While down here in the navel of the universe, the USA, most of us have never heard of him. He’s one of those right-wing media guys who yells a lot about immigrants and the purity of the Canadian essence (I understand the secret ingredient is maple syrup), and blusters about suing people who disagree with him. And now he’s threatening to sue an acquaintance of mine, the Canadian Cynic.
You cannot possibly imagine how much I despise people who fling lawyers at everyone who notices how big an asshat they are.
Anyway, CC is putting together a legal defense fund. If you also like the underdog in these kinds of fights, or if you’ve actually heard of puling dildork Ezra Levant and wouldn’t mind seeing him publicly embarrassed, go donate.
As a Canadian and a born cynic myself, I was hoping it wasn’t me he was going to sue. But at the risk of that, I’ll just say that I find he’s mostly an asshole. He once in a while has a cogent point, but mostly he’s a pretty loathsome individual.
Just another example of the plutocracy we live in. Courts: just another goon-squad for the wealthy.
Purity Of Essence!
Peace On Earth!
Ezra Levant is a fuckhead. He just seems to love stirring up hate towards the Syrian refugees in Canada and abroad.
Oh, most Canadians haven’t heard of him, either. No one watched Sun News, so they never got to experience his apoplectic rage over his own impotence in Canadian culture.
He’s been mostly reduced to lying about anything and everything that is less hateful than him on his crowdsourced editorial website, The Rebel, and producing a series of subscription-based YouTube “news” shows.
Oh, and suing people who laugh at him.
I know who that guy is. Fuck that guy, fuck every part of who he is. I have a pretty hard time hating people, even when they have seriously wronged me. He’s a rare exception.
It’s always fun watching the Canadian right talk about the purity of Canadian essence when they spend so much time attempting to turn Canada into a carbon copy of the United States.
Levant is a mealy-mouthed pissant crybaby. Fuck him.
Ezra has been a right-wing bloviator for decades. He was active in Reform Party circles (different entity from the US Reform Party) when I lived in Alberta in the 90s, and published a loathsome “news” magazine for a while. Then, as mentioned up thread, he terrorized an ever-shrinking audience of retirees with his show on Faux News North.
Blech.
@Erlend Meyer
Just another example of the plutocracy we live in. Courts: just another goon-squad for the wealthy.
Well not really in Ezra’s case. It’s more that he’s a slow learner. I think he’s lost every case he ever filed. The defendant has the stress and hassle of the law suit but Ezra pays the damages. In other cases where he was the defendant, he pays and/or apologizes, issues retractions and so on. If I recall correctly this is one example of Ezra’s genius http://bigcitylib.blogspot.ca/2015/06/ezra-levant-final-failure.html.
Other than that, he is a loathsome racist idiot. Here is one example http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/rabble-staff/2012/09/ezra-levant-openly-promotes-hatred-against-roma.
And his retraction/apology : http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/sun-news-host-ezra-levant-issues-rare-apology-for-roma-slurs/article9924574/
Mr. Levant said Monday in a voluntary apology during his television show that he was wrong to equate the actions of some individuals with an entire ethnic group. His original broadcast used the outdated term “gypsies” frequently, causing some in Canada’s Roma community to ask police to investigate him for hate crimes.
Unfortunately I cannot find a link to Ezra’s interview with Michael Welner, the unethical “expert” witness, against Omar Khadr in the Guantanamo kangaroo court. If anything, it was even more disgusting than the Roma rant.
I suspect Sun Media removed both of them from the Internet in fear of prosecution. I would note that Canadian hate laws are far less tolerant of so-called “free speech” than the US equivalent.
Isn’t the “levant” the domain of the horrible, dark-skinned mooslems?(sarcasm) So if he is named after it, he should shut up about “race” and “purity”.
Some unfocused searching easily finds this kook being called “Canada’s Alex Jones”, “Canada’s Rush Limbaugh”, and similar. He’s an AGW-denier, seems to be “drill, baby, drill!” (or actually, since he’s mostly talking about tar sands, it’s “dig, baby, dig!”), a big fan of Harper, loathes Trudeau, loooves teh trum-prat, and on and on and on(you can easily guess most of positions). He resigned from a law society just before he was to be kicked out, and he(? his staff?) have been evicted from press conferences. As mentioned by others, he seems to be a serial filer-of, and loser-in, lawsuits.
I’m not certain — I didn’t chase down specific links / claims — but there are also hints he may be in the “Israel can do no wrong” camp.
For extra irony, Levant is a big fan of freedom of speech when it means attacks on Muslims or so forth. Just not when it means people talking about him (I’m pretty sure that’s never positive).
Kichae@5 yeah, Sun’s viewership numbers were apparently in the low thousands of viewers at times, if not the hundreds. Their fans, few that there were, would likely whine about the CRTC and the cable companies not treating Sun fairly. But I’d say a lot of their problem was that they didn’t advertise their existence. I think I saw maybe one TV ad for the network, and maybe a newspaper ad or two. They seemed to assume that there was a viewership out there that was jumping at the bit for a Fox News Canada, and that they wouldn’t have to let said viewership know they were actually around.
Ironically the CEO of Qiuebcor, who were the majority owners of the Sun News Network, was Pierre Karl Peladeau, who became leader of the Quebec separatist Parti Quebecois in May of 2015..
Yes, you are right, Mr. Levant is not very popular here – he’s one of those “out-there” people who get far more attention than they deserve, merely by being so “out there.”
For some reason that I cannot fathom, the province of Alberta seems to spawn a disproportionate number of these far-right fringe people, and I get them confused sometimes. In the dark ooze of my mind, Levant shares a space with other fringe-dwellers (and fellow Albertans) like Jim Keegstra and Ted Byfield – although I’m pretty confident they would have had little in common, aside from mutual enmity.
“the”@15, I may be getting my Canadian provinces and territories and cheese rustlers all mixed up — easy to do, they all seem to contain ice and the same national attack moose — but isn’t Alberta sometimes known as “Canada’s Texas”?
I wasn’t a fan of Byfield’s, but at least Alberta/BC/Western Report was intended to promote a Canadian brand of conservatism. Western Standard, the replacement for Alberta Report that Levant was involved in, seemed to have a lot of syndicated US right wing stuff that had little relevance to Canada. Apparently it couldn’t find much traction either, since it went to being a strictly online publication after only 3 years of the print version.
blf @16:
Yes. There was a guy from Alberta cattle country on my floor in residence at the University of Alberta aeons ago. Hat, jeans, boots, accent, the Texas works. Nice bloke.
blf #16
Only if you want to start a fight.
Chigau @19
A cowboy poetry and music revue called Bunkhouse had this dialogue
Texas Cowboy: Do you have lot of bears in Alberta
Alberta Cowboy: We have bears in Alberta
Texas Cowboy: In Texas I once saw a man kill a bear with a rattlesnake.
Alberta Cowboy: Is that so? In Alberta I once saw a man kill a rattlesnake with a bear.
militantagnostic #20
I’m already a bit of a fan of the genre.
http://www.albertacowboypoetry.com/index.html
Probably using the word genre is not quite right, here.