Joel Pollak, Breitbart’s senior editor-at-large, traces conservative media’s fight against left-wing censorship—from Amazon’s fake Vanity Fair traffic claims to Facebook’s 2019 "fake news" threats by Justin Trudeau. He contrasts Breitbart’s citizen-driven model with corporate-backed outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times, exposing Silicon Valley’s bias through blocked URLs (e.g., fireScottIsrael.com) and selective fact-checking. Post-Trump, Pollak notes Breitbart’s growing acceptance despite lingering ideological skepticism, while visiting Israel’s Shterot reveals children’s bomb shelters with 15-second safety drills, underscoring real-world stakes beyond media wars. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the media party calls us fake news, but they're the ones telling the lies.
It's June 28th, and you're watching The Ezra LeVance Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Welcome back.
Well, one of our favorite guests to talk about is my friend Joel Pollack.
He's the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
He focuses on foreign affairs, especially Israel.
He once did an interview with us from there.
He talks about California matters, being based as he is in LA.
U.S. politics is his main beat.
He covered the Trump campaign very closely.
But today we're going to do something a little bit different.
We're going to talk to Joel about his media organization itself, Breitbart.com, where he is a senior editor, and not just Breitbart and what it's done in the American media atmosphere, and around the world too.
Of course, they have a big office in London.
But what Breitbart.com and alternative media, including The Rebel, what we stand for in the new era of fake news and Silicon Valley censorship, and how, in fact, governments are trying to restrict our conversation.
It's something new, but I think Joel Pollock is the guy to help us, and he joins us now via Skype Joel Gregency again.
Good to be with you.
I covered about 10 things there altogether, and I don't know if it really hung together, but my point is this.
Breitbart.com, I've been following it since, you know, I never met Breitbart personally, but I interviewed him via satellite at the Sun News Network, and I thought, boy, there's a guy who fights.
Finally, a guy who doesn't try and split the difference with his haters.
Finally, a guy who doesn't accept the premises of the other side.
And then you guys were such an important force in the 2016 election.
Why don't you tell us from your American point of view, what has the reaction been to Breitbart from your enemies?
Oh, they're still trying to put us out of business.
I think they have predicted that we'd be out of business for many years now.
In fact, in 2012, right after Andrew passed away, there was a piece in BuzzFeed about the crumbling empire of Andrew Breitbart.
So we went on to expand dramatically in traffic and influence.
So they're really trying hard.
There are boycott movements.
There are efforts to keep us out of the White House or out of the Senate press gallery.
I mean, there's all kinds of things going on to try to delegitimize and destroy us.
They can't win an argument, so they would rather we just shut up.
But we're very successful because there's a huge thirst, a huge demand for the content we provide.
Fox News is very successful in the United States because it's the only conservative cable news channel, but that does not satisfy the demand by itself for news that is at least not liberal.
It doesn't even have to be necessarily conservative news, but the other options are all so far left of center that there's a market that's more than half the country.
I wouldn't even say half the country.
It's more than that for something different.
And that's much bigger than I think people have realized.
So Fox News fills some of that demand, but we do as well.
Yeah.
You know, Breitbart had some help.
I remember when Andrew Breitbart himself was alive and things were growing.
And I later visited Breitbart's offices in LA and I was struck by how modest they were.
It felt very low cost, a bunch of guys in a big boardroom on their laptops.
Like it's not fancy and it's not big.
I know a lot of people work from home.
That's sort of how you got to do it in the internet age.
You've got to keep your costs low if you're going to compete, unless you have a huge corporate backer, like in Canada, the CBC state broadcaster.
But otherwise, you've got to sort of be low-budget and fast-moving, am I right?
Well, that's what we show visitors.
Of course, if you had hung around long enough and developed a trusting relationship, we would have shown you our high-tech underground bunker with laser tripwires.
And no, I mean, look, media companies have to stay lean because there are so many of us.
And even though the conservative space is not that overpopulated, still a lot of room there, I think, there's a lot of other media companies we see ourselves as competing with.
We don't see our competitors as being other conservative news websites.
We're competing with the BuzzFeeds of the world, with the Atlantic, even with mainstream newspapers like the Washington Post.
We are up there in terms of traffic.
We go back and forth beating them.
They beat us some months.
But we are in that kind of a space.
And if you're going to survive in that cutthroat competitive environment, you can't waste money on the kinds of things that perhaps newspapers indulged in the past.
This is when newspapers were still a thing.
So, yeah, we try to keep costs down, but we are definitely in a very nice part of LA.
I mean, we are in, I won't say where we are exactly.
We do try to keep that under wraps, but it's a beautiful part of L.A., and it's a very nice office, so nothing to complain about.
Well, I mean, you mentioned some newspapers there.
I know that the New York Times was bought by Carlos Sleem, once the world's richest man, a Mexican tycoon.
The Washington Post, very influential newspaper, was bought by Jeff Bezos, who is the world's richest man.
He's the owner of Amazon.
It seems to me that a lot of media, I mean, here in Canada, the Globe and Mail is owned by our wealthiest family, the Thompsons.
It seems to me that media is maybe returning to what it was a couple hundred years ago, where they were factional instruments of wealthy tycoons who were trying to make this point or that point.
Like, I don't think that the Washington Post or the New York Times are independent.
I think that they follow the general direction of Bezos and Sleem.
I'm not saying those guys edit it, but they say generally we're for open borders, we're against Trump, we're for certain basic policies.
And there's no economic reason to support the Washington Post, but there's a political reason.
It's like a daily lobby force.
That's my view.
Well, Andrew used to call himself a middle-class mogul.
So he wasn't some big financier trying to make his stamp on political debate.
He was a true believer in the conservative cause and in the idea of citizen journalism.
He really wanted to empower people to tell their own stories.
And so he was a middle-class mogul, as he put it.
He was very, very influential without money.
His influence was cultural.
His influence was intellectual and eventually political as well.
And that's how the company is built.
We're not the mouthpiece for anybody who comes along, whether advertisers or owners or whatever.
We are the mouthpiece of our movement.
We are, in a sense, the voice of our readers.
Our readers determine much of what we do.
And that gives us a kind of independence that perhaps some other publications don't have when they are given their marching orders by one billionaire or another.
You talked about sometimes you beat some of these old established brands with all that corporate money behind them and all that history.
Tell me some of the stats about Breitbart, because obviously things wax and wane with the news.
I mean, everyone was super attentive to politics during the 2016 presidential election.
But in a way, that sort of kept on going because it's, you know, Trump's presidency has been a perpetual campaign and a perpetual crisis in the true meaning of that word, clashes of ideas, issue campaigns.
How is traffic since the election?
You know, traffic's been steady.
I mean, every six weeks or so, another story gets printed in Politico or somewhere else that Breitbart's doing terribly and blah, It's all based on lies.
I mean, there was a Vanity Fair piece some time ago that was based on traffic numbers that were caused by a glitch at Amazon.
You know, you talk about Amazon and whose interests they represent.
Amazon, it turns out, controls one of the big traffic monitoring sites.
And somebody at Amazon unplugged our counter.
So our numbers dipped and Vanity Fair reported as if it were an actual event.
As soon as they put the counter back on again, things went right back to where they'd been.
So a lot of it is fake news.
And we've actually sustained, I think, the interest and traffic in our website since the election, which is remarkable.
Most years, the traffic for news websites drops off after an election.
Your peak traffic is in the October before Election Day, Election Day always happening typically in November.
But that's not been the case.
I don't know the exact numbers.
I don't follow it that closely.
I'm much more interested in following narratives, following stories.
I don't look at the numbers every day.
But I do think we've been pretty successful.
And it's funny to me how invested some journalists are in trying to prove otherwise.
By the way, not just left-wing mainstream media journalists.
Some of our competitors in the conservative world want to create the impression that we're not doing as well, but I don't think that's true at all.
Well, have you guys faced the kind of throttling or kettling, I'll use a policing term, of your traffic from social media companies?
I mean, we were growing on YouTube by 8% per month, Joel.
It was staggering.
I mean, we are by far the largest YouTube channel in all of Canadian news.
I mean, we're just under a million.
That's larger than the CBC, Global, and CTV combined.
But it was like someone flipped a switch in January of 2017.
I mean, we were the only pro-Trump media in all of Canada.
That was part of our growth.
But then, boom, YouTube, Google, decided to demonetize conservative commentary, guys like Paul Joseph Watson of the UK, Mark Dice from San Diego, just anyone who had a YouTube account who was just killing it in traffic and even ad revenue, suddenly YouTube pushed a button and it fell by 85% for us.
And now, if we have key words in our headlines like Trudeau, feminism, and ISIS are three words we've identified, YouTube will automatically not even serve up ads at all.
Now, I'm talking a lot about us here, but I'm asking, has Breitbart been marginalized by Facebook, YouTube, Google, Amazon in a similar manner?
Yes, in different ways, but I can tell you it happened to me personally.
I did a story about an illegal alien in California who was given a statewide office here, and a lot of people had the story.
I think the original report came out in the Associated Press, so different outlets were picking it up and adding to it or giving their own spin on it.
But our version of the story was the most successful, I think, largely because of the photograph we used.
We used a picture of the young woman in question holding a Mexican flag.
So holding up a Mexican flag, very proud of being from Mexico and now serving in state government in the United States.
So that got people interested in the story.
And for a while, we were the number one story on social media in North America.
That means people were sharing our article on Facebook and other platforms more than they were sharing any other article for that moment.
As soon as that happened, our traffic on the article got shut down.
And we tried to figure out what happened, but Facebook essentially had a pop-up window over the article that said, you may want to read more information about this subject from another source.
And if you clicked on that, it redirected you to the Associated Press.
So essentially, the Associated Press was stealing our traffic.
And I asked Facebook about what happened.
They said, well, we don't control that.
That's the old fact-checking operation.
Remember, they used to flag fake news, and the problem with doing it is that human beings would go, when they were told not to do something, they would do it.
So when Facebook was flagging articles as fake news, people were reading the articles more.
So they changed it.
They call it something more euphemistic now.
I think it's called related subjects or further reading or something like that.
And the same system works.
They have some fact-checkers at these different competing media companies.
And somebody at the Associated Press flagged our article and redirected our traffic to them.
And there's a huge conflict of interest in the system.
There's no reason it should have been flagged.
And Facebook actually apologized to me, said, no, there was nothing wrong with your article.
Fact-based, totally 100% true, at least as far as everybody knew at the time.
There was some information that came out later, but the Associated Press also didn't have that information.
So basically, this was a sabotage effort, I think.
The Associated Press said it was a mistake, but I think that they knew what they were doing.
They saw that our article was doing very well and they put the brakes on it by using their privilege as a member of Facebook's fact-checking squad.
There are certain media organizations that they use.
So that's happened.
The other thing that Facebook does is they have a little italicized I above our articles.
And if you hover your mouse above it or your cursor, whatever they call it, a little box comes up that says click here for more information, something like that.
And then you click it and it gives you more information about that news source.
Well, guess where they're getting their information from?
They're getting their information from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is dominated by the left.
And Breitbart's Wikipedia entry is not just inaccurate, but really hostile.
So Facebook is basically telling its readers by using Wikipedia that we are not to be trusted.
Ironically, Wikipedia is probably the biggest source of fake news in the world.
In college classes, they don't let you cite Wikipedia.
We don't let our journalists cite Wikipedia unless it's for rhetorical purposes.
You know, like even Wikipedia says blah, blah, blah, you know, something silly like that.
Facebook's Trust Blacklist00:08:10
But basically, that's the kind of shutdown or interference I've experienced directly.
There are other kinds, and the social media companies know what they're doing.
In some cases, they are not acting out of political bias necessarily, but they are under the spotlight.
The left blames Facebook for handing the 2016 election to Donald Trump, ostensibly because Facebook allowed Russians to advertise on their platform.
When you see the ads the Russians made, you'll laugh.
I mean, they're so bad.
Nobody would have been convinced of anything by these ads.
But anyway, there's this idea that Facebook is responsible for it.
So they're trying to show that they can be team players and they're reconfiguring their algorithms.
They're changing the way they do things so that Breitbart and sites like Breitbart can no longer do as well.
And if you actually look at what's happened since Facebook has started changing its algorithm, many of the more political sites, especially on the right, have fallen off in traffic, whereas the mainstream media outlets have gone up in traffic, CNN and so forth.
So I think there is an effort.
We don't fully understand it yet, but there's an effort to throttle the traffic or interfere with the social media sharing of conservative media outlets.
Yeah.
Well, there's a lot of similar experiences we've had here.
I won't take a lot of your time on them, but there was one.
Our web editors went to post a story on Facebook, as they do 10 times a day, and a screen popped up and said, you violated our terms of service.
Would you like to delete your page now?
Like, you can delete your page.
Yes or no?
They didn't say what we did that violated the terms of service.
They didn't say which term we violated.
They just said, well, you know what you did.
And the only option they had was not appeal or learn more.
The only option was delete your page, yes or no.
Right.
Now, can you imagine that?
So I managed to get a hold of some executive in Facebook Canada.
I sent her that.
And she said, oh, it was a glitch.
And I said, well, what kind of glitch?
Oh, a technical glitch.
And I went back and forth with her about five times.
And I said, well, you got to give me a little more than a technical glitch.
And she asked me to make a public statement acknowledging that it was just a mistake on the part of Facebook.
I said, sure, but you just got to tell me what happened.
And just saying it's a glitch ain't it.
I tell you, it's tough to take these folks seriously, Joel, because all their mistakes seem to be in one direction.
That's just how it looks like to me.
Yeah, yeah, they're all in one direction.
It's rare that they hurt the left.
And partly that's because the employees of Facebook are very much on the left.
When we've had trouble with Facebook, I've tried to contact them or other social media companies, and they're very tough to track down.
So you try finding them through their own social media sites.
And when you look at these executives, they've got all sorts of left-wing political stuff on their own personal sites.
So I think they know when something bad is being done to the left, and they're able to prevent it from happening or to clean it up as soon as it does happen, if it does.
Whereas I think they're more inclined to regard bad things that happen to conservative media websites as ordinary and expected.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'll just give you one more example.
And we sometimes buy micro sites like little websites.
We had one when our correspondent Katie Hopkins was threatened with a defamation suit by the mayor of Molenbeek, Belgium.
So we just put up a website called savehopkins.com.
And we have 500 of those websites, Joel.
And we had one in Florida for Sheriff Scott Israel, the Broward County coward.
So we had one called firescottisrael.com.
It's a petition.
And if you type either of those websites into Twitter to this day, if you type in firescottisrael.com, Twitter will not let you type those words.
It'll either say so many people are doing this, we think it's spam, or that is a malicious website when, of course, it's not.
It's based on a—I don't know how that's happened, but I thought I'd give you two examples.
Anyways, this is an interview of you, not me telling you my war stories too.
Let me ask you something that I find equally terrifying, and that is governments pressuring these social media companies to crack down.
In Canada, there was a story in the Toronto Star, Justin Trudeau threatened Cheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, saying, fix your, quote, fake news problem in Canada before my reelection, or I will fix it for you.
That was in the star.
This is shocking.
We see this in Europe too, especially in Germany.
How much of the censorship is social justice warriors embedded in Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter?
And how much is government saying, you know what?
If I passed a law, I'd have to do so through a legislature, transparency, people could see what I was doing.
If I just have a private meeting with Facebook and either threaten them or offer them something in return, they can do my dirty work and no one will even know.
It's hard to know, and I don't know that we could ever break that down.
I mean, there were so many members of Google, for example, close to the Obama administration, that he wouldn't have had to really threaten them.
They just would have carried out what he wanted.
I'm sure it's the same in Canada, where there are high-level tech executives who are very much on the left and are big fans of Trudeau.
It's probably only his own ineptitude that he would have to have made that threat explicit or even implicit.
He wouldn't have had to say anything at all.
I mean, if you wanted to be cool, if you were in a social media company, you sided with Obama or with Hillary Clinton, and everybody understood that.
It was kind of the hip thing to be and where you wanted to be on the political spectrum.
So the trick is not to do that heavy-handed stuff.
And the danger is, as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted almost 200 years ago, that when that form of despotism comes that is most dangerous and pervasive, it will come largely through the consent of the governed and not through the tyranny of the ruler.
So that's something of what we see here, that people are indulging these anti-free speech campaigns because they are coming from people they like, or because they're coming from private companies, not from the government, or because they're attacking unpopular ideas, unpopular people.
So the real challenge is to articulate the case as to why this is bad.
And that's something I think conservatives have to do a much better job of carrying out.
I want to ask you about a phenomenon that we faced here at the Rebel.
I don't know if you faced it at Breitbart.
You have an interesting wrinkle in that your charismatic chairman figure, Steve Bannon, was seconded halfway through Trump's campaign to come in and reboot the campaign, and it worked.
And he was such an electric figure that he, you know, he was doomed, I think, from my outsider's view, because he was such a big personality and a big figure.
That doesn't necessarily do well as a staffer in an office supporting one man.
And Bannon had his, you know, the president's, the White House had some stern words for Bannon later on.
But other than that, has Breitbart been marginalized by conservatives as, oh, they're not polite company, they're alt-right, we're conservative, but if Breitbart's there, we're not with you.
Because that's what's happened in Canada.
Our federal conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, and in Alberta, IKEA Conservative province, the conservative leader Jason Kenney, it's clear to me that they're so sensitive to left-wing criticism of the rebel that if they dare consort with the rebel, they will become targeted by the mob too.
So what I'm saying is the hatred for us by the CBC and the mainstream media is so high that conservative politicians say, yikes, I don't need to get in between that.
Mob Targeted Politics00:03:30
I'll just let the mob go after the rebel.
And if they ask me, I'll say, yeah, I don't like those guys either, or I'll be consumed by the mob too.
Does that happen to you?
Not anymore.
It used to happen.
I think what people developed was a respect for Breitbart, especially after Trump won.
I think there's some blacklisting on a personal level.
You know, there are some journalists who don't like us, including conservatives.
There are some politicians who don't like us, but that's mostly because we're quite critical of them or they don't like our audience.
But for the most part, that doesn't happen.
And I think it could turn around in Canada as well once you have some politicians who win by getting a message out through offering interviews to the Rebel or working with the Rebel.
I mean, once people understand that your outlet is a gateway to people they need to reach, then you start to see the attitudes turn around.
You start to see the invitations come.
People may not like Breitbart and they may not like our readers, but there are a lot of them.
And they show they make a difference.
And so people have to treat us respectfully, even if they don't like them.
Well, that's a nice note to end on and a hopeful note, too.
It's true.
We are, by many measures, the largest, not just conservative medium in Canada, but even in social media, the largest on YouTube.
We're not the largest on Twitter, but we have millions of names of supporters.
And it's like you say, we are their voice.
And it's for them that we operate, even in some ways more than Breitbart.
I think we're crowdfunded and grassrootsy.
I really enjoy you taking time to come on our show so regularly throughout the year, Joel.
So it's nice to have a longer sit-down with you like this.
I appreciate it.
And you guys keep up the fight down there.
In many ways, we see you as a role model up here.
All right.
Well, yeah.
Keep it up.
Okay, Will too.
Thanks so much.
Well, that's our friend Joel Pollock.
He joins us so often to talk about the news of the day.
It was good to spend some time with him just talking about Breitbart and even the Rebel and some of the battles we both face.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
Well, that's my friend Joel Pollack.
What a smart guy.
He covers so many different bases.
Donald Trump, American politics, immigration.
Covers Israel well.
He covers the lies of a very smart cookie.
I'm so glad he spends time with us.
And with Breitbart.com, we see how the left tries to silence alternative voices on the right.
Hey, by the way, I recorded that interview with Joel a few days ago because I'm actually, and this is pre-recorded too, I'm actually in Israel with the Rebel Israel, 60 or so of our most enthusiastic viewers, sightseeing, fact-finding.
And in fact, here's a quick clip from our trip today.
I'm here in Shterot in Israel, and I'm right on the border of the Gazan Strip.
And this Children's Play Center is unique because it's actually formed of a series of bomb shelters.
The children have got 15 seconds to get down from whatever piece of kit or equipment they're playing on and get themselves into a place of safety.
And I wonder, you know, what's it like to be a mum and know that you've got 15 seconds to grab everything you love the most, all your children, and make sure they're safe?
15 Seconds to Safety00:00:10
What's it like to be in a car and know that you can't?
And what's it like to live your life as the target of someone else's hate?