Alex Jones’ sudden August 7 deplatforming by Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and others—three months before U.S. midterms—sparked accusations of coordinated "Great Purge" censorship, with no cited violations despite years of content. Contrasted with left-wing outlets like The Young Turks, this selective enforcement mirrors free-speech groups’ silence on conservative bans while defending progressive figures like Sarah Jeong, whose racist tweets went unpunished. Toronto Mayor John Tory’s letter after Faisal Hussain’s ISIS-linked Danforth shooting ignored terrorism, pushing gun control instead, despite Canada’s existing restrictions failing to curb urban violence. Guest Andrew Lawton warns Trudeau may reclassify firearms to avoid rural backlash, exposing media’s ideological bias over facts—raising fears of broader internet censorship targeting dissenting voices ahead of elections. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, every single tech company decided to ban the same conservative news service all on the same day.
Three months before the U.S. midterm elections, the purge has begun.
It's August 7th, and you're watching The Ezra Levant 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 about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The massive independent news and opinion site called InfoWars was banned from most of the internet yesterday.
All at once.
Facebook banned them, YouTube, even though they had millions of subscribers.
Smaller social media sites like Pinterest.
Apple deleted every single one of their podcasts ever.
Years of them.
I'm talking about Alex Jones and the website Infowars.com.
They didn't say why they were banned, these social media companies.
They didn't say this YouTube video is unacceptable for this reason and that Facebook post is unacceptable for that reason.
I mean that could make sense, I suppose.
Perhaps Alex Jones and InfoWars did something that was unacceptable under their terms of service, could be, though you can find just about anything on Facebook or YouTube that's not banned.
No, they all just deleted everything.
Anything.
Going back years, decades in some cases.
Alex Jones has been online since before most people were online.
He's been there since the 90s.
Now he's gone.
He's just a rumor.
He's been unpersoned.
Why?
Why now?
Why all of these social media companies, all these tech companies doing it all within 12 hours of each other?
Why?
The Great Purge.
Is it because Alex Jones and his company Infowars have massive reach?
Not to the fancy people, not to liberals, not in Manhattan or Hollywood, but in flyover country, in Red State America, with people who are dissidents, people who Hillary Clinton would call deplorable.
Jones was an early backer of Donald Trump and promoted him.
Donald Trump appeared on Jones' shows.
Is that why he's being banned?
But why now?
Is the reason for the timing that it's just three months before the U.S. midterm elections?
Shut down a major voice on the right?
Perhaps you've never heard of Alex Jones, or perhaps you've only heard of him in outtakes from his show that are shown on late-night liberal comedy shows mocking him.
Perhaps you hate him or ridicule him, and that's fine.
But since when has that caused for someone to be unpersoned, literally to have every single word they've ever said or everything they've done, just wiped out, deleted by all the tech companies operating in concert?
I've been on Alex Jones' show once.
I watch it once in a while.
I'm not his spokesman.
I simply don't know enough about him or InfoWars.
But here's what I do know.
He's based in Texas, and like everything in Texas, he's larger than life.
He's over the top.
He's entertaining.
He's loud.
He's funny.
He's outrageous.
He gets into trouble.
He goes too far.
He indulges in speculation and even in conspiracy theories.
He would be impossible in any other country because no other country has the First Amendment like the United States does.
So he can say things whatever he wants, really.
And if you don't like it, don't watch it.
Sometimes he's very perceptive.
Sometimes he uses hyperbole, engages in logical leaps.
I think he does it on purpose to show where we could be headed on some trends, the slippery slope.
He's a dissident.
That's what dissidents do.
They dissent.
They warn.
They raise the alarm.
They're not always right.
They can't always be right.
But I think we need people like them.
On the right and on the left, I think, but only dissidents on the right are ever banned.
A left-wing counterpart to Infowars called The Young Turks is full of conspiracy theory touting kooks on the left, full of profanity and obscenity.
Great, no problem.
The more debate, the merrier.
Don't like it, don't watch it.
But they're not deleted by all the tech companies all on the same day.
Imagine that.
Apple, Google YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest even.
All of them banned Alex Jones within 12 hours.
You'd call that a conspiracy theory if someone said it would happen.
Alex Jones said it would happen, and it did happen, so it's not a conspiracy theory, is it?
It's a conspiracy fact.
What's worse is that this ban was egged on by the media party, by the establishment media who want to silence him, I don't know, for business competitive reasons, for sure, but also for ideological conformity reasons, as in they hate that someone else is breaking their business cartel, their grip on viewers, but they also hate that someone is breaking their ideas cartel.
Someone is talking about things that they don't want talked about.
Look at this tweet from a CNN reporter just a few weeks ago.
This is CNN's Oliver Darcy.
Facebook invited me to an event today where the company aimed to tout its commitment to fighting fake news and misinformation.
I asked them why Infowars is still allowed on the platform.
I didn't get a good answer.
That's one of dozens of tweets that he did demanding that his conservative rivals be censored.
And Facebook did.
They listened to him.
CNN whines about Donald Trump being really mean to the media, but Donald Trump has not called for CNN to be banned or shut down.
He mocks them.
That's his free speech.
CNN calls for InfoWars to be shut down.
And it happened.
And they're gleeful.
And here's the New York Times today.
They're aiming for the one last social media company that, at least at the minute I record this video, has not yet banned him yet.
And that's Twitter.
Here's the New York Times on that.
Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Apple have removed Alex Jones and Infowars from their platforms.
Should Twitter follow suit?
All the liberal media smell blood.
They're a mob.
They're literally calling up anyone who does business with Alex Jones and pressuring them, bullying them, embarrassing them, threatening them maybe.
I don't know.
Unless they ban him too.
No one is standing up to this.
Not the ACLU, not the free speech groups, not any press association that I've seen.
Actually, they've become the mob, haven't they?
No normal person would want to censor Alex Jones.
If you don't like Alex Jones, don't watch him.
Or watch him to laugh him and mock him or debate him.
I don't know.
I don't care.
Only hardcore leftists, the antifa types, the alt-left types, the Democrats, want to deplatform and censor their enemies.
Hand in hand with the Democratic Party.
Here's a Democrat senator from Connecticut who tweeted, Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart.
These companies must do more than take down one website.
The survival of our democracy depends on it.
Really?
Does the survival of the U.S. democracy depend on censoring people that politicians say should be censored?
Hate and lies.
Well, maybe.
Maybe Alex Jones engages in hate and lies, but I think the left hate and lies him right back since when do we ban a natural human emotion?
That's what hate is.
What does it mean to ban hate?
You can make the same video, but only if you feel happy inside.
You can't do a video if you're feeling mad about something.
What on earth rule would that be?
Lies, right.
It's not against the law to lie or to make factual mistakes or to exaggerate.
If it were, there really wouldn't be any journalists or politicians left standing.
U.S. and to a lesser degree, Canada, permits people to be angry.
In fact, speaking out when you're angry is a safety valve.
It's better than blowing things up, which is what they do in places without freedom of expression, where there is no constructive outlet.
It's not against the law to lie, by the way.
Congress and Parliament would be empty if it was.
But more to the point, we are all allowed to make up our own minds about whether someone is telling the truth, lying, is merely wrong, or is just stating an opinion.
We don't hand that power over to politicians or, in this case, secretive corporations.
Really, whatever can be said about Alex Jones and Infowars when it comes to speculation or fake news can be said just as much about many other broadcasters.
No one less than the great Dan Rather literally used forged documents in the days before the U.S. 2004 presidential election to claim that George W. Bush got an inappropriate excuse from serving in the military.
The documents were forged.
Dan Rather used them anyways.
He's the grandpa of fake news.
And as you can see by that story, a decade later, Dan Rather and half of the media are still insisting that they were true enough.
My point is that conspiracy theories, speculations, false news, outrageousness, and just plain old mistakes, they're not just the property of the right or the left or anyone.
You might recall, shortly after Donald Trump was elected, the CBC literally hired actors, you can see them here, to go onto Toronto City streets, Montreal City streets, and pretend to be racist and walk through Canadian streets trying to entrap unsuspecting Canadians with racist comments and getting them to buy racist shirts.
There was no real racism there, not enough to find and report.
So the state broadcaster used your tax dollars to literally pay actors to pretend.
And they filmed it and they called that news.
So yeah, call Alex Jones a conspiracy theorist if you like, but I'll put the CBC in 60 minutes in the same bag.
Real Reporting, Unreal Consequences00:02:56
You don't have to like him, but he's got an enormous following, Alex Jones, tens of millions of viewers every month.
Huge.
He's been at this for really 20 years, since 1999.
He really is an internet pioneer, whatever else you have to say about him.
He's over the top, absolutely.
But he's done real journalism that others haven't.
Like when he sneaked into that ultra-elite gathering each year in California called the Bohemian Grove, that's a bizarre secret club of the ultra-elite, including several former U.S. presidents.
Even Stephen Harper has attended one of their secret summer camps.
It's a summer camp for grown-ups and it's secret and it's by invitation only and only guys allowed and the world's top bankers and military leaders and politicians.
It's really weird and Alex Jones sneaked in there with a video camera and did some real reporting, including their bizarre rituals.
I'm just going to show you in 90 seconds.
This is what Alex Jones filmed in this secret society.
Begone, don't care.
Fire shall have its will of thee.
Begone, don't care.
And all the wind, make period with thy doubts.
Hail fellowship's eternal claim.
Once again, Midsommar sets us free.
That's just weird, but that's real reporting about something a bit occult, a bit odd.
That's Alex Jones' specialty.
He goes too far sometimes, but so what?
Don't watch him if you don't like it.
But banning him?
But it's not just him.
He's the first to go.
But do you think he'll be the last?
Yesterday, Tommy Robinson was banned from Instagram, which is a photo sharing service.
YouTube's New Recommendations00:15:31
It's owned by Facebook.
He was already banned by Twitter.
I think it's a 50-50 chance he'll be kicked off Facebook.
He has nearly 900,000 followers on Facebook, but so what?
He had 400,000 followers on Twitter, and they just kicked him off.
I myself, for the first time ever, was locked out of Twitter over the weekend.
It was bizarre.
It was a comment I wrote literally four years ago.
I don't even know what it was referring to now.
Twitter said I had violated some obscure foreign rule and I had to delete it or I couldn't continue with Twitter.
I've made almost 100,000 tweets in the past 10 years.
Something from four years ago, obviously dug up by some George Soros-funded leftist activist group, was used to shut me down.
That's probably what happened against Alex Jones and Infowars.
A directed, organized campaign likely spent months going through everything Jones has ever said or done or written and probably put together a detailed dossier and shopped it privately to these internet companies all at the same time and started to really pressure them.
And CNN was obviously part of this too.
They were the stalking horse.
They were boasting about it.
And when the first company caved in, the rest of them caved in too.
I mean, who would want to be the last one left standing by Alex Jones, right?
I mean, look at that New York Times pressure poll on Twitter.
I'm sure they have the dossier too.
Everyone has it except for Alex Jones and Infowars.
They weren't shown the complaints against them.
They had no chance to explain or remedy a problem or appeal.
No, no.
This is coordinated.
With the Democrats, too, you saw that senator.
But of course, Silicon Valley is just a fancy way of saying San Francisco.
They're all Democrats out there.
It's the home of Berkeley and Antifa and other left-wing extremists.
They are all hardcore left-wing, and they know their job.
Stop Donald Trump.
They know that Donald Trump won in 2016 on the internet, and they want to derail him for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election.
They want to silence the right.
They want to start with Alex Jones because he's controversial and many moderates love to hate him.
Annie Hay talks about conspiracy theories, but if they can take him down with his millions of viewers, they can take anyone down.
Breitbart will obviously be next in the U.S.
And of course, we're enemy number one here in Canada.
Remember this story of Justin Trudeau personally threatening the COO of Facebook that if she doesn't shut down Facebook pages that Justin Trudeau doesn't like before the 2019 federal election, he will force Facebook to do so through regulation.
Gee, who's he talking about?
Well, Gerald Butz will answer that.
He's Justin Trudeau's principal secretary.
He is obsessed with the Rebel.
He's already demanded that Twitter delete any satirical accounts that mock liberal cabinet ministers.
And Twitter complied with him.
And I've shown you before how British MPs have positively shouted at YouTube, demanding they delete Tommy Robinson's videos.
I mean, they are appearing.
They are in my recommended timeline at the moment.
So because I've been searching on my iPad for national action videos, I, as a result, have the first two videos recommended to me by YouTube.
When I just click on, as I've just done this afternoon, I click onto YouTube.
The first two recommendations are Tommy Robinson videos.
So the Tommy Robinson that was identified as part of the Finsbury Park online radicalization process, that's what YouTube's recommended.
I've not searched for it.
YouTube has recommended that to me.
Doesn't that cause you some serious alarm?
I can't speak to these particular videos personally.
It causes me a lot of alarm, but I will take this back to our team and see why this has happened.
It's not even just about the individual videos.
It's actually a recommended channel.
I have got up here, it is coming up as my recommended channels.
That one of the recommended channels for me is Tommy Robinson recommended channel.
They're not even hiding it.
It's a war on freedom.
It's a great purge.
They won't stop with Tommy Robinson and Infowars.
They'll move on to us too, of course.
And not a peep from the media against it.
They all love that their ideological and business rivals are being run out of business.
Have you heard from the ACLU, from Reporters Without Borders, from the White House Correspondents Association, from any media association?
I'm kidding.
Of course, you haven't.
Alex Jones was one of the biggest things on the internet until yesterday.
Today, go on Apple, YouTube, Facebook.
He's just a rumor.
He's been unpersoned.
He's been thrown down the memory hole, as Orwell would say.
Maybe that's going to happen to me one day.
Maybe that'll happen to the Rebel one day.
And maybe it'll happen to you the day after.
Oh, well, at least we'll all be able to watch fun cat videos online and all the pop songs we can stomach.
Stay with us for more on this.
Welcome back.
Well, the role of censorship of these tech giants is terrifying to me and has been for a couple of years, ever since I read that op-ed by Eric Schmidt, the senior executive at Google.
He was writing in the New York Times, dreaming about a day when there would be a spell checker, but for hate.
He wasn't whispering this in some secret meeting.
He was writing about this boastfully in the New York Times.
Imagine that.
You're writing an email to a friend, you're typing some Facebook post, and it corrects your wrongthink.
The same way we have autocorrect for spelling.
Imagine that if the ultra-left-wing bosses at the social media companies could design a spell checker, but for your illegal emotions.
Well, I think we are pretty much at that stage now.
And who better to talk about it than what I think is the world's leading journalist on the matter of censorship by these Silicon Valley billionaires, our friend Alan Bokhari.
He is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
Alan, great to see you again.
Unfortunately, it is because of bad news.
Alex Jones and InfoWars just deleted en masse, vaporized, thrown down the memory hole, as Orwell would say, on pretty much every platform out there except for Twitter.
Yeah, it was like a set of dominoes.
First, Apple took him off their store and then Facebook, then YouTube, then Spotify, then finally Pinterest.
I didn't even know that people still used Pinterest, but all of these platforms, one after another in the space for 24 hours, banned Alex Jones and Infowars.
And regardless of how you feel about Infowars, whether you're a fan or not, I think everyone should be concerned that a handful of Silicon Valley executives essentially gets to decide who has a platform on the internet and who doesn't.
And of course, you can say, well, Alex Jones still has his own website, but the reality of the web today is if you don't have access to these distribution channels like Facebook and YouTube and the App Store and the Google Play Store, which CNN now campaigned to get him banned there as well, then you are severely limited in your audience you know um mark tracy who are mike tracy who is a left of center commentator um he said just he actually works for the young turks He's very left-wing.
Yeah.
He's quite thoughtful about free speech.
He says, just for the sheer public record, Alex Jones interviewed world leaders, political leaders.
I mean, he interviewed Donald Trump famously.
And, you know, he has an enormous track record of public life.
And some of it was accurate and some of it wasn't.
And some of it was hilarious and entertaining and some was dispiriting, whatever.
But just to vaporize and to turn that whole thing into a rumor, to delete his entire body of work to unperson him.
I mean, I've talked about this on other occasions, that old Roman concept of damnatio memorie, to delete someone from any memory, to scrape them off of paintings, to destroy sculptures of them, to make it illegal to even say their name.
That was a crazy concept.
Or the old Stalin thing where he removed.
That's right.
It's very Stalinistic when they would edit photos.
That's what.
That's what it is for Apple to delete an entire body of work.
Sorry, I'm ranting too much.
Let's hear from you, Alan.
No, I mean, you're absolutely right.
We've allowed these really unaccountable tech companies to amass a huge amount of power over what we can see on the internet and what will be recorded.
I mean, you know, Alex Jones' entire archive of videos is now inaccessible on YouTube.
You can't find them.
Yes, Alex Jones still has them himself, but they've just been banished from the internet.
The internet's become this repository of information where people go for research purposes for all manner of things, and now people can't access this.
And info was even if you totally disagree with Alex Jones, I mean, he's still been an important political figure, especially over the past few years.
And was growing in importance.
It's probably why they terminated his accounts.
And I think it all comes down to like, again, it comes down to your view of, I think I mentioned this before, it comes down to your view of human nature and how gullible you think people are.
I mean, if you think Alex Jones is this terrible conspiracy theorist who peddles false news, then why don't you trust ordinary people to make that determination for themselves?
Why does it have to be a handful of elites in Silicon Valley?
Why do they know better than the average user?
Yeah.
And by the way, sometimes I watch things that I know are fantastical or fabulous because I want to know what the other side of the story is, because I want to be entertained, for whatever reasons.
I don't need to explain myself.
And obviously, if literally millions of people positively opted in to get his YouTube videos and Facebook comments by signing up, I mean, you don't have to watch him, but obviously millions of people want to.
It's quite something for Facebook, YouTube, Google, not yet Twitter, but I think they'll fall soon.
It's quite something for them to say, we disagree with millions of our customers.
We will not let you hear from this person.
But what's so weird, Alam, is that they will not particularize what the beef is.
They didn't say this video on that day broke this rule.
They just said all your works ever.
You are a person that has to be unpersoned.
I find that creepy.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense at all that they'd all ban him in the space of 24 hours as well.
So they all suddenly decided independently that he suddenly violated their rules.
That doesn't make sense.
I mean, clearly they saw Apple either they were coordinating or they saw Apple taking action.
They thought, okay, it's time for us to take action as well.
So the idea that they independently looked at their own rules and decided on that day in the space of 24 hours that Alex Jones is violating the rules of each particular platform that it is sounds like nonsense to me.
And that every single video of his happened to violate the rules.
I mean, I know that we here at the Rebel have produced more than 9,000 videos, and we're only three and a half years old.
I can only imagine his body of work was much larger to vaporize them all.
You know what?
I saw that.
That's another good point, actually.
It's a very draco.
A lot of these tech companies leap straight to extremely draconian punishments for people they don't like.
So Patreon, for example, they permanently banned Britney Pettibone a few months ago.
And there was no review period.
But on the other hand, I've recently did a story about this far-left podcast host who was openly advocating for violence against right-wing protesters on Twitter.
And that's supposed to be a big no-no for Patreon.
But what they did is they placed his account under review and then they let him back on after he deleted the tweets.
So they'll take these draconian measures like wiping and wiping all of Alex Jones Jones' channel.
Whereas they'll be far more lenient to people they have ideological agreements with.
And the other thing is, why do they even need to be so draconian?
If there's a particular Alex Jones video they object to, why don't they just ban that one?
I'm not saying I'd support that, but it seems to be massive overkill to ban the entire channel, just for one or two videos.
And I think that goes for all channel bans, frankly.
Yeah.
You know, someone, I was talking about this on Twitter over the weekend, and someone said, well, you know, you wouldn't expect them to carry works by Adolf Hitler, would you?
Well, out of curiosity, I went to the Apple Store and I typed in Mein Kampf and hit after hit after hate.
You can get it as an audio book.
You can get it as a podcast.
And I think that's appropriate because it's a historical work that's very relevant.
And why would we pretend it never happened?
I mean...
And also, how poor must your opinion be of ordinary people if you think if they're allowed to access this sort of forbidden knowledge they'll somehow be corrupted and turn into racists and neo-Nazis.
That's ridiculous.
Obviously, a small minority will always be extremists.
But this idea that allowing hate speech to circulate will somehow corrupt humanity means you have a pretty poor idea of humanity and their rationality.
You know, I want to refer to Mike Tracy one more time, only because, as you point out, he's a thoughtful leftist libertarian from the Young Turks, which is sort of like the Alex Jones of the left.
Like they go too far.
They're over the top.
They're outrageous.
They swear.
They really are mirror images in certain ways.
But, you know, they're leftists.
So they're celebrated by YouTube.
YouTube's president has photos taken with young Turks.
But this Michael Tracy, he challenged libertarians on the right.
And I know you have lately, Alan, too.
And I think this is something I'd love you to expand on.
The traditional pure libertarian response is, well, government shouldn't regulate it.
We should just create our own Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Amazon, Pinterest, our own, as if those won't be corrupted and co-opted, as if deeper internet infrastructure wouldn't cut us off.
But Michael Tracy, thoughtful guy, says that would be like saying in the 1890s, huh, if you don't like dealing with J.D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, why don't you set up your own oil refinery?
That's what libertarians would do.
I mean, that's the scale of, that's the scale required.
You can't just start your own oil refinery if the oil and the steel and the railways and the coal is all in an oligopoly.
That's what they're saying, really.
There's no way to just opt out and start your own.
That's true.
And honestly, I'll say the left libertarians like Tracy and Glenn Greenwald as well.
The Snake in Our Own Garden00:06:49
I mean, they're making much more sense than the Nebotrumpists and some of the principled conservatives who say that Facebook and Twitter can do what they want.
First of all, this isn't really a free market we're talking about here.
So in order to compete with Twitter or Facebook, especially like going forward the next 10 years as smartphones and tablets begin to replace desktops and laptops, you need access to app stores because you can only get on smartphones and tablets via app stores.
And the app stores are controlled by either Apple, they run the Apple App Store, or Google, they control Google Play.
And those two companies have a night, this is not an exaggerated figure, they have a 99% market share over the smartphone market.
So if both of those companies decide to ban you from their stores, as they did to Gap, which is a Twitter competitor, then you're effectively locked out of the smartphone market and you can't compete.
It's like if USPS and UPS got together and decided FedEx isn't allowed to use the roads.
Yeah.
You know, I see that Gary Kahn, a former cabinet member of Donald Trump, said, I think he was in Breitbart.com, I read this, that Facebook now has more power over America and is in more, and it's jeopardizing America more than the big banks were right before the 2008 crash.
I thought that was a strange juxtaposition, but of course it's true.
And of course Facebook is more dominant and Amazon, Google, YouTube, Twitter, more dominant in our lives than Standard Oil was 100 years ago.
I think our side, and by that I mean people who believe in free speech, are so focused on, you know, don't step on me, don't, you know, don't, you know, the Gadsden flag, don't tread on me, do no harm.
We're so used to just saying don't punch me and leave me alone that when we need to push back against these tech titans, there's no one on our team.
There's an increasingly popular remix of the Gadson flag going around in which the snake is being stepped on by a foot that has the logos of Facebook, Google, and Twitter on it.
And the snake says, well, at least it's not the government.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's time maybe for the snake to bite back.
I was pleased that Gary Kahn mentioned that.
I haven't seen anyone else in cabinet yet.
I haven't seen Donald Trump Jr. really call for it.
He's a pretty good proxy for his father sometimes.
My last question to you, Alam, is the timing here.
Alex Jones has been doing Infowars for almost 20 years.
I mean, really since the internet was a baby.
And he's been doing this for so long.
And he really, him and the Young Turks really did the whole YouTube TV show thing.
They invented it for years.
I have to tell you, we here at the Rebel modeled ourselves after both InfoWars and the Young Turks in terms of how do you do it.
And we look to them as a business role model.
We're our own editorial creature.
But for this to happen now.
Whatever you think about him editorially, I mean, Alex Jones is clearly a successful businessman.
Yeah.
But here's my point about how long he's been doing this.
Now, three months to the U.S. midterm elections, is that coincidental?
That he's been online for 19 years, but they're taking him out now, before the midterms.
And if Donald Trump doesn't see this as a wake-up call, I don't know what will, because this is about him.
Infowars is not going to be the last.
Alan?
Yeah, it's hard to know what they're doing, really.
I know that Brad Pascal, because it's clear from his statements that he understands the threat of big tech, why they're not commenting more on InfoWars.
Donald Trump Jr. did comment on Infowars recently.
He said he was worried that Breitbart and the Daily Caller would be next.
So there's some talk there, and Pascal made, I think, one or two comments, but nothing from Donald Trump yet.
Although he did call out Twitter last week when they were shadow banning Republicans.
So there seems to be some growing awareness, but they're not talking about it as much as they should, really, though.
When you consider the fact that big tech is compared to, say, CNN, presents a far greater threat in terms of the damage they could do to the Trump movement electorally.
So it's hard to know what they're up to, really.
Maybe there's a strategic play here.
I mean, maybe they're seeing what's going to happen in the midterms if the Republicans lose the House and they can blame it on social media, much like the Democrats blame 2016 on social media.
So, you know, that might be a political strategy they're going for.
So it's hard to know what they're up to.
I think Brad Pascal understands the threat.
I think President Trump is starting to understand the threat, but he's a very sort of old media, broadcast media guy, so maybe he's having, he maybe needs some time to get his head around it.
But certainly.
At this point, Donald Trump is really the only person who can do something about this because the Republicans on the Hill are still part of this dogma that says you can't regulate private companies, even if Silicon Valley has some of the most lobbyists of any industry out there.
I think Facebook and Google, the number of lobbies between them is staggering, plus their political donations.
Just before I hopped on this interview with Alam with you, I checked the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, that really used to emphasize freedom of speech.
And I checked a group called Reporters Without Borders, also called Reporter Sons Frontier.
And I went through everything they've said over the last 24 hours.
Neither of them has a word about this.
Reporters Without Borders has several pieces commiserating with Jim Akosta of CNN because he was heckled and supporting Sarah Jeong, the racist who was hired at the New York Times, and defending her against the Twitter mob, but not a word for Alex Jones and Infowars, who was actually shut down by them.
I think it's extremely sad that the people we have relied on as guardians for free speech, they never really meant it.
It was just a tool for their side.
They don't care about conservatives.
Last word to you, Alan.
Yeah, and I would also say some of Nebutt Trump as well, some of the establishment conservatives.
We're seeing them cheering on the censorship info as well as last week they were defending James Gunn and Sarah Gioung and saying they shouldn't be fired.
So apparently corporate censorship is great when it targets Alex Jones, but not so great when it targets progressive.
It's a very strange position for so-called conservatives to be taking.
Gun Control Controversies00:10:02
Yeah.
Very frustrating times.
I'm so glad you guys are fighting hard.
I mean, don't count Alex Jones out, but the thing is, it doesn't matter how hard he fights if one by one the lights are turned out from him and they pull the plug on him.
You just can't fight if you're not plugged in.
That's the reality of 2018.
Thanks for spending so much time with us today, Alan.
All right, there you have it, Alan Bokhari, a good friend of the Rebel.
He's the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
And I encourage you to go to the website, Breitbart.com, and read all of his work.
Almost every single day, Alan breaks more news about this growing cyclone of censorship coming from social media companies.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Welcome back.
It's been a couple weeks now since the mass shooting in Toronto's Greek town, a street called the Danforth, that left more than a dozen wounded and a 10-year-old girl and an 18-year-old woman dead.
The murderer, Faisal Hussain, we don't know much about him, but we do know that the Islamic State took credit for it, and various police sources say he was known to them and had even made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Well, that narrative was shut down pretty quickly by the official people who preferred their own narrative.
The problem wasn't Faisal Hussain or his criminal family, including his drug-dealing brother who was arrested with so many firearms.
No, The problem was the inanimate object that Faisal Hussein used, the gun itself.
Let's stop talking about those uncomfortable things and get back to the tried and true gun control.
And so it is that Toronto Mayor John Torrey has written a four-page letter to his friend Justin Trudeau asking for more gun laws for Toronto.
And joining us now to talk about this letter and what it means is our friend Andrew Lawton, who we're thrilled to have back with us.
He's now a fellow with the True North Initiative, and he's a columnist with Looney Politics.
Great to see you, Andrew.
Nice to have you back.
Yeah, it's been a while.
Thanks for the invite, Ezra.
Well, it's a pleasure.
You know, the idea of banning guns, they're already banned in a number of ways.
For example, you can't just get a handgun like the type used by the Danforth murderer.
That is a restricted weapon.
And even if you can get one, it's against law to kill someone.
So, Andrew, is it not the case that John Torrey is really just asking Justin Trudeau to double ban the gun, to triple ban them?
And if there's more murderers, we'll quadruple ban them.
I mean, isn't he just asking for more laws that don't seem to be working?
Yeah, and I think that when you look at people like John Torrey and a lot of the other gun grabbers we have in office right now, they already want the ban.
They're just looking for any place they can apply it and advocate for it.
And that comment that John Torrey made where he said, you know, guns are the problem here and made that famous line, why does anyone need a gun, that was about 12 hours after the Danforth Aft shooting.
I mean, the bodies weren't even called yet, and John Torrey was getting up there saying, you know, we need to have a gun control discussion.
And then city council in Toronto voted to ban the sale of handguns and ammunition, except they don't actually have the authority to do that.
They can only ask the federal and provincial governments to regulate it.
But let's say that the city got their way.
John Torrey got his way.
The one gun store in Toronto, there's only one.
That's the ultimate amusing part of this.
The one gun store in Toronto gets shut down.
It wouldn't have changed anything.
The gun that Faisal Hussein used by several reports was an illegal gun.
It was illegally owned.
It was illegally acquired.
And as you mentioned, Ezra, it was illegally used.
So there is no law that would have prevented this tragedy.
And that's what the gun control advocates always fail to understand, that when you're talking about gun crime, the vast majority of firearms, especially in Toronto, which has a gang problem, are from illegal sources.
So they are immune from what gun control does, which is simply impact people like me that have gone through the steps to get a gun legally.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing.
If you go after guns, an inanimate object, there is no human gun that would say, stop, that's not fair.
Whereas if you go after gangs, if you go after possible terrorists, you have all sorts of groups, interest groups that say, well, stop being racist, stop being Islamophobic, stop being terrorist-a-phobic, stop talking about...
So going after guns is always the safe bet because, you know, I mean, Canada doesn't even have much of a gun lobby at all.
It's not like the U.S. with the NRA.
It's just as, it feels like it's just, okay, play that old favorite again, that golden oldie.
I mean, it's just a safe place for politicians.
But here's the thing.
As you point out, the guns used by gangs in Toronto, and look, Toronto, I think, is ahead of New York now in murders, they would not be covered by this ban.
They would not be stopped by this ban because they're already in violation of this ban.
Does anyone buy this other than the politicians and the media?
No, and just recently, actually, this weekend, they had 63 murders in Chicago.
63 murders, or 63 shootings, rather.
Just in the end of the weekend, just in a Friday to Sunday span.
They had 63 shootings, and I forget how many were fatal, but I think it was at least a dozen.
And Chicago is one of the cities that has one of the strictest gun bans in the country.
It has an effective ban on handguns, although the gang criminals haven't gotten that memo.
And in Chicago, you see what would happen in Toronto if John Torrey got his way, which is that people will get their guns from other jurisdictions and move them in.
So even if we were to accept that disarming Canada was a good thing, and I don't think that's the case, but let's even say for a moment it was.
It's impossible to have any effect of gun control when border security is effectively non-existent.
And this is where the gun discussion actually comes full circle to the immigration discussions we have in Canada.
When you've got the ability to just walk across the border into Canada, you can't stop the flow of illegal guns.
And even Australia, which has a massive gun ban that's been on the books for about 20 years, has thousands upon thousands of guns that are shipped in illegally from the U.S.
And the point I made in a column I wrote on the subject was that if a country 9,000 miles away from the U.S., that's literally an island can't stop illegal American guns, certainly Canada with its significantly unprotected border between us and the U.S. is not going to fare any better.
So gun control is a low-hanging fruit for politicians and it really is a distraction issue.
Yeah.
Last question for you.
You know, there are lawful firearms in Canada.
It is very hard to get a handgun permit.
You have to get a special license.
We won't talk about that.
But the gun that's more often owned and used lawfully in Canada are rifles and shotguns.
They're used for sport.
They're used for hunting.
And in some rural parts where the police are half an hour or 45 minutes away, there's, you know, one RCMP detachment a few towns over.
It can actually be used for safety and security as well.
Those lawful, often rural owners of long arms, that's what they would call the long gun, you know, rifle or shotgun, they are demonized by the gun control folks in the city, although it's almost never that an urban criminal would commit a crime with a big old long rifle or shotgun.
I mean, you can't sneak it around in your car.
You can't keep it in your shirt before shooting someone on the street.
The idea that going after rural farmers and duck hunters and punishing them will somehow relieve the urban crime problem, I think that's another bit of misdirection and sleight of hand.
Which brings me to my last question.
Do you think Justin Trudeau will go for it?
Do you think he just enjoys having rural duck hunters and farmers who are often middle-aged white men squawking about guns?
Do you think Justin Trudeau just loves that political opponent a lot more than he would say love dealing with the possibility of urban gangs or Muslim terrorism?
Well, it's an interesting point you raise because gun ownership in rural parts of the country is significantly higher than it is in urban centers, but gun crime is higher in urban centers than it is in rural areas.
So right there between urban and rural, you see a divide in usage versus or usage and crime versus ownership.
The stats show there's no correlation.
As far as what Trudeau will do, my fear is that we're headed towards a handgun ban or a restricted gun ban.
And I think that there would be too much backlash, even from a lot of liberal and NDP supporters in the rural parts of the country to say we're going to further restrict rifles and shotguns.
But I think there is going to be for the liberals a belief system that they could use their political capital to ban handguns, to ban AR-15s, to ban other restricted guns, because it's that old trope that John Torrey espoused that no one needs them.
That's the belief system.
But the problem is, Ezra, they have the right to reclassify guns at their whim as restricted or non-restricted.
So even if they say today we're going to get rid of restricted guns in Canada, well, tomorrow they're going to be reclassifying a lot of non-restricteds as restricted.
And we will have this slow tide towards disarmament.
And when we're talking about something that is as regulated as it is in Canada, gun control isn't necessary here at any further level.
Korean Love Talk00:03:13
Yeah.
Well, I think it's coming.
I think Justin Trudeau would love to talk about that as opposed to NAFTA or possible terrorism or any of, or, you know, our slowing economy or failed pipelines.
I think he would love to talk about that, especially now that he's not talking about global warming so much.
Andrew Lawton, great to see you.
Hope to have you back again soon.
Likewise, thanks, Ezra.
All right.
There's our friend Andrew Lawton.
He is now a fellow with the True North Initiative, which he does with our friend Candace Malcolm, by the way.
And he's a columnist for loony politics.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me on my monologue yesterday about the New York Times hiring Sarah Jeong despite her public record of racism.
Harley writes, my family fought alongside the Korean people.
It was called the Forgotten War.
It was not forgotten by the Korean people.
This woman is just a taker and has no respect for our war dead.
Yeah, and I thought Joel Pollock made a really interesting observation.
She seems to be living a great American life while despising and disparaging it.
Joel Pollock's theory, and maybe it's a little bit out there, he says she actually doesn't believe those things.
That's just what you need to say and do to get ahead.
I mean, if she believed them, why would she move from Korea to America?
Why would she live in such an American city as New York?
Why would she do those things?
I don't know.
That's the left for you.
Liza writes, anyone who could say this in public or private for that matter has some serious problems.
She may be bright, but she's disgusting.
And as a journalist with a considerable following, she's a big part of the problem.
I put it to you that a lot of journalists despise the public.
Some of it is vanity and narcissism.
They have to feel morally superior.
I think they're also ideological warriors who embed themselves within journalism.
Hey, that's why I'm in journalism.
I'm not here for the craft.
I'm here to spread my ideas.
I'm candid about it.
I'm here to change the world if I can.
I think a lot of journalists are that way, but they just pretend to be neutral writers.
They're not.
Bruce writes, actions truly speak louder than words.
Sarah Jung's Twitter posts show that she has a warped view of white men.
Well, yeah, I don't know if you saw, but Candace Owens, she's a black conservative.
She did sort of an experiment.
She swapped out the word white for black, and I think she swapped in Jewish, and she saw how quickly Twitter would take that down.
And the answer was right away, she was, not just those tweets were blocked, but she was suspended.
It was a scientific experiment.
The control was Sarah Jung's tweets.
And Candace Owens swapped in other races, ethnicities, and she was shut down immediately.
That shows that it's not just Sarah Jong who's racist.
Twitter is too.
No surprise.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, at least unless we're kicked off the internet.