BUCK: In Canada right now, there’s a story that I think really illustrates a lot. You know, there was the GiveSendGo data leak. GiveSendGo is the platform for sending money that people went to after GoFundMe which, to Clay’s point, also came into controversy ’cause people there were giving money for Kyle Rittenhouse. I think that got shut down. And then they found out people who had donated —
CLAY: Showed up at their door, knocking on the door. “How dare you give $50 to the Kyle Rittenhouse fund!” There were media doing this.
BUCK: And this is also, the thuggish left — also known as the authoritarian, collectivist Democrat Party — they always want to know who’s giving money to whom. They are always in favor of trying to out conservative donors or causes, donors to causes that they don’t like ’cause they want to name, shame and… It’s classic Alinsky: Freeze the target, isolate the target, destroy the target, right? Well, if you are a gelato cafe owner in Ottawa, Canada, now Stella Luna Gelato Café has closed down, Clay, ’cause someone hacked into the GiveSendGo database, and I think this is very… Who? Tucker pointed this out on the show last night. I think we should know who did this.
CLAY: Kind of a big deal.
BUCK: Kind of a big deal. You know, those companies you’d think they’re doing massive financial transactions. Hacking into it is not a minor thing. So they got hacked into, and the owner of this cafe gave $250. Tammy Giuliani. I wonder if it’s any relation, by the way. I have no idea.
CLAY: $250.
BUCK: 250 bucks.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: So she thought it was a peaceful protest group and it was uniting people and she talked to this a little bit and she now had to shut down her gelato store in Ottawa because the Ottawa Citizen and all the Canadian media had picked up this story and they’re putting her name all over the place. She’s already shut down guys ’cause of all the death threats and everything else. People are calling in.
They’re calling in threatening to throw bricks through her window, burn her store to the ground, and the media is naming and shaming! They’re going out to the people from the GiveSendGo list saying, “Hey, we’re calling you because your name was one of the donors. What do you think about this?” We know exactly what this is! This is the establishment using its muscle to crush private political opinion and dissent and funding. What’s a more free country right now — people are pointing this out — Canada or Hungary, which the left is always saying is authoritarian?
CLAY: It makes me want to donate money to the Canadian truckers. You know what’s gonna happen, Buck. I said live on the air that was donating money to the defense fund on January 6th, and then I went and donated money. At some point somebody’s gonna hack that January 6th defense fund, and there are gonna be all these articles written as if I haven’t already publicly said that I donated money. They’re gonna be like, “Oh, Clay Travis was donating money to the fund!
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Why don’t you go back a month when I said live on the air that I was doing it. But doesn’t this make you…? I mean, it makes me want to donate to the Canadian truckers’ cause and also it makes me want to go buy gelato from that gelato place even if I can’t get it here shipped to me because it won’t make it.
BUCK: Now, you have to wonder. Given Trudeau ‘s invocation of the emergency act, which is really the Canadian version of the insurrection act.
CLAY: Martial law, basically.
BUCK: Yeah. It’s a serious escalation. It hasn’t been done in… This is a new version of an even older law, and this has not been invoked in many decades. And so you have to wonder, would the owner of the gelato cafe for this $250 donation…? Under Trudeau’s governance right now, martial law, they could seize her bank account. They could shut down her payment processor. They could probably deny her the right to travel in or out of the country. They could seize her passport, Canadian passport.
They could, I’m sure, find a reason to say that she should be detained, she should be put in Jamaica for domestic terror financing. Now, you go down the list. Now, they haven’t done this but I’m saying the powers they have given themselves right now to crush the trucker protests would allow this. And the media, Clay, instead of saying, “Hold on a second,” the Canadian media — which is state broadcasting, so everyone knows that.
Instead of saying, “Hold on, this is not what you have in a free society,” they’re saying, “Yeah, we saw your name on that list, hot dog stand owner. Be tough if somebody sees this and decides they want to threaten your life and your family’s life for supporting domestic terrorists with a $50 donation.” That’s what the media in Canada’s doing right now.
CLAY: Oh, and imagine if the same thing has happened to BLM in the United States. If there had been a list of all the BLM donors coming out and then it had come out that there was a random store owner — gelato owner in, I don’t know, Minneapolis or somewhere in Milwaukee where BLM was particularly active — and all of a sudden, Republicans started berating that store such that it had to shut down. The media would cover it, but they would cover that gelato owner as the modern-day equivalent of Rosa Parks, right? They would turn that gelato owner into an incredible hero.
BUCK: For sure. For sure.
CLAY: And they would label all the people who were coming after them as the worst people on the planet. Now, again, I always try to — and I know it’s rare — stand on principle over politics. I think you should be able to donate to political causes that you believe in — and it’s gonna be a wild idea — and not have your business shut down as a result whatever political cause you are supporting!
BUCK: Think about the logic here in Canada. They’re declaring that this protest or anyone who shows up to it is effectively engaged in some form of illegal activity.
CLAY: Terrorism!
BUCK: Right, and they’ll point to… They’ll say there was a flag here or a person threatened someone there or whatever it may be. BLM burned a police station to the ground! People acting in the name of BLM — which, people don’t have membership cards for this stuff. Sso BLM, for all intents and purposes, tried to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland, destroyed whole sections of neighborhoods, looted stores, dozens of people were killed. Black Lives Matter raised almost a hundred million dollars.
CLAY: I’s amazing — and they don’t even know what happened to it, by the way.
BUCK: No one knows where the money went. Could you imagine if the Trump administration had said — and, by the way, maybe they should have — we’re going to use domestic terror finance statutes to not just scrutinize but seize millions and millions of dollars that citizens of this country or people in this country donated to BLM?
CLAY: And were gonna label ’em terrorists.
BUCK: They would burn down even more neighborhoods, Clay.
CLAY: Well, and to be fair, the media would say this is wildly inappropriate action for a president to have undertaken. And that’s why I always say you have to stand on principle and stand behind the precedents that you support. That’s how Team Reality wins. Because look. You’re right there’s 20% of the population, frankly, on both sides that are gonna excuse no matter what happens. This is where I learned, Buck, when I did sports. If a team had a player do something inappropriate and he was a player on your team, you would bend over backwards to defend whatever he did, right? Like, Ray Rice knocked a woman out on video, running back for the Baltimore Ravens.
BUCK: I remember that.
CLAY: Right after he did that, Buck, people showed up at the Ravens practice in Ray Rice jerseys and said, “Hey, you know what? He deserves another chance.” You know why? Because he was a decent running back for the Baltimore Ravens. They were a fan of that team. Fandom is based on emotion, not rationality. And there are people who are fans of political parties and will defend whatever that political parties does to the end of the earth.
But that’s not most people. Most people are rational and how you win in Team Reality is by doing what you’re pointing out: Just taking whatever the facts are, subtly altering them and saying imagine if we had done this, what would the response have been, and the lightbulb goes off for a lot of people on Team Reality, on Team Sanity, and they say, “Boy. This is really wrong.”
BUCK: I think some of the big, lasting take-aways, conclusions that people have from this whole period of the pandemic and also the aftermath of BLM, Clay, will be a massive and justified distrust of government institutions, both in this country and in Canada and a lot of the what’s referred to as the Anglosphere, the English-speaking world — Australia, New Zealand — and then also a recognition that the corporate media.
Just like the way Big Government and big companies love each other, the corporate media pretends to be on the side of the downtrodden, the oppressed, and a voice for the voiceless; they are actually the handmaidens of those in power. They will support those not only who are in power but who abuse — as Justin Trudeau in Canada is — power in obvious ways — obvious and, I would say, detestable aways.