the Canadian ear, which
Speaker 4: is maybe a little bit sensitive. And so when you
Speaker 4: say to someone, hey, join the United States and be
Speaker 4: a state, I mean for some people, they as a
Speaker 4: thought exercise, they say, oh, that's a good idea. We'd
Speaker 4: be wealthier, we'd be freer, we'd have an army. But
Speaker 4: for many other people, it would be like going up
Speaker 4: to a married woman and saying, ditch your husband and
Speaker 4: run off with me. So it's an indecent proposal of sorts.
Speaker 4: I mean, I guess if someone was contemplating a divorce,
Speaker 4: or if they weren't married yet, if they would treat
Speaker 4: it as a real proposal. But I think that's how
Speaker 4: it landed emotionally, as a lot of Canadians say, how
Speaker 4: dare you? Even though we have our flaws, we're not
Speaker 4: just going to join you. And I know it was banter,
Speaker 4: and I know it was Trump just yanking the chain
Speaker 4: of Trudeau, but I think that that gave the Liberal
Speaker 4: Party a new story to tell. We are the defenders
Speaker 4: of Canada. Anyone who's not with us is an American shill.
Speaker 4: And you're not for Trump, are you? Because Pierre Paul of,
Speaker 4: the Conservative Leader of Canada, had a twenty point lead
Speaker 4: over the Liberals. Now maybe it's a ten point lead.
Speaker 4: I've seen some polls that put the Liberals ahead because
Speaker 4: the Liberals are saying, we're captain Canada. If you're not
Speaker 4: for us, you're a trader, they use that word, and
Speaker 4: we must unite to stop the evil Trump. Wouldn't you
Speaker 4: rather if you're a left wing Canadian, wouldn't you rather
Speaker 4: run against Trump than run against a popular conservative Canadian?
Speaker 4: So that's the situation in Canada.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, Ezra, it's Steve Hayward out in California, and
Speaker 1: I feel you're pain because we suffer under our version
Speaker 1: of Justin Trudeau in the form of Gavin Newsom.
Speaker 2: But the less said about that, the better.
Speaker 4: Look.
Speaker 2: I want to turn to your new book.
Speaker 1: I want to talk a bit about this fifty first
Speaker 1: state business, but I want to work into it in
Speaker 1: a roundabout way through your new book, A Deal the
Speaker 1: Century about Canada's oil sands. Can you give us a
Speaker 1: thumbnail sketch of what you're on about here? And then
Speaker 1: I got a follow up question about whether it's a
Speaker 1: good idea depending on this and that, So go ahead.
Speaker 4: Sure. I don't think all America. I don't think most
Speaker 4: Americans would know that the third largest oil reserve country
Speaker 4: in the world, after Saudi Radio and Venezuela is Canada.
Speaker 4: And it's just, you know, a couple hundred miles north
Speaker 4: of Montana in my home province of Alberta. And it's
Speaker 4: sort of a new fangled technology. It's oil sand. So
Speaker 4: it's literally sandy oil. So how did you get the
Speaker 4: oil separated from the sand? It took them a while
Speaker 4: to figure that out, but when they cracked that secret
Speaker 4: about twenty five years ago, wow, it just And so
Speaker 4: today Canada is the number one source of oil imports
Speaker 4: into America, which is a wonderful thing because it's displacing
Speaker 4: conflict oil from opek. I like to call the oil
Speaker 4: sands ethical oil. If I was thinking, yes, if I
Speaker 4: was thinking like a liberal, what are the ethics of oil? Well,
Speaker 4: are you environmentally responsible, that's a good one. Do you
Speaker 4: take the proceeds from your oil and you doing good
Speaker 4: things with it? Or did you spend it on terrorism
Speaker 4: and the military. That's a good question to ask Qatar
Speaker 4: or Russia. Right, are you respectful of workers? Do you
Speaker 4: pay them? Well, it's a good question to ask the
Speaker 4: Petro states in the Gulf. And finally, do you respect
Speaker 4: civil liberties? Canada is one of the few ethical oil
Speaker 4: producers in the world, compared to the conflict oil of Opec. Now,
Speaker 4: that's an argument that might win over some liberals, but
Speaker 4: if you're in America first Republican, I think there's a
Speaker 4: different way to phrase it. And the reason I'm talking
Speaker 4: about oil is this. Donald Trump has repeatedly said we
Speaker 4: have a huge trade deficit with Canada. That ain't fair. Well,
Speaker 4: the reason there's that huge trade deficit is because of
Speaker 4: the oil. And if you weren't buying Canadian oil, you'd
Speaker 4: be buying it from Venezuela and Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, god forbid,
Speaker 4: I ran none of those places are better options. So
Speaker 4: Trump wants to put a tariff on the oil. Sized
Speaker 4: trouble is, you know, you put a tariff on a
Speaker 4: Honda factory in Mexico. You can move the Honda factory
Speaker 4: to the States and you've got what Trump likes, American jobs,
Speaker 4: American factory in the American market. But you can't. The
Speaker 4: tariff is not going to move the oil. So it's
Speaker 4: not going to get up and move down to the States.
Speaker 4: So what's happening is that tariff and Trump has proposed
Speaker 4: to ten percent tariff on oil. Well, all that's going
Speaker 4: to do is add ten percent to the price of
Speaker 4: the oil that is the feedstock for these American refineries.
Speaker 4: One more thing about that American about that oil sense
Speaker 4: who's actually in Alberta developing the oil scents.
Speaker 2: It's Americans.
Speaker 4: Imperial Oil that's the local subsidiary of Exxonomobile and Canadian companies.
Speaker 4: Guess who owns them, Big US pension fund. So you
Speaker 4: got Americans producing the oil, Americans refining the oil. American
Speaker 4: American American map. The USMCA gives America preferential access. It's
Speaker 4: as American as can be. Terriffing. It doesn't do any
Speaker 4: of your America first ideas. So here was my pitch,
Speaker 4: and I call it deal of the century. And that's
Speaker 4: this new book I wrote, why do I call it
Speaker 4: deal of the century? Because Trump thinks like a real
Speaker 4: estate man. He says he wants to acquire Greenland. I
Speaker 4: can see why if you look at the map. He's
Speaker 4: talking about Panama. That's smart. Well, Canada is the oil
Speaker 4: sands is a bigger deal than either of those times
Speaker 4: ten because there's one hundred and seventy billion barrels of
Speaker 4: ethical oil just sitting there. And I did the math.
Speaker 4: If you double the production, double the annual production of
Speaker 4: the oil sands, which Alberta, their premier, says she wants
Speaker 4: to do. And if America bought that, it would displace
Speaker 4: all of the OPEC oil that America buys. And what's
Speaker 4: the value of that fifty years at approximately seventy seventy
Speaker 4: five bucks of barrels? A little bit less than that.
Speaker 4: Now that's a thirteen trillion dollar deal. But the best
Speaker 4: part is America is no longer beholden to the Persian Gulf.
Speaker 2: Did you know that the.
Speaker 4: Fifth Fleet, the United States fifth Fleet, costs about fifty
Speaker 4: billion dollars a year just to patrol the Persian Sea. Lings,
Speaker 4: It's like, it's like you have agreed to be the
Speaker 4: fifty billion dollar year Brinks truck to let the Saudis
Speaker 4: and the Bahrainis and the Amoradis sell their oil. You're
Speaker 4: the global cop if you didn't have to do that,
Speaker 4: Like you could still mess around in the Middle East
Speaker 4: if you want to, but now you don't have to.
Speaker 4: Cazerill's coming down through the Keystone XL pipeline and others.
Speaker 4: So here's the big win, and I'm trying to phrase
Speaker 4: it as an America first thing right Number one, You
Speaker 4: get all the good stuff from Canada without having to
Speaker 4: have the side effects. You don't need a huge Democrat
Speaker 4: voting electoral college. You know, you don't need the French
Speaker 4: bilingualist like you want to acquire Canada, really you want
Speaker 4: another Democrat, you know, two more Democrat cenaters. I don't
Speaker 4: think you do. How about take the good stuff and
Speaker 4: when and if you're really going to pay Canada ten
Speaker 4: thirteen whatever trillion dollars over fifty years, Well, now you
Speaker 4: got something to trade. And now you can say, hey, Canada,
Speaker 4: you got to reinvest in your military. Now you got
Speaker 4: to defend the ARC to with us. You got to
Speaker 4: get those f thirty fives going. No more messing around
Speaker 4: and by the way, can you let our dairy in
Speaker 4: which Canadians would want It would lower prices. And by
Speaker 4: the way, how come we can't have American banks on
Speaker 4: your main streets offering mortgages. You're not forced to get
Speaker 4: a mortgage from an American bank, but can we please
Speaker 4: at least be allowed to sell them. So Trump's demands
Speaker 4: are actually reasonable. And if Trump says, I'll buy all
Speaker 4: your oil. And by the way, I hope Trump likes
Speaker 4: this idea because you know who's been sniffing around the
Speaker 4: albert oil.
Speaker 2: Sands, well, the Chinese, right, the Chinese.
Speaker 4: In fact, they actually bought an oil sands company about
Speaker 4: fifteen years ago. They would buy it all if they could.
Speaker 2: That's right, I think. So I love the idea.
Speaker 1: I've been following the oil sands story for a long
Speaker 1: time and I'm sure, as you know, if there's any
Speaker 1: kind of oil.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you think environmentalists hate.
Speaker 1: Fracking, they really hate the oil sands in Canada. And
Speaker 1: never mind of what they think about as accurate or not,
Speaker 1: that doesn't matter. Would it has the bonus of freaking
Speaker 1: them out and outraging them even more. But this is
Speaker 1: an argument against making Canada the fifty first state. If
Speaker 1: I'm Alberta and I'm the oil sands owners, the last
Speaker 1: thing I want is to be under the regulatory jurisdiction
Speaker 1: of the United States, because actually, you know, Alberta has
Speaker 1: a much more permissive regulatory structure, which is why the
Speaker 1: industry has flourished there. So I mean, Alberta has always
Speaker 1: struck me as the Texas of Canada, the one province
Speaker 1: that might really like to join the United States, except
Speaker 1: that R. E. P A, even under Trump, would screw
Speaker 1: it all up. So that's one argument against the union idea. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I love the idea. You said one other thing, though,
Speaker 1: that's on my mind, which is quite aside from the
Speaker 1: merits of integrating. What's the old Bernard Shaw line at
Speaker 1: American England or two nations divided by a common language.
Speaker 1: That's just as true of Canada, not so much, you know,
Speaker 1: a in a boot butt of the cultural differences are
Speaker 1: much larger than a lot of people. And as you
Speaker 1: point out, you're likely to get two Democratic senators if
Speaker 1: it was just one state, but also forty houseeed or
Speaker 1: something like that, because Canada is the size of Californian
Speaker 1: population wise. And I'm looking at this thinking just the
Speaker 1: politics of it are terrible from a Republican point of view.
Speaker 2: I don't know what Trump is thinking.
Speaker 4: Well I know what Trump was thinking because Senator Marco
Speaker 4: Rubio told us he told Captain Herridge, if I'm saying
Speaker 4: her name right, yeah, she asked him where did this
Speaker 4: whole Canada fifty first state thing come from? And Marco
Speaker 4: Rubio said this. He said, when Justin Trudeau flew down
Speaker 4: to Mara Lago a couple months ago, Trump asked Trudeau,
Speaker 4: what would happen if we zeroed out our trade deficit?
Speaker 4: And Trudeau, who's sort of stupid and has never negotiated
Speaker 4: anything in his life, blurted out, well, that would be
Speaker 4: the end of Canada. If you watch that interview between
Speaker 4: Marco Rubio and Catherine Herridge, Rubio, I mean, it was
Speaker 4: very plausible the way he described it. Trump said, what
Speaker 4: happens if we zero things out? Trudeau said, it's the
Speaker 4: end of Canada, which is a crazy thing to say.
Speaker 4: First of all, it's not true. Second of all, what
Speaker 4: you've just told Trump is your existential dread of what
Speaker 4: could happen, and now he knows where to poke you like,
Speaker 4: this is the master of giving people mean nicknames. So
Speaker 4: he Trump immediately said, oh, well, you should become the
Speaker 4: fifty first state. And Trudeau's face I could just imagine
Speaker 4: when he realized the weapony. So that's where it came from.
Speaker 4: It's a taunt. It's like little rocket Man, or it's
Speaker 4: like any of his other tweets, and Trump is here's
Speaker 4: I re read parts of Art of the Deal, and
Speaker 4: I really recommend that to people if you want to
Speaker 4: understand what Trump's doing with these tariffs. He talks about hyperbole,
Speaker 4: he talks about knocking the other guy off balance, and
Speaker 4: of course that's what he's doing. But here's what Trump,
Speaker 4: I think is missing. Trump is used to real estate
Speaker 4: deals where the other side wants it badly, and Trump
Speaker 4: knows you've got to be able to walk away. That's
Speaker 4: half of your strength. But what happens, and this goes
Speaker 4: back to your very first question to me, what happens
Speaker 4: when the guy on the other side, the guy on
Speaker 4: the Canadian side, has the moral hazard of wanting the
Speaker 4: negotiation to fail. In fact, a successful negotiation between the
Speaker 4: Liberals in Canada and Trump would be terrible for the
Speaker 4: Liberals because then you would remove the demon, the risk,
Speaker 4: the ogre, the threat. There is no deal that Trump
Speaker 4: could offer the Liberals that they would accept. They flipped
Speaker 4: the tables on them because they need to fight against them.
Speaker 4: In fact, perversely, the more damaging to Canada the fight is,
Speaker 4: the more the Liberals can say, you see, and by
Speaker 4: the way, that also hides their own economic mismanagement. So
Speaker 4: Trump thinks he's in a deal where the other guy
Speaker 4: has no cards. He uses that phrase a lot. Hey Zelenski,
Speaker 4: you have no cards. And it's true, it's true, it's true.
Speaker 4: But what happens if the other guy has a weird strategy,
Speaker 4: a comic Kazi strategy that says, I want Trump to
Speaker 4: smash Canada like a bowl of eggs because I need
Speaker 4: that victim hood to run and beat this Pierre Poulv.
Speaker 4: That's what I don't think Trump quite grocks, because I
Speaker 4: don't think he pays very close attention to Canada, and
Speaker 4: he has actually, contrary to his own instincts, strengthened the
Speaker 4: Liberals up here.
Speaker 2: I'm something of an expert on Canada myself, because twice
Speaker 2: a year in Cancun and I have conversations with people
Speaker 2: from Canada. I love to go down there, and what
Speaker 2: a cross section there they are. I mean, I've really
Speaker 2: had fascinating conversations about economies in Canada. But one of
Speaker 2: the things that people keep avoiding and dancing around, perhaps
Speaker 2: because they're a Canadian, is the subject of demographic shifts
Speaker 2: and change in Canada. And I don't mean to put
Speaker 2: a bowl around Steve's questions about the oil, but we
Speaker 2: have you for a limited time, and I am curious
Speaker 2: exactly as to how Canada is or not with what
Speaker 2: some perceived to be a shift and it's demographic makeup,
Speaker 2: or if it's just no big thing and everybody's whistling
Speaker 2: and moving along and heal Canada and use your maple
Speaker 2: syrup and whatever.
Speaker 4: That is, in my opinion, the number one issue in Canada.
Speaker 4: Justin Trudeau has raised the immigration and temporary migrant workers
Speaker 4: temporary students to two million people per year legally and proportionately,
Speaker 4: that would be like eighteen million a year in the US.
Speaker 4: That's just the legal that's not even illegal. And that's
Speaker 4: the problem we have is and if you come to Toronto,
Speaker 4: you'll say, am I in Toronto? There are four point
Speaker 4: nine million people in our country on temporary permits that
Speaker 4: expire at the end of this year. That's more than
Speaker 4: ten percent of the population. You can see it with
Speaker 4: your eyes. Every issue is exacerbated. Obviously, housing prices, especially
Speaker 4: in the big cities, are beyond the reach of ordinary people.
Speaker 4: The average home in Toronto and Montreal is more than
Speaker 4: one million dollars. Inflation of other goods, of course, energy costs.
Speaker 4: We've got a carbon tax. And of course what happens
Speaker 4: when you bring in hundreds of thousands of migrant workers,
Speaker 4: you depress wages. So Canadians have wages being depressed, housing
Speaker 4: prices being inflated, inflation everywhere. There's one million foreign nationals
Speaker 4: who claim to be international students. There aren't even one
Speaker 4: million Canadian students in university. There are more foreigners. And
Speaker 4: by the way, they come here as students, they never
Speaker 4: even go to a school. They're fake schools set up
Speaker 4: in strip malls, you know, the local college. They're so
Speaker 4: it is so outrageous. A huge effect is economic. Of course,
Speaker 4: we have a welfare state and welfare state medicine. You
Speaker 4: can imagine what that does. These people in the main
Speaker 4: come from low trust societies, so they discover the Canadian
Speaker 4: tradition of food banks, Well, they just do their weekly
Speaker 4: shopping at food banks. Now there's no such thing as
Speaker 4: a food bank in Canada. In fact, some food banks
Speaker 4: now say no foreign students allowed because they just, oh,
Speaker 4: these suckers are giving away free food. I don't need
Speaker 4: to shop like it's And then you have the extreme
Speaker 4: side of that, where you have pro Hamas extremists like
Speaker 4: you had in Columbia, not just in Campton universities, but
Speaker 4: on the streets in Jewish neighborhoods. In Montreal there was
Speaker 4: a Hamas riot. So every and Trudeau is doing this
Speaker 4: on purpose, and his successor, Mark Carney is doing the
Speaker 4: same thing. They can count there are now two million
Speaker 4: Muslims in Canada compared to four hundred thousand Jews. So
Speaker 4: do the math.
Speaker 1: So, Ezra, I'm will give you a broad last question here.
Speaker 1: When I first heard this Trump idea of making Canada
Speaker 1: the fifty first state, well, the first things I did
Speaker 1: was dust off my shelf because I'm an academic, a
Speaker 1: thirty five year old book Continental Divide by Seymour and
Speaker 1: Martin Lipsitt, very distinguished American political scientists, Sally deceased now,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm sort of aware of some of
Speaker 1: the cultural and political differences between the US and Canada,
Speaker 1: and the book really alerted me to how deep and
Speaker 1: profound they really are. I think Americans really don't pay
Speaker 1: much attention to Canada. Sorry, not much except maybe during
Speaker 1: hockey season. And Canadians, I mean, you know, like James
Speaker 1: when I you know, my visits to Canada, mostly British Columbia,
Speaker 1: but also other Canadians. I know there's a lot of
Speaker 1: deep pride in the country, as there should be, and
Speaker 1: while not anti American, although there's some of that everywhere,
Speaker 1: but while not anti American, I think there is I think,
Speaker 1: maybe justly a sense of wounded pride that America sort
Speaker 1: of regards Canada with benign neglect or to stain or
Speaker 1: make funny about people saying a boot and so forth.
Speaker 1: So I don't know what's your sense of I mean,
Speaker 1: you mentioned politically this has reinvigorated the Liberal Party in
Speaker 1: a foolish, unintended consequence. But to what extent is this,
Speaker 1: in an odd way, maybe helpful to some of the
Speaker 1: problems you just mentioned, In other words, reinvigorating some sense
Speaker 1: of Canadian pride and nationalism and therefore resistance to some
Speaker 1: of these adverse transit point two.
Speaker 4: You know it's funny because under Justin Trudeau, our founding
Speaker 4: Prime Minister, Sir Johnny McDonald was stripped off the ten
Speaker 4: dollar bill. Statues of him were put either torn down
Speaker 4: or put in wooden coffins. Our national anthem lyrics were
Speaker 4: changed by Trudeau. Our passport, all the imagery in the
Speaker 4: passport was stripped. Trudeau denounced Canada as a genocidal project,
Speaker 4: and he said the genocide was continuing. He told The
Speaker 4: New York Times in his first year of government that
Speaker 4: Canada was a post national state with no core values.
Speaker 4: During the trucker convoy, this symbol of the truckers appropriated for
Speaker 4: their flag was the Canadian flag. They flew to the
Speaker 4: Canadian flag, they sang the Canadian anthem, and those were
Speaker 4: demonized as right wing hate symbols, woke ideology, saying the
Speaker 4: Canada which was the end of the underground railroad, No,
Speaker 4: we're the racist ones. They actually had Black lives matter
Speaker 4: up here. We were the place where black people fled
Speaker 4: to get away from slavery. So we had this whole
Speaker 4: woke denaturing of Canada, and in the last sixty days
Speaker 4: suddenly The people who hate Canada and told us it
Speaker 4: was a sin to be Canadian are now saying raw
Speaker 4: rock passing the Canadian flag, So it's all fake. It's
Speaker 4: all fake. The man with three passports, who has returned
Speaker 4: to grace us with his leadership, is now saying he's
Speaker 4: a Canadian. No, he's not. He hasn't lived in Canada
Speaker 4: for years, so it's a lie. Just In Trudeau went
Speaker 4: on Anderson Cooper show a couple months ago, and Anderson
Speaker 4: Cooper said, what is a Canadian? That's a good question.
Speaker 4: Imagine the man who's been Prime minister for nine years answering,
Speaker 4: we're not American. That's your answer a negative, and it's
Speaker 4: an insulting negative. That's like saying, who are you on?
Speaker 2: Not you.
Speaker 4: There's an arrogance too. We have a National bookstore and
Speaker 4: their chain motto is the world needs more Canada. This
Speaker 4: sort of a patronizing, condescending and the thing is, in
Speaker 4: a way Trump exposed that. He said we'll swap your
Speaker 4: Canadian minibucks for our real dollars one to one, Yeah,
Speaker 4: reminding us that we're poor up here. He said, we'll
Speaker 4: defend you, unlike your undefended North Yeah. That's sort of
Speaker 4: a thing, and so that it did hurt partly because
Speaker 4: it's an indecent proposal to ask Canadians to abandon their loyalty,
Speaker 4: which and by the way, forty percent of young people
Speaker 4: in one poll that I saw young men in Western Canada,
Speaker 4: forty percent of them said I'm up for that. Why
Speaker 4: because they can't make a go of it in Canada,
Speaker 4: and they also like Donald Trump's pride and nationalism. So,
Speaker 4: by the way, his indecent proposal has some takers, but
Speaker 4: for most Canadians, they're saying that's a little bit too
Speaker 4: much and that Trump kutzba, which which Trump supporters love.
Speaker 4: I love it, but I can also see how it
Speaker 4: hurts people's feelings. And the liberals are so malleable that
Speaker 4: suddenly they've you know, decided that they're patriotic. They're not patriotic,
Speaker 4: they're not reducing that they're bringing in migrants from Gaza.
Speaker 2: That's insane.
Speaker 4: So, oh, believe you me. There's no real Canadian pride
Speaker 4: going on, just symbolism and jingoism just to get through
Speaker 4: this moment against Donald Trump. I hope it doesn't work,
Speaker 4: But the polls are narrowing.
Speaker 2: When Canadian liberals start condemning church burnings, then you'll know
Speaker 2: that they're really, really, you know, feigning an appeal to
Speaker 2: the population. If Trump had been actually the master of
Speaker 2: the the insult nickname, though, I think he would have
Speaker 2: started referring to Trudeau as Castro junior. Well he did
Speaker 2: allude to Oh, did him?
Speaker 4: He did?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: He knows his stuff, and he actually knew Margaret Trudeau
Speaker 4: in her wild child days. That's Justin Trudeau's mom. He
Speaker 4: refers to her in one of his books. I can't
Speaker 4: remember the title. It's not Out of the Deal, It's
Speaker 4: another one of his books. How she I mean? Justin
Speaker 4: Trudeau is gone now literally today was his last day,
Speaker 4: and I think the only saving grace for his nine
Speaker 4: years would he was sort of dumb, like he had
Speaker 4: a high emotional EQ like he was very good at
Speaker 4: being friendly and relating to people, but he was sort
Speaker 4: of dumb when it came to policy and sort of lazy.
Speaker 4: So there were a lot of terrible things he planned
Speaker 4: that didn't get done. He planned one of the worst
Speaker 4: censorship regimes known in the world, called the Online Harms Act,
Speaker 4: that would have included life in prison for a hate
Speaker 4: crime but there is no life in prison in Canada
Speaker 4: for anything, not even for murder. But they would have
Speaker 4: been for hate. They would have had all that. He
Speaker 4: would have established three new censorship bureaus. The only reason
Speaker 4: we were spared those, by the way, is because of
Speaker 4: his dis of Parliament to save his skin. So if
Speaker 4: Trudeau had been more industrious and got these bills through earlier,
Speaker 4: he would have done a lot more damage. I mean,
Speaker 4: believe me, he's done a lot of damage. And immigration
Speaker 4: is a bell that I don't know if you can
Speaker 4: unring it. But Canada is a much weaker country now
Speaker 4: than when Trudeau took it over. One of the reasons
Speaker 4: he juiced immigration so much was to hide the fact
Speaker 4: that we are actually in a recession on a per
Speaker 4: capita basis. We're getting poor every year per capita. The
Speaker 4: only way to hide that is to bring in five
Speaker 4: percent of your population every year.
Speaker 2: That's insane.
Speaker 4: There's no country in the world that does that well.
Speaker 2: At least you've space to put them, given the unoccupied
Speaker 2: nature of vast sauaws of the country. But no, I
Speaker 2: want Canada to thrive. I want Canada to be proud
Speaker 2: of Canada. I want Canada to be a partner, and
Speaker 2: I hate what's going on in both of the government
Speaker 2: and the relationships between the two, because it's like watching
Speaker 2: your parents fight. Don't please make up and be Everything
Speaker 2: will be well, Hey, folks. Deal of the Century is
Speaker 2: what it's called Deal of the Century, the America first
Speaker 2: plan for Canada's oil sands. That's as it was, the latest,
Speaker 2: and of course you can get him at Rebel News
Speaker 2: and elsewhere. We enjoy your work and we thank you
Speaker 2: for coming on this the Ricochete podcast, and good luck.
Speaker 4: Thanks, great to see you guys again.
Speaker 2: Bye bye. So you know, when I was mentioning the
Speaker 2: the church burnings in Canada, which seemed to be a
Speaker 2: consequence of people being angry at the church for all
Speaker 2: of the native schools and the desks that they attended,
Speaker 2: if I recall correctly, they did a lot of soundings
Speaker 2: with the ultracenter of the ground and they couldn't turn
Speaker 2: up these mass graves. You read these stories even.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, it turned out to be a complete hoax,
Speaker 1: kind of like all the church burnings that Bill Clinton
Speaker 1: said he remembered from his childhood, when the historical records
Speaker 1: show there were none right anywhere around where he lived.
Speaker 1: But this is uh, you know, this is a favorite. Well, look,
Speaker 1: the Left relies on the hoax as much of the time.
Speaker 2: Bill, do you actually remember specifically the details of the
Speaker 2: Bill Clinton years, because I do. I was there. And
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Speaker 2: for sponsoring this the Ricochet podcast. Before we go, well,
Speaker 2: where do we end here? Apparently there was a CR.
Speaker 2: They always call it a CR, like everybody knows what
Speaker 2: that is, now, yeah, do we? Well?
Speaker 1: No, it's when you don't pass a budget like you're
Speaker 1: supposed to in which we haven't been doing for almost
Speaker 1: fifty years now, passing a budget properly the way the
Speaker 1: law says we should.
Speaker 2: So they just say we.
Speaker 1: Call it an omnibus continuing resolution, which means just keep
Speaker 1: the government going at current levels. Except these things are
Speaker 1: always cobbled together in the middle of the night. Theyre
Speaker 1: always sliped some extra things and new spending in and
Speaker 1: Republicans have sometimes tried to block it, and then Republicans,
Speaker 1: when they have a majority, had to rely on Democratic.
Speaker 2: Votes to pass it.
Speaker 1: So they finally got wise to this game and passed
Speaker 1: a Republican only version, and that has put the Democrats
Speaker 1: in a panic because it's got some spending cuts in it.
Speaker 1: I think they're modest, but still the arrows in the
Speaker 1: right direction and the Democrats so it's a pause here.
Speaker 1: You know, political sciences will tell you that the way
Speaker 1: you can tell there's a real tectonic shift in politics
Speaker 1: going on is not when you change your own party,
Speaker 1: as Trump is done, but when you compel the other
Speaker 1: party to move your direction. Reagan did that to the
Speaker 1: Democrats in the eighties. Margaret Thatcher made labor moderate and
Speaker 1: so forth. Well, suddenly Senate Democrats were thinking all week
Speaker 1: we're going to borrow the favorite feudal tactic of Republicans
Speaker 1: and shut down the government. Apparently they have already collapsed
Speaker 1: on this, because I think there are enough of senators
Speaker 1: who say this is insane. And by the way, would
Speaker 1: you like to be as you know, these government shutdowns,
Speaker 1: non essential personnel stay home. Do you want to be
Speaker 1: designated as a non essential personnel in the age or.
Speaker 2: The moment of Doge? I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I think the Democrat Apparently, all the rumors are that
Speaker 1: the Democratic senators met in the caucus midweek and they
Speaker 1: were yelling and screaming at each other so loud you
Speaker 1: could hear it out in the hallway. So you know, again,
Speaker 1: this is Trump genius and Republican rare Republican competence in Congress.
Speaker 1: They're actually going to pass something that moves the ball
Speaker 1: down the field in our direction and divide the Democrats
Speaker 1: along the way. And that's just lots of fun. I
Speaker 1: would be happier if thecr had to be printed out
Speaker 1: in everything, A person who voted on it had to
Speaker 1: initial the page, every single page. And now with an
Speaker 1: autopen Biden style. I mean, because I don't think they're
Speaker 1: even at the point now. I mean, when you when
Speaker 1: you sign an eu LA on your computer, all they
Speaker 1: ask is that you scroll to the end. You know,
Speaker 1: the program, the texts that you've scrolled to.
Speaker 2: The end, you clicked the box, and you get accept
Speaker 2: But I would like something just to just to know
Speaker 2: that they had to go through the gruesome process of
Speaker 2: at least acknowledging the length and depth of these things.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, one of the things we like
Speaker 2: about Doge and the new administration is their ability to
Speaker 2: prune and remove, to make things less complex and less burdensome.
Speaker 2: The headline you're going to see next week, if not already,
Speaker 2: of course, is that the Trump administration proposes an increase
Speaker 2: in the amount of mercury in the air. I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm absolutely certain that's what it is. And what that
Speaker 2: would be is the administration saying, okay, there's a regulation
Speaker 2: here that says the acceptable parts per million in the
Speaker 2: air or parts per billion is a point zero zero
Speaker 2: zero zero zero zero zer one, and we're going to
Speaker 2: make that point zero zero zero zero zero zero two negligible,
Speaker 2: non noticeable nominally through nothing of the sort, but making
Speaker 2: a change that doesn't crimp. Shall we say this, that
Speaker 2: or the other thing in the economy that'll be the
Speaker 2: main headline. It comes from Zelden the EPA tweeting out.
Speaker 2: I mean, he wrote a Wall Street Journal article about it,
Speaker 2: but I found it out about it in a tweet
Speaker 2: thread where he discussed thirteen or fourteen consequential regulatory rollbacks
Speaker 2: that will help energy production and prosperity. So essentially moving
Speaker 2: us back to twenty twenty, when you know, the Biden
Speaker 2: administration came in and apparently in twenty twenty this was
Speaker 2: a dystopian mercury Field hell hole out of the you know,
Speaker 2: the dark satanic mills belching their poison into the air
Speaker 2: all around the country. So if we roll back to
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, I guess we'll have to hope that we
Speaker 2: can survive. I'd like to roll it back a little
Speaker 2: bit more somewhere between ironized Cody, you know, having a
Speaker 2: fake tear and maybe Bill Clinton juice in the caffe standards.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but there's all there are so many
Speaker 2: regulatory boat anchors that are draped around the economy, and
Speaker 2: so many of them come from the EPA and regulations
Speaker 2: that have been not exactly codified in law, but but
Speaker 2: somehow summoned into existence by the bureaucrats. So what do
Speaker 2: you think about these little steps here? I mean, it's
Speaker 2: it's it's EV mandates going the way of I love
Speaker 2: how the people who say that Trump is doing what
Speaker 2: he's doing to make money for his rich, technocratic buddy Elon,
Speaker 2: then turns around and does away with EV mandates. Isn't
Speaker 2: that sort of counter to the other. Yes, and not really.
Speaker 1: I mean what the Biden administration was doing was heavily
Speaker 1: subsidizing Elon's competitors. Now Elon built his company on some subsidies,
Speaker 1: but it's become profitable and the leading maker in the world.
Speaker 1: And Musk actually said, I think even before the election
Speaker 1: that getting rid of the mandates and subsidies would help
Speaker 1: his company. So it works either way. I think you're right.
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful irony. I do think there broadly, what
Speaker 1: Zeldon has announced is something really fundamental. It's not just
Speaker 1: tweaking some regulations here there, or even rolling them back,
Speaker 1: but the two big ones. And the problem is, I'm
Speaker 1: a walk and so I don't want to be wonky
Speaker 1: on the podcast because it does walk away well just briefly.
Speaker 1: I mean, the two things he's going after is, first,
Speaker 1: a thing called the Endangerment Finding and what essentially is
Speaker 1: what the Obama EPA used to say, Oh co. Two,
Speaker 1: the stuff that each human being breathes out eight hundred
Speaker 1: pounds worth a year is a dangerous health hazard, and
Speaker 1: they're gonna try and roll that back. And they've done
Speaker 1: some I know a bit of the background. They've done
Speaker 1: careful legal work to make this stick, and that will
Speaker 1: kick the props out from under the EPA trying to
Speaker 1: nationalize the electric utility industry, which is what Obama tried
Speaker 1: to do and Biden was trying to do it again.
Speaker 1: The other one is and this gets boring in a hurry,
Speaker 1: and so I won't. I'll get rid of it in
Speaker 1: a hurry. They're going to redo the cost of benefit
Speaker 1: analysis of prospective global warming, and it's called the social
Speaker 1: cost of carbon And as I say, I won't bore
Speaker 1: listeners except to say we'll do this. The Biden EPA
Speaker 1: said that the present value of future climate damages in
Speaker 1: economic terms is one hundred and fifty dollars a ton.
Speaker 1: I think that was the figure maybe a little higher.
Speaker 1: Now almost nobody ever says what is the social benefit
Speaker 1: of fossil fuel use? And the one really credibly economist
Speaker 1: is a Dutch guy named Richard Tol who's very well respected.
Speaker 2: In environmental economics.
Speaker 1: He did a calculation a few years ago said the
Speaker 1: social benefits of our fossil fuel use is at least
Speaker 1: four hundred dollars a ton.
Speaker 2: I think it's probably much higher.
Speaker 1: And all these this is economic flim flamm and mumbo jumbo,
Speaker 1: and he changed the assumptions, you get different numbers. But
Speaker 1: the problem is the benefits of fossil fuels are overwhelmingly positive.
Speaker 1: And no one knows this better than my friend, the
Speaker 1: new Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. And he's going to
Speaker 1: be delivering hammer blows to all this stuff, and it's
Speaker 1: going to be fun to watch. I think the show
Speaker 1: was almost over for the climatistas, as I like to
Speaker 1: call them.
Speaker 2: It maybe you know, wankree to you, and it may
Speaker 2: sound born, but it's actually important to every single little
Speaker 2: aspect of the economy if we're coming up with social
Speaker 2: goods and the rest of it. In declaring car, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think you're right. I mean, it's as we were.
Speaker 2: It always polls low. It's never up there in the
Speaker 2: top five or seven issues that people are particularly cared about.
Speaker 2: It's something that people not and pay lip service do,
Speaker 2: but then live there like precisely if they do. I'm
Speaker 2: very concerned about the climate. I'm getting on a plane tomorrow.
Speaker 2: Aren't there mutual? Isn't there some sort of consistency? No,
Speaker 2: there isn't because I pay carbon credits and I planted,
Speaker 2: et cetera. No, it will seem to be one of
Speaker 2: those fevers from which we awoke later at home. So
Speaker 2: there's that, I mean. But then again, there are people
Speaker 2: who I'm sure blame Elon for a great deal of
Speaker 2: carbon dumping into the atmosphere, because of course it is
Speaker 2: space X rockets, and those people are probably at this
Speaker 2: very moment demanding that he turned them into electric vehicles somehow, somehow.
Speaker 2: You know, if we can just develop a start rec
Speaker 2: warp factor and you know, the the the replicators, all
Speaker 2: will be well. All is now over because we come
Speaker 2: to the end of the podcast and we release you
Speaker 2: now to your life to listen to something else. Will
Speaker 2: it be as interesting and as as wonk filled as
Speaker 2: as we have given you I don't think so that's
Speaker 2: why you come back week after week. But you have
Speaker 2: not left us a review on the Apple podcast thing,
Speaker 2: have you yet? No? No, I mean I've been begging
Speaker 2: you for seven hundred and thirty two episodes. Please do
Speaker 2: it now so I can stop cavetching and covelling on't you.
Speaker 2: You also might want to avail yourself with the fine
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Speaker 2: them for supporting us. And of course, of course I
Speaker 2: leave this for last because it's have to say it
Speaker 2: week after week. If you would just go over to
Speaker 2: ricochet dot com. Yeah, I know that place, and go
Speaker 2: check out the member feed. Oh what's that You can't
Speaker 2: because you're not a member. Well, you know, sign up
Speaker 2: and for a few little coins. It's just you know,
Speaker 2: you have access to the same civil center, right community
Speaker 2: you've been looking for all your days on the internet.
Speaker 2: Stick around. Of course, you can go to the comments
Speaker 2: at Ricochet and add your thoughts if you are indeed
Speaker 2: a member, and I'll see you this weekend at the Diner,
Speaker 2: which is also held on the Ricochet Audio Network. That's right,
Speaker 2: many podcasts, many topics, many great Voices and many more
Speaker 2: podcasts to come too, So we'll see you next week.
Speaker 2: Hope Charlie's with us, Steven, hope you're with us as well,
Speaker 2: And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet four
Speaker 2: point zero. Bye bye bye, James Ricochet Join the conversation