Screen capture (Rebel News)
David Freiheit, widely known as Viva Frei, joined The Ezra Levant Show to discuss free speech, censorship efforts by the Canadian government, and how platforms like Rumble and Twitter should respond.
Ezra prefaced the conversation with a brief history of the Canadian government's crooked relationship with the media, saying:
"You mentioned the Blacklock's story revealing hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Twitter influencers. Then there was over $100 million... paid by the government to the regime media during the lockdowns. There's the annual media bailout. So there's the carrot but then there's now the stick, because, you know, you can't force people to watch the CBC... The CBC's viewership is falling even by their own acknowledgement. People will find interesting things on their own... But now in Canada, you got [Bill] C-11, which grants the government domain over the internet, [Bill] C-18, and other bills yet to come. They have something called the Online Harms Act that they're planning to reintroduce. So if the government couldn't get people to watch the regime media with a carrot, here they come with a stick."
Viva commented on how the Left views Rumble as a threat and why, reminding us that "it never had to do with principled free speech."
"It had to do with narrative control. And the only way certain people can maintain control is by suppressing and censoring those who would otherwise destroy their ideas in the open market of ideas. Rumble has been pivotal... It's taking some heat, it's taken some flak, it's taken some massive DDOS attacks, which is always a good sign ideologically. But people are gonna soon appreciate how lucky they are to have this alternative to YouTube."
Comment: From the December 26th, 2023 show:
Tonight, a heart-to-heart with one of the country's leading civil liberties advocates, a lawyer by trade, who is in exile because of the pandemic.
There are not a lot of lawyers left who care about liberty. For most, it's just a job. They have to pay the bills. Frankly, many lawyers don't want to take cases that are too spicy because it might disqualify them from a government contract. Certainly, they would lose the opportunity to be appointed to the bench and serve as a judge.
Because of this, in the early days of the pandemic, many Canadian lawyers were averse to representing an unvaccinated person or someone who was defying the lockdowns, which makes it an even greater pleasure to discover or rediscover the lawyers who do care deeply about civil liberties and are as troubled by the world as the rest of us.
One such lawyer, turned video blogger, has his roots in Montreal — perhaps the most locked-down city in all of Canada. From 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. was its typical curfew, whether you were vaxxed or not, whether you were sick or not.
The civil liberties inferno was outrageous and too few lawyers cared. But this lawyer, David Freiheit, known online as Viva Frei, was pained deeply by it all. He joins Ezra tonight from Florida, his current residence after his refusal to abide by lockdown orders forced him to abandon his position at the bar in Quebec and depart from Canada altogether.
His licence to practice law is one of the many things he's had to sacrifice but his passion for liberty has not diminished: "I've gone from being a lawyer to just being an internet legal critic, loudmouth guy who screams to the clouds at what I think are the most outrageous injustices I've seen, at least in my lifetime."
GUEST: Viva Frei, Canadian lawyer and political content creator.
Reader Comments