The NYT’s anonymous op-ed—allegedly from a Trump administration "resistance"—mirrors partisan tactics, exposing media bias tied to owners like Slim and Bezos. Legal parallels suggest Twitter’s Dorsey may exploit "digital public square" claims to justify censorship while dodging accountability, despite user tools like blocking lists already controlling content exposure. Canada’s Trudeau hypocritically invokes national identity against U.S. ownership while ignoring American media dominance in Canadian networks; his NAFTA opposition seems politically motivated, given past auto industry bailouts and indifference to pipelines. The episode underscores how elite-backed media and tech platforms weaponize speech restrictions, reinforcing Trump’s critique of systemic anti-democratic forces. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the New York Times runs an anonymous attack on Donald Trump that they claim was written by a senior Trump official.
It's September 6th, 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 for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The New York Times, which is owned by Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico, they hate Donald Trump.
They're obsessed by Donald Trump.
The Washington Post newspaper is pretty bad too.
It's owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America.
Now that's worth keeping in mind.
When you read newspapers in 2018, almost every newspaper in the world is losing money, so they have been bought up by men who use newspapers as their playthings, as political tools to promote their own interests.
It's the same here in Canada.
The Globe and Mail loses buckets of money, but it's an important propaganda machine for its owners, the Thompson family, who are, you won't be surprised, the richest family in Canada.
I don't think you should ever take a media company's reporting at face value without first knowing who pays for it.
Isn't the most obvious example Trudeau's state broadcaster, the CBC?
Okay, so back to the New York Times.
Last night, they published this op-ed by, well, that's the thing.
They don't say who it's by.
They just say we have to take their word for it.
It's a top Trump insider disparaging Trump himself.
Here, let me read a bit of it for you.
I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.
The resistance, eh?
There's something grotesque about that very phrase, the resistance.
That's what the French and the Polish and other European partisans in the Second World War, who were fighting behind enemy lines against the Nazis, that's what they called themselves.
These are patriotic Poles and Frenchmen and others who didn't submit to the Nazi occupiers.
They were loyal to their own countries.
They knew they would one day be restored.
The Nazis were illegitimate as well as being evil.
And so these partisans, they were the resistance.
That's what they were called.
How dare anyone claim an analogy between fighting against murderous Nazis who had invaded their countries?
Comparing that to fighting against a democratically elected president, that is a sign of moral extremism to say that.
Right away, you know who you're dealing with here, or at least who the Times claims you're dealing with here.
Someone who has apparently told Trump that he is a loyal officer, what, a cabinet minister or a senior aide, who has signed an employment contract, probably signed a non-disclosure agreement, probably has some sort of security clearance, so sign contracts there.
Because to be senior, you have to see classified material.
If they are indeed a high-level appointee, someone who every day claims to be loyal and honest and diligent, but who in fact is disloyal and dishonest and a promise breaker, a contract breaker, an imposter.
And yet someone's so proud of that that he calls himself Val Resistance, but not quite proud enough to reveal himself, and so the New York Times is part of that resistance too, aren't they?
By colluding with him and enabling him, aren't they?
But look at this.
Look at this, the next part here.
I work for the president, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
Thwart his worst inclinations?
Okay, let me be positive here.
I suppose part of the job of being a staff member, especially in a political context, is to give advice as strongly as necessary to correct what you think are mistakes made by the key man.
Now, you give this advice in the course of your job to that key man directly.
I suppose every human being has their worst inclinations.
I certainly know what they were for Bill Clinton, for example.
We know what they are for Justin Trudeau, for example.
I suppose an assistant helping to correct a leader's flaws is actually part of the job description of any staff.
But what exactly does this anonymous underminer say are Trump's worst inclinations?
And mind you, he's not telling this to Trump.
He's telling this to the New York Times to undermine Trump.
So he's not really helping the inclinations, is he?
He's helping himself.
Well, we'll get into those inclinations in a minute, but you already have a hint.
It's Trump's agenda.
But Trump's agenda is well known and has been known for years.
It was put in writing and called his election platform.
It was elaborated on by Trump himself in countless speeches and rallies.
It was tested in countless interviews with the media, in debates against Hillary Clinton herself.
Trump's inclinations, his agenda, his policies, his platform, it was scrutinized endlessly and criticized endlessly by a hostile media and yet had won the election.
Whatever you think of Trump, he has done what he has said he would do, from foreign policy on China and Mexico and Iran and Israel and North Korea to trade policy, to tax policy, to energy policy, everything.
Is there anything in Trump's agenda that is democratically illegitimate?
Well, if it is, then courts will stop him, and they haven't been shy about doing so, though Trump usually prevails on appeal.
That's one of the official roles of a court, to review legislation to make sure it's constitutional and to thwart legislation that isn't, to use the New York Times op-eds language.
We have checks and balances.
It's all open for scrutiny.
It's an official part of the government.
Thwarting a president is what the Constitution is built for.
But since when does some secret infiltrator have the moral authority to thwart Trump's agenda dishonestly under false pretenses from the inside secretly?
Yeah, that's not resistance.
That's what conservative critics have been calling the deep state, a permanent governing class that refuses to accept the will of the people, that claims honor and history and moral authority, but in fact is undermining democracy through narcissism and a sense of entitlement to be perpetual rulers.
People who used to complain about the deep state, about abuses at the CIA and the FBI, about illegal spying on political opponents, about illegal leaks, about abusing the power of the government, they were called conspiracy theorists.
Well, the New York Times just published an op-ed by someone they claim really is in the inside undermining things.
This is the diary of the deep state.
Now, before I read more of the essay itself, let me read a bit from the New York Times editors.
They say, The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous op-ed essay.
We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration, whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.
Why would he be fired?
Well, of course he wouldn't be fired because he's breaking his contract.
He's breaking his oath of office.
He's breaking his oath of loyalty to the office and to his boss.
He may be breaking the law in terms of confidential information.
So, yeah, it's true he would be fired.
But the thing about anonymous accusers, and the reason why we don't allow them in any real court system, for example, is that you have the right to confront your accuser, whatever it is.
You have the right to know who is saying you did something wrong because who accuses you tells you so much.
Are they a spurned rival?
Are they someone with a personal grudge?
Are they someone who maybe, I don't know, asked for a promotion or a raise but was denied it?
Are they someone who has a history of lying?
Are they someone who isn't really who they say they are, someone who is exaggerating or telling tall tales in which they just happen to be the hero?
Are they someone whose story actually holds up?
Like Omarosa.
Remember her, the reality TV crank who met Donald Trump on the show The Apprentice a decade or more ago?
Trump actually hired her.
in the White House to do black outreach, and then who was fired by Trump's chief of staff for misconduct, and who then went on to publish a book with all sorts of accusations.
That book actually made it to number one on the New York Times bestseller.
You see, right there, you know so much about Omarosa before you even open the book.
If you ever watch The Apprentice, you know she is immoral and unethical and a perpetual liar and not to be trusted.
You know that because you know Omarosa or you know enough about her or others know enough about her that they can answer her.
I mean just for example, Pierce Morgan, when he heard of Omarosa's accusations against Trump, he reported that Omarosa really weirdly offered to have sex with him as part of a dramatic TV plot on The Apprentice.
They were on the apprentice here.
That is gross, that is weird, that is bizarre, but it tells you something about Omarosa, doesn't it?
And Omarosa's specific claims could be challenged.
Look at this from pollster Frank Lunt.
He says, I'm in Omarosa's book on page 149.
She claims to have heard from someone who heard from me that I heard Trump use the N-word.
That's a lot of degrees of separation, isn't it?
Luntz says, not only is this flat out false, I've never heard such a thing, but Omarosa didn't even make an effort to call or email me to verify.
Very shoddy work.
Do you see my point?
If you know the name of your accuser, you can fight back.
You can answer with facts.
You can understand motivations, grudges.
You can call BS on claims.
You can say, oh, they're a track record of lying.
But you can't do any of that if it's a secret source writing secretly about secret things.
I mean, seriously, how can we even trust Carlos Sleem's New York Times?
It does what he tells them to do.
But let me get back to this anonymous attack in the New York Times.
I'm not going to read it all.
It's actually pretty boring, very self-serving, very self-congratulatory, and really nothing that new in it.
The only new thing about it is that it claims to be written by someone on the inside.
Let me read.
The dilemma, which Trump does not fully grasp, is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know I am one of them.
Is it really true that many senior officials are working to frustrate Trump's agenda?
I don't know.
We can't check, can we?
Did the New York Times check?
They don't tell us.
How could they check?
How could they confirm it?
Why would they let someone say that if it can't be confirmed?
But if it is confirmed, how is that a knock on Donald Trump anyways?
Isn't it a knock on these dishonest underminers?
I don't know, maybe they're holdovers from Barack Obama's time, possibly career bureaucrats who are violating their public service oath of being nonpartisan.
Who knows if any of it's true?
The Times must think it's true, or enough of it's true, or maybe they just hope it's true, but how does that make Trump look bad?
I suppose if he hired these people, it's on him in part, but to me, it just proves Trump's own thesis.
He needs to drain the swamp, as he says, to get rid of the perpetual governing lobbying class that believes it knows better than everyone, especially better than the deplorable voters.
This proves everything Trump has ever said about Washington, doesn't it?
And about the media party, doesn't it?
Let me quote some more, and this is sheer arrogance here.
Look at this.
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives.
Free minds, free markets, and free people.
At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings.
At worst, he's attacked them outright, unquote.
So that's your big bombshell here?
That's your big criticism.
You really got him now?
That's your silver bullet, eh?
Is that the excuse for the disloyalty and the undermining that?
That he's not the right kind of Republican.
He's not a Jeb Bush Republican.
He's not a Marco Rubio Republican.
He's not a John McCain Republican.
Yeah, exactly.
He beat them.
He beat them all.
He won the Republican nomination fair and square.
And his views, he's accused of deviating from Republican values.
Well, if so, is that not his right to do so as the president, to be his own man and campaign in his own style?
And is any of what he says or does a surprise?
Has he not, for decades, for example, said he would rip up America's trade deals?
Why does some secret inner guard get to veto what tens of millions of Americans voted for?
By the way, I think Trump is a great conservative.
Best judges appointed in a generation.
Great work at untangling America from the United Nations, from corrupt countries like Turkey and Pakistan, and Palestinian terrorists like the PLO.
I loved Ronald Reagan, but in some ways Trump is even bolder because Trump is a disruptor, not a smooth operator like Reagan was.
But again, so far, how is any of this criticism legitimate?
Isn't this just some liberal or more likely someone with a personal grudge who just burrowed their way into Trump's confidence?
Where's the scandal for Trump here?
There's no proof or even an allegation of any misconduct in this op-ed.
I thought maybe that's what they would be here.
If Robert Mueller, the special investigator with $20 million, the power of subpoenas, a team of Democrat prosecutors, if they can't find any wrongdoing after two years, if the worst they've come up with so far is that one of Trump's former staff cheated on his taxes a decade ago, if that's all they got on Trump, I don't think some coward in the New York Times op-ed page will have anything that's a bombshell.
But this next part is just dumb.
Google's Tyrannical Dance00:10:29
Look at this.
In addition to his mass marketing of the notion that the press is the enemy of the people, President Trump's impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
Really?
Huh.
What's anti-democratic is undermining an elected president.
That's the official job of the opposition party.
That's the job of the checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution.
That's not the job of cowardly deceivers.
You want to block Trump?
Run as a Democrat.
Go be a judge.
And on trade, Trump uses tariffs to make threats against countries that aren't letting in free American trade.
But tariffs are his threat to get to what he wants, which are open markets.
He's not doing tariffs because he wants the tariffs as the end.
The tariffs are a means to an end, a free trade deal.
But even if that weren't true, even if Trump liked tariffs, that's a policy decision.
He's the president.
He's an executive.
He can make that choice.
How is that a high crime or a misdemeanor?
Let me read some more.
There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next, a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he'd made only a week earlier, unquote.
This snitch complains that Trump sometimes changes his mind.
He flip-flops.
I'm sure he does.
I'm sure many politicians do.
I know Barack Obama did.
I think in the Oval Office, that's where you want these conversations to be held.
candid debates going back and forth where Trump is actually open-minded to criticism and might even accept it.
That's where a mind should be changed.
And then a policy announced and followed.
What I see here is that Trump is open-minded, not rigid, but that he is simply surrounded by haters who gossip about him.
Isn't the real test?
Isn't the real test what Trump says and does after the debate, after the internal decision is made?
I'm sure making laws and policies, it's like making sausages.
It's not pretty.
It's not pretty.
But what happens at the end is what counts.
What a whiny op-ed this is.
What whininess.
I'm not going to go through it all.
It really reads like some earnest college kid whining in like a model parliament or something.
Frankly, it reads like an Obama speechwriter.
I'd say there's a non-zero chance that it is an Obama speechwriter.
But here's my favorite line to hate.
Here's this anonymous insider describes his little team of underminers this way.
This is classic.
He says, this isn't the work of the so-called deep state.
It's the work of the steady state.
Oh, the steady state.
I bet you worked on that for a while.
That's so comforting to know that there is a group of high priests, of people smarter than all of us, better than all of us, taking care of all of us, taking so much care of us that they will stop us from hurting ourselves by making the wrong democratic decisions, a steady state.
Someone should pass that on to the dictators of China or Cuba.
We're not dictatorships anymore, guys.
We're a steady state.
We're so steady, you just can't unelect us.
Donald Trump says he's upset with this op-ed.
I bet he is.
He probably thinks that even if the Times is exaggerating this person's credentials and even if this person is exaggerating his circle of underminers, there's a grain of truth to it.
And Trump has had problems with leakers since the beginning.
Last night, Trump tweeted one word, treason, or treason.
Now, I don't know about that, but again, who knows what security clearance this insider has, and who knows what he had broken either here or on other occasions?
I don't know.
But here's what I do know.
Everyone who has ever suspected that things are stacked against Donald Trump, that the system is rigged against Donald Trump, that it is corrupted by undemocrats, well, they just got their proof from no one less than the New York Times itself.
There was absolutely nothing new in this op-ed and absolutely nothing damning in this op-ed, unless you're new to the accusation that Trump is a different kind of president than John McCain would have been, John McCain who this snitch praises.
So there's nothing new in here other than Trump can now say, with absolutely impeccable evidence, that he must take a blowtorch to the place to reveal, as is his constitutional right, the truth about the unlawful surveillance against him by the FBI and the NSA and the deep state, steady state, whatever the hell they're calling themselves today.
I think this doesn't actually harm Trump's argument.
I think it proves it.
I think Donald Trump is stronger today because of it than he was yesterday.
Stay with us for a moment.
Well, I have said it before, the number one issue of our age, because it touches on all the other issues, is the censorship of alternative and conservative and dissident thought, not by government.
but by the titans of Silicon Valley.
Never before has such a small cabal of tycoons controlled so much information.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Amazon.
Between them, not only are there hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth, but they are a chokehold for everything we know about the world, whether it's an internet search or what we can share with friends of family on Facebook or what we can say about the passing parade on Twitter.
Well, this censorship has come to the attention of Donald Trump.
Of course, the internet is how he won his 2016 campaign to the surprise of Hillary Clinton and the establishment.
They have thus come out with a vengeance against conservative thought on Twitter.
Donald Trump himself has spoken about it.
And yesterday, the president and founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, appeared on Capitol Hill to be grilled, sort of, by congressman.
I'm not sure who got the better of it, but our friend Alan Bokari, who is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, was watching it, and he joins us now with his review.
Alan, great to see you again.
Great to see you, Edward.
I'm glad that Jack Dorsey attended on Capitol Hill, because Google, they're not even going, are they?
They refuse to send people these days, don't they?
Yeah, Google are just holding out on lawmakers.
And actually, Marco Rubio called them out on that at the Senate hearing yesterday as well.
They've had a recent spate of really embarrassing stories for them, both from the left and from the right.
The right has pointed out that there's all sorts of bias in Google search results.
There was a conservative journalist who did a search for Donald Trump on Google News and found like 96% of the results were from liberal outlets.
And you'll think with Google having personalized search that they'd show a conservative journalist, someone interested in conservative topics, more sources from conservative news, but instead they showed a 96% liberal mainstream results.
So you have to wonder what liberals and independent voters are seeing.
And there was an argument there that it's the way search engines in general, not just Google, are structured because they rank, the way they determine whether a new source is authority database, whether other news sources link to them.
And obviously the mainstream media links to other mainstream outlets, but they don't link to right-wing media.
So that might be why the bias occurs.
It's still a problem, though.
And Google, as the top search engine, needs to address it, even if the other ones need to address it too.
And also, there are other examples of Google bias you can look at.
If you search Idiot on Google Images, you'll find pictures of Donald Trump right at the top.
If you search fascists, you'll find pictures of Donald Trump right at the top.
So there are all kinds of examples you can look at.
Yeah, and now those are, as you said, those are the critiques that conservatives would bring.
But conservatives and even genuine liberals who are concerned about freedom and human rights, they would probably be grilling Google, if they ever showed up, about work that's being reported of Google working in cahoots with the communist government of China to provide a communist-filtered, censored form of Google suitable for that tyrannical regime.
Do I have that right?
That's absolutely correct.
Google are moving into China.
And that's probably another reason why Google didn't want to show up, because one of the things that Twitter and Facebook were able to say to senators yesterday was they abandoned China and they have no plans for going back there.
But, you know, Google wants to go into China.
It's kind of bizarre that a company, one of the wealthiest and most influential companies in the world, wants even more to the extent that they're willing to work with a really tyrannical authoritarian regime.
I remember in the early days, Google had sort of a goofy motto, don't be evil.
And everyone laughed at it because it was so blunt and so obvious.
Of course, the hard part is what does evil mean?
And we all agree don't be evil.
But I don't think Google even says that anymore because they have decided, well, that's naive.
That's when we were idealists.
Now we're, you know, we can't afford such niceties.
And look, that's the way the world is.
The fact that they won't even talk about that, I think, is cause for concern.
Yeah, everyone mocked that slogan.
And as Google just evolved into this all-powerful company, their official mission statement is to organize the world's information, which is, I can see why they'd want, when you've got a mission statement as radical as that, which involves so much power constantly in the hands of one company, organizing the entire world's information, you'd probably want to couple that with a statement like, don't be evil,
because otherwise people will ask questions like, you know, why should one unaccountable corporation, a few executives in Silicon Valley have the power to organize the entire world's information?
But that's exactly what Google's done.
And they now spend more on lobbying.
Congressmen With Humor00:04:55
I believe this is true.
They spend more on lobbying in DC than any other company.
So Google, along with other Silicon Valley companies, that aren't these sort of nice insurgents with these sort of nice cute slogans anymore.
People know they're the real power.
They're the corporate overlords of today.
And they control what we see.
They control what we're allowed to say.
And if they wanted to, they could influence how we vote.
They could swing elections.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing.
You have written before how tweaking the search results.
You've written how a scientist has shown tweaking the search results can torque an election outcome amongst voters by a double-digit change.
Now, the news of yesterday was that Jack Dorsey did, in fact, attend on Capitol Hill.
He's an interesting character.
He had a little flash of humor yesterday.
I guess he wears a Fitbit or some sort of a health medical app.
And he will show this on the screen now.
He posted a little video of his heart rate, which was very funny.
He showed that he was obviously quite stressed.
A bit of a sense of humor there.
But I think, sorry, go ahead, Alan.
In fairness to him, we did have to do two hearings, first the Senate in the morning, and then the Energy Committee and the House in the afternoon.
So yeah, that was quite funny.
It was funny.
It shows he has a bit of a sense of humor.
I remember when Zuckerberg attended Congress, he was extremely disciplined.
He had obviously been through a lot of rehearsals, and he mainly gave non-answers.
But I think the chief strength that Zuckerberg had a few months ago, and Jack Dorsey had yesterday, is that the congressmen who are grilling Jack Dorsey, they are not native Twitter users.
They are often people, as you would expect, congressmen and senators to be.
They're in their 60s and 70s, which is what you want in a senator.
It comes from the word for senior.
You're the seasoned oldsters who have a lot of experience and wisdom.
You don't want 20-year-old whippersnappers on your Senate.
But when you're trying to grill a Zuckerberg or a Jack Dorsey and you're not as fluent in the details of Twitter and Facebook, you're going to ask questions that give these guys a lot of wiggle room.
That's your general assessment that most of the questions just didn't land a punch because they were asked awkwardly or not properly followed up on?
Yeah, there's a sense that some congressmen, you know, a lot of these people are quite smart guys.
Some of them are not so smart.
And some of them are getting their heads around it.
Like, you know, Ted Cruz, for example, understood the social media issue very, very quickly.
He's been talking about this since January and probably was looking into it even before that.
So there are congressmen who get it.
There are other congressmen who don't get it so much.
There was particularly a funny moment with a Democratic senator.
His name escapes me at the moment, but he was asking the executives of Facebook and Twitter if they thought he was warning that Pokemon Go would become a conduit for Russian foreign propaganda.
So that was an interesting weapon from the first hearing.
That's funny, but it avoids the big issue, which is the censorship.
I mean, give Jack Dorsey credit.
He was the one social media company of all of them that didn't on the same day decide to unperson Alex Jones and InfoWars.
And whatever you think of Alex Jones and his personality and InfoWars and their editorial slant for Facebook, YouTube, Google, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Apple, iTunes, all these places on the same day within six hours to decide to absolutely eradicate not only him going forward, but any historical work he had ever done to unperson him.
I don't care what you think of Alex Jones.
That's terrifying.
Give Jack Dorsey credit.
He was the one social media outlet that didn't do that to him.
That's true, and he received a lot of blackboards and he didn't give him, he gave Alex Jones a temporary suspension later on.
But again, I don't think we should be necessarily praising these social media executives for doing the right thing, or in Jack Dorsey's case, partly doing the right thing, because he still suspended Alex Jones for dubious reasons later on.
And he also kicked off Gavin McInnes for extremely dubious reasons that he was.
I mean, Gavin McInnes, he's a rebel alumnus, Tommy Robinson, rebel alumnus.
So many rebels soon find themselves unpersoned.
Digital Public Square Challenges00:10:33
There's something that you pointed out.
Let me just refer to your article, which is, and I've said this on the show before, and I know you must think I'm just sucking up to you.
I'm not.
I'm trying to communicate to our viewers what I think is the leading issue of our day, and that is censorship.
I was censored at the hands of the Alberta Human Rights Commission a dozen years ago, and that was bad enough, but there were checks and balances.
There was some transparency, there was some procedure, there was some route of appeal.
There were some ways to fight back, even though it was abusive.
But tech censorship done in secret by corporations has none of those things.
No warning, no appeal, no rationale, no transparency, no timeframe.
So let me refer, and this is your beat.
Let me refer to your latest story.
The headline in Breitbart.com is, Jack Dorsey says Twitter is a public square more than five times.
And I think we have a video clip of that.
I just want to play it.
And then I'd like you to share with me and our viewers why you believe that is such a key concession or admission by Jack Dorsey.
So let's take a quick look at that clip.
We believe many people use Twitter as a digital public square.
And we believe that the people use Twitter as they would a public square.
The value of what they're giving to that digital public square.
We believe many people use Twitter as a digital public square.
Twitter cannot rightly serve as a public square if it's constructed around the personal opinions of its makers.
We believe a key driver of a thriving public square.
We believe it was important for us to continue to increase the health of this public square.
We believe we're used as a public square.
Yeah, that was quite a few, quite a bit more than five times.
Now, public square, we know what that means in the center of a town is a square where the public can congregate and communicate.
In some places, it's formalized, like the traditions at Hyde Park in London.
The concept of the town hall.
This is part of Western tradition, leafleting, posters, campaigns, debates.
What is the importance of Jack Dorsey confirming so repetitively there that he sees and he wants Twitter to be a form of a public square?
So here's why I think that's important.
Public squares in the U.S., that's a very specific legal term because whether a public square is privately owned, as Twitter is, or publicly owned, like an actual municipal town hall in the center of a town, the First Amendment applies to that.
You can't stop people expressing themselves.
You can't stop the lawful speech in a public square.
So there was a Supreme Court case back in the 1940s, Marsh v. Alabama, where you had an entire town that was privately owned by a shipbuilding company.
And the town used trespassing laws to eject a Jehovah's Witness who was handing out religious materials.
So their argument was because they owned the entire town, including the sidewalks, then they could use trespassing laws to stop lawful First Amendment protected speech in that particular town.
The Supreme Court said no, even if a public square is privately owned, in that case it was, then the First Amendment still applies.
And we've seen similar cases with shopping malls more recently in recent decades.
So it's been well established that if a private company owns a public square, then they have to protect the First Amendment in that space.
And Twitter obviously isn't doing that.
There's all sorts of lawful speech ban on Twitter.
I'm admitting that it was a public square.
That's an important concession, but maybe he wasn't giving the correct legal advice.
Who knows?
It was very interesting.
And, you know, in Canada, we don't have a First Amendment.
We have Section 2B of our Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression, including freedom of speech in the media, etc.
But it is much weaker than the U.S. First Amendment because it is subject to any infringements as justified in a democratic society.
As in, we have a First Amendment, but, whereas the United States just has a First Amendment.
And I think that's why some people from Canada, from the UK, from around the world are startled at American tolerance for radical speech in airports, in shopping malls.
You're accosted by people pitching you the Moonies, you know, other religious groups.
And sometimes it's a bit of a nuisance.
But if you understand that it's because Americans have the freedom to do that, it's actually a wonderful revelation.
And the case you refer to, Marsh v. Alabama, and you cite that in your article, it's very illuminating.
Alam, I got to say, using that phrase, he probably said it almost 10 times there.
I can't imagine that was accidental or coincidental.
Here's a theory I'd like to put to you.
Maybe Jack Dorsey actually wants to be declared a public square to remove from him the entire hassle of being the arbiter of taste and politics.
Now, some people in Silicon Valley get a Messiah complex, a God complex.
They want to, I think Zuckerberg has this for sure.
They want to tell everyone what to think and feel.
Maybe Jack Dorsey, this is his way of saying, please regulate me.
Let me get back to the tech business.
Sure, we'll stop terrorists and true crimes, but get me out of this political BS that I never wanted to be in when I was a kid.
It's entirely possible.
I mean, remember, he is Twitter's co-founder, and Twitter was founded as, you know, the free speech member of the Free Speech Party.
That's what they were originally.
And in many cases in these companies, and I hear this is the case in Twitter as well, you've got very radical left-wing employees further down the food chain inside the companies who are pushing for harsher censorship.
And you've got CEOs trying to resist that.
So it's possible that's the case in Twitter.
And also, you've got that internal pressure combined with external pressure from, say, the Democrats from the media urging platforms to take responsibility for what's on their platforms.
So it's entirely possible that Jack Dorsey doesn't want the hassle anymore.
And the only free market Republicans don't really understand this very well.
One of the only ways you can ensure free speech from social media is if you have regulation.
Because otherwise, CEOs, whether they want free speech on their platforms or not, they won't be able to withstand the pressure from advertisers, from politicians, from the mainstream media, and from their own employees.
They will not be able to withstand that pressure unless there's a regulation that says you've got to guarantee free speech, you run a public square, you've got to guarantee free speech.
So I do think it's entirely likely that some CEOs do want regulation forcing them to have free speech on their platforms.
It would certainly make their lives a lot easier.
Yeah, especially if they could say, well, don't blame me, guys.
My hands are tied.
This new public utility, public square law, I can't fight that.
Oh, well, we have to go along with the law.
I mean, I was talking with Gavin McKinnon the other day about this.
It would be like if a phone company was listening into your calls and said, we don't like what you're talking about on our phone, so you can't use the phone anymore.
And I've talked to all the other cell phone companies.
They don't like it either.
So you're banned from phones.
I mean, telephone companies, correct me if I'm wrong, Alam, they are in the same sphere, public utility.
They're not publishers.
They're a platform that anyone can say what they want.
If someone uses a phone to utter a death threat against you, you don't sue the phone company because they had nothing to do with it.
That's the analogy here, right?
Yeah, indeed.
And Section 230, which is kind of a flawed piece of legislation, it needs to be changed.
It says that platforms aren't going to be held legally liable for things that are said on their platform because, you know, why would they be?
They're not taking any editorial role in what a user says unless they start moderating content and saying some content is allowed, some content isn't, some content is going to be prioritized, some kind of it isn't.
Then they start acting like a publisher.
But unfortunately, that piece of legislation also says that platforms have this protection that allows them to do good faith blocking so they can block content on behalf of their users.
That's the part of Section 230 that really needs to come out because, as you said, it's as bizarre as a phone company saying that two people aren't allowed to have a conversation.
It's like, you know, you've got two people, person A and person B. Person A agrees to hear what person B says.
Person B agrees to that person A can listen to what they have to say.
And what we have in Silicon Valley is a third party coming in between those two people saying you're not allowed to have that conversation.
It's completely bizarre.
It's an interference in consent between two people.
Yeah, what two consenting adults want to do in the privacy of their own phone.
I mean, I remember when Tommy Robinson was kicked off Twitter, he had 400,000 followers.
By definition, those people pushed a button indicating, I want to hear what Tommy says.
Now, you might not like Tommy.
You might think he's a scallywag.
But why should 400,000 people not have their wish?
And why should Tommy not have his right to grant their wish?
Because someone in Silicon Valley said, well, I don't like the cut of his jib.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's even more bizarre when you consider the fact that there are way more tools available to users to block and filter content they don't want to see than you have on a telephone.
I mean, nowadays with modern telephones, you have blocking and so on.
Back in the day, I mean, there were very little ways to stop, you know, nuisance phone calls.
If they want to pull you, there was very little way to stop that.
There are tons and tons of ways to stop content you don't want to see from appearing on your feed.
There are shared block lists, there are word filters if you don't want to see a certain word.
There are all sorts of ways to give consumers a choice about what they can and can't see on social media.
So there's absolutely no reason for executives in Silicon Valley to take those decisions on behalf of their users.
It's anti-choice and it's anti-consumer.
And I think the only reason they're doing it is because they're scared of advertisers, they're scared of Democratic politicians, and they're scared of the mainstream media.
Why Would You Risk Our Auto Industry?00:05:38
Yeah.
Yeah, you take those fears away through a law and all of a sudden they can get back to tech work.
Well, listen, Alan, it's great to talk to you.
You really are one of my favorite guests.
Not only do I like you, but I just really wish other journalists were covering the truest threat to our speech, which is, I mean, when I was a dozen years ago, before social media was big, the threat was from governments.
But I absolutely, as a veteran of those free speech wars, I know in my bones I have far greater threats from YouTube executives than I do from any prosecutor in this country.
And that's what terrifies me.
It's great to have you on, Alan.
Thanks.
Keep writing these great stories and we'll keep talking about them.
I can assure you that.
Thanks, Esmeralda.
Great to be on.
Right on.
There's our friend Alan Bokari.
As you know, he is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
And I've said many times that I believe that beat is the most important political beat in the Western world these days.
Stay with us.
More Ahead on the Ripple.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about Trudeau wanting to lose NAFTA so he can blame Trump in the next election.
Liza writes, Trudeau wants to protect Canadian media companies from U.S. ownership when they are already owned by U.S. companies, huh?
And he is using that false premise for not doing a deal with Trump.
God, I hope Canadians aren't as stupid as Trudeau thinks they are.
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
And even on Canadian-owned networks like Global or CTV, we're mainly watching American shows.
I mean, stop and think about all your favorite shows.
They're American.
Even the knockoffs are American.
Remember when they had Canadian Idol?
Well, what's that other than the local franchise of the International American Idol Pop Idol franchise?
I mean, sports, music, to pretend that we are not already awash in American culture, either directly or indirectly, is foolish.
And anyone with a Netflix account or an HBO account obviously likes it that way.
Lawrence writes, didn't Trudeau himself say that Canada has no real identity?
And now he says he won't give up our sovereignty or identity to the U.S. in the NAFTA deal.
Well, that's a great point, isn't it?
Justin Trudeau flips some flops on that when he wants to.
When he's praising extreme multiculturalism, he says, we have no core identity.
Our identity is diversity.
University in diversity, whatever.
So he says we're nothing but a hotel room when it suits him.
But when he's fighting against Donald Trump, boy, he wraps that flag around him, the same flag.
And he's just such a Canadian identity guy.
He's all for taking down Sir John and McDonald, whether it's a statue in Victoria or stripping him from the $10 bill.
Don writes, the Liberals do not intend to resolve the trade agreement because frankly they do not care about Canada's economy.
They have already demonstrated that in a hundred different ways from billions of dollar giveaways to Islamic dictatorships to quashing all of Canada's domestic pipeline projects.
Yeah, I think you're right, but I'm puzzled by why they would risk the auto industry.
It's dominantly in Ontario, but there are auto makers in Quebec as well, if I'm not mistaken.
I mean, things are waxing and waning.
I'm not an expert in the auto industry, but I'm pretty sure they make some in Quebec too.
So they're in, it's not like Alberta, which the Liberals hate and they know they're going to lose their handful of seats there anyways.
Although auto industry is a heavy industry that uses steel and obviously cars run on oil, it has not been denormalized the same way oil and gas and the oil sands have.
So it's not like they find the auto industry yucky, like they find pipelines or oil and gas yucky.
So these are real jobs for who they probably think could be liberal voters.
And of course, those companies pour so much into the economy.
That's what I don't get.
Why would you risk that industry?
An industry, remember, that just 10 years ago, federal and provincial governments poured billions of dollars into to bail them out.
Why?
I don't know if you remember that.
I'm just give me a minute on this.
In the 2008 crisis, Barack Obama said to Stephen Harper, I'm bailing out the auto industry.
If you don't bail out the auto industry proportionately in Canada, I'm going to take those factories back.
So if I'm putting in all the dough, Barack Obama said, you Canadians had better put in the dough because I'm not putting in American money to bail out Canadian factories.
Do you understand?
And I'm against bailouts, but if you're going to bail out GM, Chrysler, or whatever, and if Canada doesn't chip in equally, you can imagine why Obama wanted those factories back.
So Stephen Harper, and I think it was Dalton McGuinty at the time, did in fact bail out the auto industry.
Well, why did you bail out the auto industry if you were just going to give it up for free to Trump anyways?
Well, only a liberal can figure that one.
That's our show for today.
I think that last letter writer is correct.
I think they really don't understand the economy.
They don't care about the economy.
But boy, they love to virtue signal and nothing will look better on them, they think, than being the anti-Trump country of 2019.