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"Tripping The Void" Tonight Tuesday, August 18th LIVE /2020 From 9pm-11pm CST/10pm-12am EST Join Saraphine Hurley & Myself, Lorilei Potvin & Share Your Thoughts/Questions as We discuss ' Current Events going on in the World, as well as some of the Unusual things that have been occurring as well as, like We ALWAYS do, Go All Around The World & then We circle right back to the beginning by the end of Our Show! Let's have SOME FUN TONIGHT!!!! Join Us on YouTube to WATCH HERE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbagxNwZsm3D2JFeMtoiylA As well as Chat with Us & be part of Our Show. Bring along Your Favorite Beverage, some snacks & Let’s Have Some Fun! www.uprntalkradio.com #millieweaver #ezralevant #rebelnewsmedia #extraterrestrial #ufo #livebroadcast #youtube #podcast #paranormal #somethingiscoming https://www.instagram.com/p/CEDasgehlim/?igshid=1mgyh72t4j4nf

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Wait till Chinese-made vaccines are mandatory. pic.twitter.com/aLPb7297tL

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) August 10, 2020

#ezralevant

Omar Khadr was on my Air Canada flight 608 from Toronto to Halifax — flying first class. He hid his face from me when I got on, but I see him now. Why is a convicted Al Qaida terrorist on the no-fly list allowed on a passenger plane?

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) February 10, 2020

#ezralevant

Omigod stop lying. NASA didn't even recruit astronauts until you were twelve. This is like when you said you were named after Edmund Hillary, the man who first climbed Everest. Except that happened six years after you were born. Just go chill in Cedar Rapids or something. https://t.co/mHBCjCr2nO

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) October 19, 2019

#ezralevant

On any other occasion, this narcissistic peacocking would simply be eye rolling. But after his disastrous week it’s just pitiful. Will no one around him stop him? pic.twitter.com/Uo3jnnE5Nw #TrudeauInIndia

— Ezra Levant 🇨🇦 (@ezralevant) February 22, 2018

#ezralevant

Why Lauren Southern Is Not A Journalist

Or: The Intellectually Anemic Clickbait Propaganda of The Rebel Media The central argument of Lauren Southern’s inexplicably popular attack on feminism ("Why I am not a feminist") rests on what she claims is the disproportionate focus on the suffering of female victims of rape. This argument is an asinine one, but a common strategy for those trying to discredit or undermine an activist group (example: "Why are animal rights activists so dedicated to saving the whales when there are homeless people who need help?"). It is never anything more than a smear but it is remarkably effective in steering people away from particular issues. Fifth Grade Level Research

Lauren Southern, of course, has no interest in dedicating her life to the alleviation of the suffering of victims of sexual assault behind bars. She is simply exploiting their suffering because it provides her with an ax with which to take down feminists. To support her claim Southern cites a Human Rights Watch report which she claims suggests that between 100,000 to 140,000 male prisoners are are raped annually in prison compared to only 90,000 women outside of prison (this also ignores the fact that thousands of female prisoners are raped and assaulted and actually report assaults at twice the rate of male prisoners). Nowhere does the HRW report make this claim. So, where did she pull this statistic from? By chance, both of her fallacious claims are identical to those which appear in the same equally inaccurate footnote on Wikipedia:

Clearly, like a sloppy high school student, she pulled her central argument from the Wikipedia footnote without ever reading the actual report. There is little doubt that this is her source rather than the actual HRW piece, as the numbers she cites from HRW are wrong and are identical to the ones cited in the Wikipedia article on "Rape by Gender". Both she and the footnote claim that HRW gives "100,000" as the low end despite the fact that they give no such statistic. That the footnote makes the exact same comparison to the exact same FBI statistic of "90,000" supports the conclusion that either a) Lauren Southern pulled her argument from the footnote or b) she or a fan of her added the footnote based on her YouTube argument. The HRW report states that the total number of "140,000" rape victims was arrived at by interviewing a sample of prisoners in Nebraska about their experiences "while incarcerated", and that the numbers reflected what they reported for the duration of their incarceration. "Extrapolating these findings to the national level gives a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped." (i.e current inmates who have been raped at least once in the time that they have been in prison, not the number of prisoners that are raped annually, which is what Southern claims in her piece).

It’s important to note that Southern's cherry-picked statistic which she lazily scooped off of Wikipedia (she must be an incredible academic) which she then misrepresented (willfully or out of sheer ignorance) is an extrapolation from a single study in the state of Nebraska five years earlier. Would this not invalidate the findings for Southern, given that they were not reported to authorities (i.e. prison officials or the police)? For in her Vancouver SlutWalk hit piece she mocks the very idea of citing "unreported" rapes (because she is abysmally ignorant and does not understand the difference between "crimes that have not been revealed to anyone" and "crimes that have not been reported to the police"). This means that while Lauren Southern cynically mocks unreported numbers as inconsequential (though police agencies do not feel the same way), she hypocritically thinks nothing of utilizing estimates - extrapolated even further - to support her own arguments.

The U.S. Department of Justice says that there were just over 2,200 reported instances of male prison rape in a single year. If she is going to insist that rapes that go unreported to the authorities do not count, should she not be limiting herself to this number from the DOJ? Of course not. She uses whichever number suits her purposes. The FBI low of "90,000" (a statistic arrived at by a definition of violent rapes so narrow that it is worthless in a conversation concerning total number of rapes in the U.S.) is used by Southern to drive the number lower than her misrepresentation of the HRW findings, while she ignores the findings of the U.S Department of Justice and other Federal agencies. The Center for Disease Control (which she uses for another pro-male argument) findings that 20% of American women and 1.7% of American men have been victims of rape or sexual assault. One CDC page says that approximately 2,000,000 women are raped each year (this seems ludicrously high), while the National Crime Victimization Survey (reporting collected from household surveys) suggests at least that 244,000 rapes and sexual assaults happened in the US in a single year. A CDC report for the U.S. Department of Justice suggests that "Almost 18 million women and almost 3 million men in the United States have been raped. One of every six women has been raped at some time. In a single year, more than 300,000 women and almost 93,000 men are estimated to have been raped." It should be noted that the FBI’s definition of the sexual assault of men is equally narrow/unsettling. What makes this even more tragic is that the reasons for the overwhelming reluctance of males to report their own victimizations mirrors that of women (i.e. shame, stigmatization, lack of responsiveness from the authorities, lack of evidence, your word against that of your aggressor, etc.), and that men are even less likely to report for these reasons (for reasons often associated with gender roles). What is important to take away from these sources is that none of them ever suggest that more men are raped than women.

In a spectacular display of callous, self-interested cynicism, Lauren Southern uses the rape of men by men to demote female victims of rape to 2nd place in the pantheon of rape victims. In her attack on feminism she makes the preposterous claim (based on her ignorant misrepresentation of the HRW study which she never read) that almost two thirds of rape victims in the U.S. are male, diminishing female victims and suggesting that (somehow) men are the *real* victims of rape, a reality she claims is ignored by ideology-driven feminists. At no point does Southern or any of those feigning sympathy for male victims of rape and sexual assault suggest that any of these men are leveling false accusations for attention or out of regret for a bad sexual experience. Southern reserves her accusation that the numbers for reported rapes are inflated for only those involving women. [Aside: In that video, “The falsely accused are the real victims”, Southern quotes three Second Wave feminists (now septuagenarians) and says, "These are just a few examples of the insanity that we are seeing today." The Robin Morgan quote is from 1974. And the Marilyn French quote is from 1978. More importantly, Catherine MacKinnon claims she never said the quote attributed to her in 1986. Yes, Southern claims that these are examples of feminism “today”]. Not only are her statistics bogus, but her suggestion that men are the overwhelming majority of victims of rape is particularly offensive given that what the statistics actually suggest, which is that the overwhelming majority of those committing rapes and sexual assaults are men. Women are raped mostly by men. Children are raped mostly by men. Even men are raped mostly by other men. Animals are mostly raped by men. Even if her stats weren't wrong, the fact that men are also raped by men is not an excuse to chisel away at concerns raised by activists who argue that victim-blaming and stigmatization are evidence of a culture that condones rape. That Southern had to go to statistics from the controlled environment of prisons should tell you that men are most definitely not the majority of victims of rape and sexual assault outside the prison walls. Prison rape is situational; outside of such controlled (and yet violent) environments men need not fear being raped. Men only rape other men in prison because there are no women to rape in prison. Ironically, though Southern invokes the plight of male prisoners to erode feminist complaints, she unintentionally confirms the very sense of aggressive sexual entitlement of males that feminists are challenging. That straight males are raped in prison by other straight males in such significant numbers confirms how much more normalized it is for males to simply take what they want (even if it contradicts their actual/real world sexual orientation). SlutWalk

In her most recent SlutWalk related video, Lauren describes the SlutWalk to a stunned passerby, “[A SlutWalk is] where people get undressed and walk around in their underwear to stop rape. Does that make sense to you?" She repeats this obnoxious straw man in every one of her SlutWalk videos with such giddy enthusiasm that it is unclear whether she genuinely understands their purpose. The SlutWalk event created in response to the suggestion of a Toronto police officer that young women could prevent rape by not dressing like sluts. The walks are intended to be a rejection of what is seen as a general cultural acceptance of the defense that some rape victims were ‘asking for it’, or ‘brought it on themselves’ with their behavior or dress. The marchers are declaring that a style of dress or heavy drinking is not the same as consent. While this may seem obvious and the explanation unnecessary, judging by Southern’s closing remarks (”What is empowering about increasing your chances of getting pregnant when you don’t want to? What is empowering about increasing your chances of getting STDs? It’s never seemed like an empowering thing to me. Yeah, go ahead and have sex. But ten people in one week? Not such a great thing. Being a slut: not such a great thing.”), she is genuinely ignorant of the very nature of the events she is ‘covering’ for Ezra Levant.

Pointing out that the majority of rapes are not reported is not just a feminist plot. That that the majority of rapes are not reported to the police is widely known and accepted by every law enforcement agency. Despite (or because of) this consensus, anti-feminists and MRAs have opted to feign ignorance (or are simply ignorant) or have adopted a strategy of obtuseness, responding that 'if we have numbers for them, then they were obviously reported to someone’. At first glance, this appears to be an immature response aimed only at infuriating one’s opponent with a throwaway bit of snark. However, it is clear that the majority of those making this argument are absolutely serious and actually believe this to be a solid argument. Lauren Southern is one such idiot. I almost want to give The Rebel Media credit for honest enough to include the comments of the woman in blue in the Vancouver SlutWalk video. However, it is obvious from the smash cut that follows her decimation of Southern is the only real reason they left it in. The editors at Rebel Media knew that their viewers were just as dumb as Lauren Southern, and they would mistake her sarcastic comeback, “So they are reported?” as some sort of “Oh snap!” “Boo-ya!” moment. The terrible revelation here is that they were entirely correct to assume that their audience was that thick. Most of the comments beneath the video focus on that one line. These responses reveal how shallow the intellectual waters of the Rebel Media’s audience are:

Reported to the Police As Crimes vs. Recorded by Other Means

We have rapes and assaults reported to the police, and then we have estimates based on people answering surveys, rape crisis councilors, women's shelters, etc. From the United States Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice:

"Despite a steep increase in rape research and public education in the past 30 years, rape continues to be largely underreported. Only one in five women who were raped as adults reported their rape to the police. Fear of their rapist, embarrassment, and not considering their rape a crime or police matter were the primary reasons women chose not to report their victimization to the police. These findings underscore the need for law enforcement agencies and victim service providers to expand their services to rape victims and do more to convince them that reporting their rape to the police is worthwhile and appropriate."

If only 1 out of 5 women report their assault to the police - in part because of widespread stigmatization & victim-blaming (MRAs note that men are even less likely to report their assaults to police for the same reasons) - then you are only starting with 20% of rapists even potentially facing prison sentences for their crimes. So, when the woman in blue challenges Southern’s assertion that ‘in Canada, rapists go to prison’ she is absolutely right to do so. All of this ties in with the perception of rape victims that they will be judged for the behavior, blamed for getting themselves raped, dismissed as liars, etc., a perception that is reinforced with comments like that of Constable Michael Sanguinetti which kicked off the SlutWalk in the first place.

Most people are quite aware of how complicated the issue is. However, the instances of wrongful accusation are greatly exaggerated by those arguing 'caution'. Given how difficult it is already to achieve a conviction for an actual rape (because it is a crime that generally occurs in private with no witnesses, does not leave a body or a paper trail or even possibly wounds or physical evidence that would suggest that anything outside of consensual sex occurred), it remains highly unlikely that many are facing conviction when no crime at all occurred. Any wrongful conviction is a tragedy, but with crimes like sexual assault and abuse the accusation alone causes irreparable harm to the accused. I absolutely agree that safeguards need to be in place and that we must move carefully, but the fact remains that many tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands in the developed world alone) of rapists walk free while relatively very few men face wrongful accusations, let alone criminal charges. However, it is interesting to note that I have not seen the issue of wrongful accusation/conviction raised so regularly for any other crime other than, specifically, the rape of women. Any news of the harassment, sexual assault or rape of women is met immediately with a deluge of comments clarifying that a man is innocent until proven guilty, followed by a wave of people suggesting that the female accuser is consciously lying "for the attention", or out of regret, or to punish the man or damage his reputation. Relatively few people are so interested in similarly defending (or attacking the accuser) in instances of child rape or molestation, though the same demands of caution and due process would obviously apply those cases, as well. The only difference is that people have been conditioned to see women who bring forward such charges in a negative light (despite the fact that actual false accusations are more likely to occur from a child who does not properly understand sexuality, the potential stigma, the gravity of the accusations, etc.). Again, this is one of the issues that feminist activists have targeted as evidence of "rape culture", the tendency for society to heap the blame for the assault on the female victim, who, it is assumed, brought it on herself. This belies the restrictive and socially conservative roots of anti-feminism, that values the maintenance of a particular social hierarchy over personal liberty.

Even John Kasich, the alleged 'nice guy' in the Republican roster, said only a few months ago that girls not wanting to be raped should avoid parties with lots of alcohol. On the face of it, this could be perceived as fatherly advice of caution, but less important than his words was the response of the conservative audience: a sudden burst of applause on this single point (there was none for any of his other comments on rape kits, etc). Would law and order conservatives burst into applause (as they did) as if on cue if he responded to a question about break-ins by telling people that they should buy a better security system or never leave the house? Would they applaud if Kasich had said that they should expect to be robbed if they flaunt their wealth? Never in a million years. In cases involving material wealth, the focus of conservatives would be - rightly - on the criminal, rather than the victim. Even if you leave your door open the person who walks in and steals your flat screen is the criminal, not you (though you may have issues with your insurance claim). Only in the case of rape do law and order conservatives upend their alleged libertarian values and demand that victims adjust their expectations of liberty and law to the whims of criminals. Sexual conservatism and misogyny are the only reasons that someone like Kasich can respond with the issuance of advice that the victim adapt their life to make room for the desires of criminals. In their eyes, young women shouldn't be drinking and mingling with unmarried men in the first place. By doing so, according to conservatives, they place themselves at risk. There is a place for honest dialogue on the topic of self-preservation/self defense, but the argument of ‘personal responsibility’ has become nothing more than a way of papering over what was previously overt victim-blaming.

Rebel Media’s Feigned Concern For The Welfare of Prisoners

As a left-libertarian somewhere on the prison abolitionist spectrum, I am suspicious of that fact that the media outlets leaning hard on the anti-feminist propaganda are generally owned by the same 'tough on crime' conservatives who regularly seek new reasons to throw mostly poor people (estimated by them to be superfluous populations) into the prisons in the first place. Here is RebelMedia owner Ezra Levant only a few years ago demonstrating his absolute contempt for prisoners on the even lower-brow Sun Media.

So why is RebelMedia, owned and operated by a conservative, pro-drug war, pro-capital punishment, security state apologist like Ezra Levant, have Lauren Southern feigning concern for the well-being of male prisoners? Because it is temporarily convenient and they are opportunistic bottom-feeding tabloid propagandists devoid of any sort of intellectual integrity. Similarly, while RebelMedia, Levant, Southern et al. exploit the suffering of incarcerated males to dilute feminist arguments concerning 'rape culture', they see no contradiction of then turning around and using every report of rape and sexual assault against Western women at the hands of Muslims as an excuse to whip the white masses into xenophobic and anti-Muslim hysteria.

Why is the male accused given the benefit of the doubt and the female victim distrusted in cases of white-on-white rapes, but the same victim suddenly embraced/supported when the accused male is a member of a particular culture that makes him a political target? Which, of course, returns us to the purpose of this deluge of pro-status quo anti-feminist/anti-SJW propaganda. These arguments have two purposes: one is to attack domestic activists (decried as "liberals", "socialists", etc. by Levant) domestically for challenging the conservative elements of society here (i.e. for being too liberal), while the other is to attack foreign enemies as being too conservative/oppressive.

Ironically, the cultures they point to as being the "real rape cultures" make clear that it doesn't matter how one dresses, where one goes, or how one behaves, so long as the culture views you as chattel. Women who have never drunk a drop of alcohol, attended a party, or dressed immodestly, are raped regularly despite their burqas, niqabs, chadors, and hijabs. While women are generally freer in the West than they are in the Middle East (often living under totalitarian governments which our Western leaders maintain in ‘our’ interests), it doesn't mean that all of our societal ills have been cured, it only means that we're a little further down the road. It is also worth remembering that some of the prejudices and 'cultural issues' we see plaguing the developing world are ones that the enlightened Christian West introduced there during occupation, through trade, through colonization and Christianization (ex. homophobia, gender roles, from the Middle East to India to Japan).