Ezra Levant’s show exposes CBC’s hypocrisy by comparing Omar Khadr—a jihadist who killed U.S. medic Christopher Speer in 2002, confessed to terrorism, and led al-Qaeda prayers at Guantanamo—to ordinary teenagers. Khadr’s $10.5M settlement shielded his victims’ family from justice while his extremist ties and unrepentant ideology went unaddressed. Meanwhile, Alex Jones’ "Google is evil" hearing revealed tech’s expanding censorship power, with platforms like Facebook and Uber wielding state-like influence under Section 230 immunity. Democrats outsourced speech suppression to Silicon Valley, while Republicans failed to act before losing control—highlighting how tech’s unchecked authority threatens freedoms globally, from China’s social credit system to Western deplatforming tactics. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Trudeau's disgraceful CBC says Omar Cotter is no worse than any teenager who commits vandalism or is caught smoking marijuana.
I'll show you the video.
It's December 14th, and this is 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.
Here's a clip from Trudeau's CBC News.
The reporter here is named David Cochran.
Listened to Cochrane describe Omar Cotter, the convicted murderer and war criminal.
He compares Cotter to teenagers who spray paint some vandalism or maybe smoke a joint.
When you're covering provincial court, you see a lot of 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds coming through in shackles and handcuffs.
And then, you know, it's routine stuff.
It could be vandalism, it could be drugs, it could be violence.
And when you pull back and listen to the story, these are kids that didn't have a chance, often because of terrible parents who put them in terrible situations when they were young.
And Omar Cotter kind of falls into a situation like this.
He was 15, taken away, rules about child soldiers.
I know Rachel's going to have a very different chance.
There wasn't any pushback from the CBC host, of course.
Now, I happen to believe that David Cochran believes every word he said there.
It really is the uniform point of view in the media.
And you pretty much have to believe that to work at the CBC, but you never know.
Maybe he doesn't really think that, but the CBC these days is just a megaphone for whatever the Liberal Party of Canada tells them to say.
And we know that Justin Trudeau is more than a casual supporter of Omar Cotter.
Without any legal precedent, Trudeau gave Cotter a $10.5 million check from taxpayers and a public apology.
I think that's probably worse.
And Trudeau gave him the check in a manner legally designed to evade a civil lawsuit by the widow, widow of the man Cotter killed, who's suing Cotter in civil court.
Trudeau made sure the money could not be taken by the widow.
Her name, by the way, is Tabitha Speer.
Her murdered husband is Christopher Speer.
Her fatherless kids are Taryn and Tanner Speer.
I just want to tell you that because the mainstream media never does.
They never mention them because in their narrative, Cotter is the victim.
He's not the murderer who left a woman widowed and two kids without their dad.
You mention the real victims and you remember that Cotter is not a victim.
He's the victimizer.
He's the murderer.
So the CBC loves Cotter and Trudeau is truly on his side.
And we know this, not just from the 10.5 million, but do you remember when Trudeau had a secret meeting some months back with this terrorist supporter, Joshua Boyle?
Boyle had taken his wife to Afghanistan to meet up with the Taliban.
Who doesn't do that?
But they captured him and raped his wife.
And Trudeau met with them when they were finally rescued by the American military.
But it was supposed to be a secret meeting.
There's no mention of it in public until Boyle tweeted it.
Now, Boyle is obsessed with terrorists.
Did you know that his first wife was Zainab Cotter, Omar Cotter's pro-terrorist sister, who now lives in Saudi Arabia, apparently?
So Boyle just can't get enough of the terrorists and Trudeau just can't get enough of Boyle.
Because look at this, look at the tweet again here.
Boyle says that it's not the first time he met Trudeau.
He said that was in 06 in Toronto over other common interests.
Ha ha.
He's a little bit cryptic and a little bit teasing about it.
Are you not curious what he meant by that, why Trudeau had met Cotter's former brother-in-law years ago?
I'm curious, but I'm not with the CBC, because they prefer to talk about how murdering someone is just like, you know, kids these days, they're smoking pot and they're doing graffiti, oh, you know, kids.
All right.
But the way, by the way, that's not actually how it happened in Afghanistan that fateful day in 2002.
Can I tell you what really happened?
Because you will never hear this on the CBC.
I just want to give you a refresher here, okay?
So Cotter was a few weeks short of his 16th birthday.
He was holed up in a bunker in Afghanistan with other al-Qaeda terrorists.
American special forces had surrounded the fort, and they waited.
And they called to the bunker to tell them to let the women and the children go free, and they did.
But Cotter chose to stay with the other men to fight as terrorists.
He could go free, but he said, no, I'm almost 16.
I'm a man.
I've been building IEDs.
I'm going to fight.
He was just a few weeks shy of his 16th birthday.
You can join the Canadian Army at 16 too, by the way.
He did not leave with the women and children.
The Americans finally attacked the bunker, and then, as Americans do, they searched through for wounded terrorists, not to kill them, not to finish them off, but to give them medical treatment and patch them up, if you can believe it.
That's what Americans do.
That's why Christopher Speer, an Army medic, was there.
And Cotter threw the grenade that killed him.
And Cotter also blinded Lane Morris in the eye, one eye.
And still, and despite all this, when the Americans recovered from his attack, the grenade attack, they still rescued Cotter.
He would have died that day without their help, but they gave him emergency medical assistance.
They even flew in a specialist ophthalmological surgeon to fix Cotter's eye.
Cotter's eye, not Morris's eye.
And you know what Cotter said to these American soldiers in perfect English when they stood over him that day and were giving him medical care?
You know what he said to them?
He said, F you, kill me now.
As in he wanted to die, a martyr.
He would go straight to heaven and get his 72 virgins because he just murdered an American.
He would later tell guards at Guantanamo Bay that it was the best day of his life, the best thing he ever did.
And when he's down in the dumps, he would think about that day murdering Sergeant Speer, and it would lift his spirits.
That's who the CBC and Justin Trudeau love.
We don't know how many other people Omar Cotter killed.
As you can see in this al-Qaeda propaganda video, that's him there, posing in front of an AK-47.
Those are little IEDs there.
He made IEDs, improvised explosive devices, homemade bombs and mines.
They were the kind that killed soldiers, including Canadian soldiers who were co-located in Afghanistan with the Americans at the time he was doing this.
Al-Qaeda IEDs did kill Canadians at the time Omar Cotter was making and planting IEDs.
Did Omar Cotter make the particular IEDs that killed Canadians?
Well, we don't know.
But it doesn't matter because he made some of them.
He deployed some of them.
And whether this one or that one killed a Canadian, he's culpable.
He's a war criminal.
He's a terrorist.
But I'd like to share with you some facts about Omar Cotter that I haven't talked about in a few years now.
As you may know, a few years back I wrote a book about Omar Cotter called The Enemy Within, Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Cotter.
And you can still get it on Amazon if you want to see it.
So I know a little bit about the guy.
I've talked to the widow of the man he murdered, Tabitha Speer.
I spoke with members of the prosecution team who obtained a conviction and 40-year prison sentence against Cotter for war crimes.
I didn't interview Tabitha Speer for the book, but I've talked to her thereafter.
And as you know, we crowdfunded college funds for their kids.
So Cotter was actually prosecuted and convicted and sentenced for war crimes.
40-year sentence.
But then Barack Obama cut a deal to spring him from prison and send him to Canada, despite the fact that he had a 40-year conviction.
Now I know a little bit about Cotter.
Let me tell you some of the things I've said before.
A few years back when I wrote the book, I did some videos about him for Sun News, and I relied not just on witnesses and experts, but on Cotter's statements himself.
You saw the video of him building bombs and posing with machine guns.
Video images, I bet if you've ever seen on the CBC, they're still running the childhood picture of him given to the press by his mom.
All right, well now read from Cotter's own confession.
Now I want to tell you, Cotter voluntarily signed this, and you can see the different signatures.
You see, okay, that's Omer Cotter.
He voluntarily signed this confession, and we know it was voluntary because Cotter's passionate lawyers agreed to it.
Cotter had many lawyers, some of them paid for by the U.S. Pentagon, believe it or not.
Some of them Canadian volunteers, some motivated by a political hatred for the U.S. war on terror in Guantanamo Bay, some motivated by cash that Trudeau happily gave them.
I mention the lawyers because I want to let you know that the Cotter's lawyers who approved the signing of this confession were not patsies of the U.S. government.
They weren't on the other side.
They hate the U.S. government.
There's no way they would have permitted their client to sign a document under duress.
You know that.
They fought it tooth and nail.
They're still fighting it.
This is actually what Omar Cotter did and confessed to.
And it's never reported.
Here's an excerpt from the confession.
Approved by Cotter's lawyers, signed by Cotter, signed by Cotter's lawyers.
Cotter got involved with terrorism with his eyes open.
He knew exactly what he was getting into.
He was excited about it.
He wasn't some teenager who, oh, I smoked some dope.
Sorry, mom.
No, here, read it for yourself.
Paragraph 23.
Omar Cotter voluntarily and of his own free will chose to conspire and agree with various members of al-Qaeda to train and ultimately conduct operations to kill United States and coalition forces.
That means Canadians, by the way.
Here, paragraph 26 of his confession.
Omar Cotter said the location where he and the other al-Qaeda operatives are shown planting IEDs in the video was chosen because it had been traveled by a U.S. military convoy.
Now, Carter wasn't just motivated by hatred for Americans and Westerners and Jews.
Did you know he was in it for the money?
Let me quote from his confession, paragraph 28.
During one interview, Omar Cotter indicated that following September 11, 2001, he was told about a $1,500 reward placed on each American killed.
Omar Cotter indicated that when he heard about the reward, he wanted to kill a lot of Americans to get lots of money.
I'm sorry that ain't no little lamb, no matter what the CBC and the Toronto Stars say.
That is why Omar Cotter was in Afghanistan.
He willingly joined al-Qaeda.
He was in it to kill Americans and make some cash, too.
So finally, his opportunity came on June 27, 2002, just seven weeks before he turned 16.
Cotter was in a compound in the town of Cost, Afghanistan.
The U.S. surrounded the fort.
They did something very American.
They stopped shooting and called out to anyone inside the fort to tell them they could just leave.
Here's how Cotter and his lawyers put that in their confession.
Paragraph 37.
At one point, the women and children in the compound exited the compound and U.S. forces escorted them to safety.
But Omar Cotter did not go.
He wanted to kill.
Carter hid in the compound, not revealing his position.
And after the battle, when the U.S. came to check for survivors, he threw a grenade at the medic.
Here's how Cotter and his lawyers describe him.
At the time that Cotter threw the grenade that killed Spear and injured another soldier, Cotter was not under the impression that U.S. soldiers were preparing to charge his position, attack, or engage him.
Rather, Cotter thought that the soldiers entering the compound were looking for wounded or dead and that the firefight was over.
See, that's terrorism.
That's not what soldiers do.
That's what murderers do.
That's what terrorists do.
That's what Cotter confessed to doing with the approval of his anti-American lawyers.
Here's Cotter's signature on that confession.
So that's Omar Cotter.
He's a Jew-hating, America-hating, ecstatic murderer, choosing to kill rather than leave the field of battle.
He was a few weeks shy of his 16th birthday, the age that Canadian forces recruit soldiers, by the way, and much older than the 14-year-old UN definition of a child soldier.
He was not a kid.
He was not a little lamb in junior high photos that his mom was circulating.
He wasn't a child soldier in the traditional definition of that phrase as used in Africa, where 10 or 12-year-old kids are kidnapped from their families and forced to fight off and drugged up, threatened with murder themselves if they don't murder.
No, Omar Cotter was a thoughtful, passionate jihadist, meticulously trained in poisons, in reconnaissance, in bomb building.
He was a translator for al-Qaeda, who spoke five languages.
He was a calm, collected terrorist who chose to stay behind to ambush a U.S. medic rather than to leave with women and children.
When Omar Cotter was in Guantanamo Bay, he was interviewed at great length for eight hours by America's top forensic psychiatrist, not a psychologist, a psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Wellner.
Dr. Wellner has worked on landmark cases ranging from Matthew Shepard to Andrea Yates to Elizabeth Smart.
He's probably the best-known forensic psychiatrist in America.
The depravity scale he developed is now a part of the FBI's crime classification manual.
And different experts can have different opinions.
You know, maybe his opinion is wrong.
But there is only one set of facts.
And when Dr. Wellner released his opinion on Cotter's dangerousness, he compiled a list of 73 facts that were not in dispute.
And by that I mean 73 facts that both the prosecutors and Omar Cotter and his lawyers agreed to.
73 facts about Cotter's dangerousness.
And that's his dangerousness after being captured, after being kept in Guantanamo Bay for years.
This is not when he was 16.
This is after.
I'm just going to pick out a few at random.
This is right before he was let go.
These are factual reasons why Cotter remained dangerous the day he was released.
Number 13 of 73.
Cotter drew great esteem from his father being a senior al-Qaeda leader.
That's not in dispute.
See, Omar Cotter is part of a crime family, like the Corleone family and the Godfather.
Omar Cotter's father was a terrorist fundraiser and a friend of Osama bin Laden.
That's why Omar Cotter is treated as such a hero in Guantanamo Bay by other prisoners.
Here's reason number 16.
Cotter would not acknowledge his father's illegal choices and actions.
He still hasn't to this day.
See, it's the family business.
Omar Cotter hasn't renounced it.
Omar Cotter's Dangerous Legacy00:06:53
Ahmed Qatar never renounced it.
His family doesn't see the family business as, he doesn't see the family business as wrong.
He sees himself as the surviving heir to take it over.
He wants to take his father's place.
Here's fact 20.
Cotter bragged about killing an American soldier.
He's not contrite.
He's not contrite.
He's never said, I'm sorry, I did it.
He's never said that.
The most he has ever said is that he was sorry to the wife for hurting her feelings.
He has never said he regrets killing the soldier because he doesn't.
In prison, he would tell guards when he was mad at them that the best day of his life was killing Christopher Spear.
He's not ashamed of it.
It's the thing in life he's most proud of.
That's a Paul Bernardo level of depravity.
Fact 22.
Cotter instigated antagonism among the detainees towards U.S. personnel.
So in Guantanamo Bay, he wasn't contrite.
He was whipping up his fellow terrorists.
See, in Guantanamo Bay, Omar Qatar made a decision to become an al-Qaeda leader, to rally other terrorists, to still resist the great Satan.
Even in prison, he was an aggressive, antagonistic enemy.
Fact 27.
Qatar was not open to any chaplain as a spiritual guide.
Now, the Pentagon, it's a fool's errand, but they hire Muslim chaplains to go to Guantanamo Bay to reach out to the terrorists there to try and show them that there is a way to be a devout Muslim that is not violent.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Qatar refused to meet with that chaplain.
He has his own extremist Islam that he has never given up.
In fact, he became more devout than ever in Guantanamo Bay.
He memorized the entire Quran and he led other prisoners in prayer, even though he was the youngest, because he was the most famous.
He was a family friend of Osama bin Laden.
His father was al-Qaeda.
He was a terrorist leader.
Fact 39.
Psychological testing reflects Qadr as angry and manipulative.
Oh, you don't say.
See, of course it does, not just in prison, but from prison.
He treats the CBC and the Toronto Stars pawns on a chessboard as al-Qaeda assets.
Of course, they are willing pawns.
Of course, you saw that Cochrane fellow from the CBC.
He couldn't rush to do al-Qaeda's bidding fast enough.
Qatar's a master manipulator, just like his father was, and just like his family still are.
Fact 40.
Qatar has an established international network of terrorist contacts.
Of course he does.
Spent 10 years making deep friendships with hundreds of other terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom are now out of prison and returning to a life of murder in mayhem.
They are Qatar's network, ready to work with him on the outside, and he just applied to go to Saudi Arabia.
Fact 43, Qadr's father and brother have a history of repatriation in Canada without being held accountable for terrorist activities.
See, that's the thing.
I keep saying this.
He's from a crime family.
He's from a terrorist family.
I didn't talk much about Qatar's dad, Ahmed, or his brother, Abdul Karim Qatar, but they're both terrorists too.
Both were captured by Pakistani anti-terrorism police.
Both were allowed to come back to Canada like Omar Qatar did.
And both just continued their jihad from Canadians.
So two other Qatars did it.
Why wouldn't Omar Qatar?
Of course Omar Qatar conned his way back to Canada.
His dad and his brother did it and they got away with it.
And so is he.
They never got $10.5 million though, did they?
Fact 46.
Omar Qatar's sister has spoken publicly of the exposure of the family's al-Qaeda legacy and having to start from zero again.
So that's referring to Zaynab Qatar.
She's the strong-willed woman in the family.
She wants Omar to take up her dead father's jihad.
She's the one Qadr wants to visit in Saudi Arabia now that he's come home to Canada.
Here's Zainab wearing a full cab talking about the family's love for terrorism.
Three of his friends who were with him had been killed.
He was the only sole survivor.
What did you expect him to do?
Why does nobody say you killed three of his friends?
Why does everybody say he killed an American soldier?
Big deal.
That was Joshua Boyle's first wife.
That's who Qatar was in court yesterday seeking a passport to go visit her.
Of course Trudeau wants to give him the passport.
He said so.
The Liberal Party believes that terrorists should get to keep their Canadian citizenship.
Because I do.
And I'm willing to take on anyone who disagrees with that.
That's a good for a laugh, isn't it?
That's a good laugh.
Can you imagine being on an airplane with Omar Cotter?
What airline could possibly take him aboard in a responsible decision?
Who would do that?
Unless it's on an airline.
Unless Justin Trudeau himself is letting Cotter ride on a Canadian government jet.
Isn't that funny?
A little terrorist boy who gets to fly on a Canadian government jet.
Omar Cotter is morally equivalent to Paul Bernardo, except it's actually worse in some ways.
See, Paul Bernardo is a sick, depraved man.
He would be all the way over on Welder's Depravity Scale.
But so is Cotter.
But Cotter is motivated not by the cruelty itself, I don't think, but by cruelty in the service of his vision of Islam.
So he willfully, thoughtfully commits terrorism.
I don't think it's a sickness or a mental illness or an accident or a perversion as it may be with Bernardo.
It is his political religious choice.
It's his belief system that he has never repudiated.
And now he wants to get on a jet to visit his pro-terrorist sister in Saudi Arabia.
And who else will he visit there?
Will he visit the hundreds of terrorist alumni from Guantanamo Bay?
But let's close with the narrative, not of the facts, not of the 73 uncontroverted facts, but let's close with the official narrative on Trudeau's state broadcaster, just one more time.
When you're covering provincial court, you see a lot of 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds coming through in shackles and handcuffs.
And then, you know, it's routine stuff.
It could be vandalism, it could be drugs, it could be violence.
And when you pull back and listen to the story, these are kids that didn't have a chance, often because of terrible parents who put them in terrible situations when they were young.
And Omar Cotter kind of falls into a situation like this.
He was 15, taking away rules about child soldiers.
I know Rachel's going to have a very different chance.
Google's Vast Power Over Speech00:13:56
Can I tell you for the 120th time, on anything important, you just can't trust the mainstream media?
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, earlier this week, there was a bit of a showdown in Congress.
I'll just let you watch the video.
I'll come back in 90 seconds.
What do you think of this?
Google is evil.
Siding with the Communist Chinese against America.
Google's helping arrest Chinese dissidents, Christians, and Buddhists.
Google is evil.
Google is going to lie again and violate the law and violate all the laws.
You're in a hallway, there's a public hallway.
You're going to be arrested.
That's enough.
You're making too much noise.
So Google's on evil officer.
I'm not saying that.
Just control yourself.
Okay, get under control now.
I'm under control.
I'm just taking this.
I just was taking my free speech away and lied about me.
So I need to stand up here.
I'm not worried about that, right?
They're going to talk about me in this committee.
They're going to talk about me in this committee.
I'm going to be talked about.
So what am I supposed to do?
I don't get a day in court.
They lie about me.
Google only puts lies up.
All the top searches are lies about me and my family.
And that guy helps round the political dissonance.
And then his people come to lie to Congress over and over and over again, and we don't get to respond to them.
So Google is helping build censorship systems in China for a global social score.
They test us there to totally control every aspect of our lives.
Apple and Tim Cook has said he wants censorship worldwide.
They're working with the Congress Chinese that have killed five times away from now.
We need to get some sort of decorum.
The United States Congress.
Again, Google has left the court to the right.
Okay, Google is evil.
Everybody gets a role.
They're not going to match it.
Well, there you have it.
Alex Jones of the website Infowars.com shouting at Sundar Pichai, the senior executive from Google who was on Capitol Hill to testify.
Quite a scene.
Personally, I agree with the cop who said, look, you've got to simmer down.
You've got to get it under control.
You're in a public forum.
Alex Jones did immediately rein it in.
But putting aside his gravelly, gruff tone, is he right?
Is Google actually evil, defining evil as working with the totalitarian Chinese dictatorship to spy on all its people and taking those censorship algorithms and implementing them in North America?
Is Google evil?
And can a man who has been deplatformed, who is being kicked off of Google's YouTube, who's being kicked off Facebook, Twitter, and unpersoned, who is being smeared by Google as a hate monger or conspiracy theorist or whatever they say about him, can he fight back in any way other than shouting at a man in a corridor of Congress?
As he did correctly point out, he has not had his day in court because there's no courts involved, just private decisions done in the bowels of private companies.
Joining us now to talk about this controversy is a man who is not far away, our friend Alan Bokhari, the senior tech correspondent for Breitbart.com.
Alam, it's great to see you again.
What a kerfuffle.
Yeah, I was there in the building and actually in the committee room itself for Google's hearing.
And let me tell you, it was totally packed.
They had to stop letting people in because they had no more seats.
And that just shows you how high profile this hearing with Google's CEO was, because we're now in a situation where this private company has grown to such a size and has such influence over all aspects of our lives that everyone seems to be interested in it.
And as you said, they have this vast power to just deplatform people.
And as you said, as also Representative Louis Gomeut said, there are no courts in the world because they have the special legal immunity given to them from the government.
We've discussed it before, that allows them to both dodge liability for when there's information on their platform that libels people, like on Wikipedia, and also gives them legal immunity from lawsuits regarding censorship.
So when they ban someone, they also have this special law that protects them from being taken to court for banning someone.
So there's no real recourse when these companies do something wrong.
Yeah.
And that was, I think, hard for viewers to watch and be sympathetic towards Alex Jones because he's physically a big man who was bellowing.
For the first 30 seconds, he was just repeating a chant, Google is evil, which, frankly, could come across as childish, although it's a counterpoint to the original Google model, don't be evil.
But his actual points about that Chinese, quote, social credit system, where everything you search, everything you look at, everything you do is connected to You to your cell phone number, and you're given a government score that they call social credit, and it determines your rights and freedoms in real life.
That's being done.
That really is being done.
And, you know, people say, well, Alex Jones is a conspiracy theory, but that's not a conspiracy.
That is how China works.
Alam, I want to play a 30-second clip for you now from a high-speed bullet train in China that shows what the social credit system is like in real life.
Here, take a look.
Dear passengers, people who travel without tickets or behave disorderly or smoke in public areas will be punished according to regulations, and the behavior will be recorded in the individual credit information system.
To avoid an inactive record of personal credit, please follow the relevant regulations and help with the orders on the train and at the station.
So, Alam, that's what happens when the censors, when the scolds at Google connect to big government.
You got big tech and big government, and now everything you say, do, look at, almost everything you think is kept on a file about you.
That I do find that terrifying, and I'm not an Alex Jones conspiracy theorist.
And on this matter, he's not a conspiracy theorist either.
Of course, everyone knows the social credit system is real.
It's been well documented by now.
One of the things I'll say, by the way, going back to what you said earlier, is that I think we'll see a lot more people yelling at Silicon Valley CEOs in the future when you consider the vast amount of power they have.
I mean, it's not unusual for protesters to go and yell at presidents and prime ministers.
And when you think about it, Google has a lot more power than many of these, than say the prime minister of a small country.
They certainly have more power to know everything about you, to surveil you.
And they also control whether your business is successful or not, whether you have a voice or not on the internet.
So I think we're going to be seeing people yelling at Silicon Valley CEOs with megaphones.
We're going to see, we may even see marches in Silicon Valley.
You know, we've seen people chain themselves to the HQ of Twitter recently.
And that's just a, it seems to me a natural consequence of the fact that these companies now have so much power over speech and discourse and politics.
When you have that much power, you will be protested.
Going back to social credit, the one thing I'll say is: yes, the Chinese system is very terrifying, but let's not pretend we don't have something similar developing in the West.
All of these companies in Silicon Valley, think about it, Uber, eBay, even Facebook, they have these hidden scores about users.
So Facebook has a score that it gives every user.
And if you fall below a certain score, you'll get banned.
You're very right.
And we know this.
On Uber, customers can rate the driver out of five stars.
The drivers rate the customers too.
Now, at least that's based on a human interaction.
Were you respectful of the taxi driver and vice versa?
But these other things you're talking about, who knows what the causes or the criteria are for that.
And you can't, that's like your credit rating.
You can't dodge that.
That's like a credit bureau.
But instead of, you know, did you pay your bills on time?
It's did you say something you're not allowed to say.
Yeah, and both Twitter and Facebook have these internal ratings that are totally hidden, by the way.
You don't get to see your rating.
And if you imagine a future where these companies cooperate some more, not hard to imagine, and they all put their rating scores together, then you just have a Chinese-style social credit system, except it's coming from corporations rather than the state.
And I think that's important because in countries like communist China, the oppression does come from the state.
But increasingly here in the West, we see crackdowns and oppression and censorship coming from private companies.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, the crackdown in China is from the state, but they use the crony capitalist links to companies to affect it for them.
They really contract out their censorship in so many ways.
That's what they're doing with Google.
And of course, in North America, the merger between big tech and big government is almost complete.
I mean, my least favorite example is how Jeff Bezos of Amazon has a half billion dollar data management contract with the CIA.
Again, sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there's some people, sociopaths, power-hungry people, who have always been attracted to government.
You can sort of tell they want to lord it over people, but we've always had checks and balances, the Constitution and official opposition, elections even, to throw people out.
In many ways, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, they have unfettered, you mentioned the Communications Decency Act, Section 230.
That gives a power to private actors that no one in government has.
And so in some ways, Sunder Pitchai, who was the person being shouted at by Alex Jones there, I don't know if he got into tech because he liked the science of it, but I imagine that there are armies of authoritarian bullies, power-hungry people who say, wow, I want to lord it over people.
Forget about going into government.
Forget about being a cop or a prison guard.
Tech is the place.
I think it maybe attracts sociopaths now.
Sure.
And it's been well known that there's a greater proportion of psychopaths in finance, for example, and in politics than there are in other industries.
It stands to reason that tech would have the same sort of effect.
And actually, people close to Mark Zuckerberg say he's apparently obsessed with Augustus Caesar, which is kind of troubling given the amount of power he has.
As I was saying earlier, these companies have such vast power at the moment over every aspect of our lives.
They've become, in a sense, more influential and more powerful than the state has.
And really, it's also the scarier thing is the merging of technological and state power.
So you imagine a company like Google working with a country like China.
That's a terrifying thought because Google has the power to spy on people and to monitor them.
That goes way beyond anything that the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century had.
You think of the Stasi in Germany.
You think of the Soviet secret police.
They did not have the kind of abilities that Google had.
They just didn't have the technology to do it.
So a company like Google working with a country like China just would create an incredible level of tyranny.
But going back to something more relevant to the lives of our viewers in the West, what we saw at this hearing was, on the one hand, I thought the Republicans were very good.
They seemed getting a handle on the issue.
It's a shame it's happened so late when they're about to lose their majority in the House, but they did seem to understand it.
But you also saw the Democrats repeatedly asking Google, what are your policies on hate speech?
Why aren't you doing more to crack down on hate speech?
So what we're seeing now is politicians and media companies who can't get around the First Amendment in America.
They can't pass legislation banning speech they don't like, instead outsourcing their censorship and their political correctness to Google by putting pressure on them to get rid of expression and speech that they hate.
Two Million Listening00:07:14
Yeah.
Well, the tech companies are colonizing Congress.
They're now by far the largest employer of lobbyists, the biggest spenders on lobbying on Capitol Hill.
And in fact, I think it was Gerald Nadler, the Democrat, who led the softball questions on Google, is the largest recipient.
He's a big paper by Google.
Yeah, he's the largest donor.
I mean, and really, I think he got, what, 30 grand or something from Google?
That's like one tenth of a second of their profits.
I mean, it's just chumsha.
They can't believe how cheap it is to buy congressmen.
I want to come back just one last time to Alex Jones, because it was a shocking video clip, but it was actually deeply sad to me because there's a man who, until a few months ago, had more than 2 million YouTube viewers, had huge, you know, like him or hate him, he had a voice.
He had a platform.
And if you're a YouTube subscriber, he had two million subscribers, that means two million people say, I want to hear what this guy has to say, either because I agree with him or I like to laugh at him or I want to know what the other...
So two million people voluntarily said, I want to hear what he has to say.
He's been kicked off of everything.
And so in a way, what can he do besides shout?
What can he do besides shout?
I mean, I suppose they could physically tape up his mouth, but they kicked him off Apple.
They kicked him off YouTube, Twitter, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, bizarrely.
Pinterest, how do you kick someone off that?
You kicked him out.
And all on the same day, don't tell me there's not collusion here.
I'm sympathetic to a man shouting at an executive who just ended his life, his public life, trying to end his business.
I'm sympathetic to a man being angry.
Frankly, it reminds me of this Iranian girl who a few months back actually was mad that she thought YouTube was censoring her vegan fitness videos.
Do you remember who I'm talking about?
And she actually went down to YouTube headquarters and tried to kill people.
Now, she was very bad with firearms and she didn't kill anybody, thank God.
But like you say, you shout at a guy, God forbid you assassinate a guy.
I don't want that to happen.
But if there's no other accountability, that's what's going to happen.
I mean, when it comes to deplatforming, I mean, this has sort of happened to everyone recently.
It seems to be accelerating.
We saw Gavin McInnes kicked off all filter platforms, Facebook, Twitter, briefly kicked off YouTube, although they later reinstated his account.
We saw Laura Luma kicked off Twitter.
We saw Sargon of Fikkad kicked off Patreon.
There's just been this wave of suspensions recently.
And also before the election, Facebook suspended over 800 accounts and new sides there, suspended the account of one person who claimed to have invested 300,000 in Facebook ads.
And they were able to do this without even compensating people for the time and money they invest in these platforms to suddenly take away people's means of making a living today.
So it has a dramatic effect on people's personal lives.
So it's little wonder that they're getting shouted at in hallways these days.
How's it going to end, Alam?
You mentioned that the Republicans have finally woken up to some of the real issues here, but they're going to lose their control of the House of Representatives next month.
Donald Trump and his campaign director for 2020, Brad Parscale, Parscale seems pretty woke to these issues, and Trump occasionally tweets about it.
But I've come to learn that Donald Trump's tweets sometimes are just him blowing off steam.
I mean, he hasn't taken any steps to crack down on this, on this censorship on the internet any more than he has building the wall.
And frankly, I'm getting a little tired of him saying, oh, we're going to do something and never doing it.
How's this going to end, Alam?
Well, yeah, when it comes to the Trump administration, they've just, you know, he signed USMCA.
And the USMCA has a provision in it, 1917, which is essentially a repeat of section 230.
It gives tech companies broad legal immunity to censor whatever they want.
It also gives them immunity from lawsuits regarding speech.
So, you know, if Wikipedia to fame is here, you can't sue Google despite the fact that they put Wikipedia at the top of their search results, which, you know, as Louis Germert says, that strikes me as kind of unjustified, especially when they're behaving more like publishers rather than platforms.
So USMCA, Trump's trade bill, actually has that provision.
And it's a lot harder to repeal a trade bill than it is to repeal a piece of domestic legislation.
So yeah, I'm not too happy with what the Trump administration is doing either.
I'm barely happy with what they're saying.
They're saying good things, but their actions aren't matching up to their words.
And maybe it's not the president's fault.
Maybe it's not Pascal's fault.
Jared Kushner had a lot of influence over drafting this trade bill.
Mexico actually gave him a medal, their highest honor, for his work on the trade bill.
So this is what happens when you put the wrong people in charge of policy that's important to the country.
What I find interesting is that Google and Twitter and YouTube themselves don't want legislation that sort of takes responsibility away from them for censorship.
Because currently, when someone loses their livelihood on social media, they're the ones who get blamed for it.
And as you said, this has even extended now to acts of violence and terrorism recorded at these companies, which is, of course, totally unjustified.
But if I was in the position of these CEOs, I wouldn't want all that responsibility.
I wouldn't want all that power over people's lives.
I'd want Congress to come and say, okay, these are now public squares, so we're going to apply the First Amendment and you no longer have the power to arbitrarily censor.
If Congress does that, then the social media companies will be able to turn to all the people who are pressuring them, all the media companies, all the advertisers, and say, well, look, our hands are tied.
We can't do anything.
It would actually be, they'd be able to just get back to the business of just providing a good product that works.
And they do provide good product that's work.
That's why so many people use Google and other services.
But they've currently got in this weird position where they're expected to take moral responsibility for every piece of content on their platform and take responsibility for protecting everyone in the world from fake news and misinformation and propaganda, which is totally bizarre.
You can't place a few random CEOs in such a position.
You can't place anyone in such a position.
It should be up to ordinary people to decide what's fake news or not, to decide what's a conspiracy theory or not.
This whole idea that the small group of Silicon Valley's Silicon Valley CEOs have to protect us all from bad information and bad speech is just incredibly paternalistic and very authoritarian.
Moral Responsibility Quagmire00:04:18
Yeah.
Well, I don't see things getting fixed in the near term, and I'm losing faith that Trump will solve it.
But I really appreciate your advice and expertise over the course of the past year, Alan.
It's great to see you again.
Thanks, Israel.
There you have it, Alan Bokhari.
He's the chief tech correspondent for Breitmarket.com.
Stay with us.
More ahead on the go.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about a Canadian immigration judge letting in a Somali gangster as a refugee because he was so honest.
Tammy writes, immigration judge Trent Cook should be suspended without pay and face a judicial disciplinary committee without delay.
Unbelievable negligence and willful blindness of the facts.
I think he should resign.
If you're in the private sector and you make such a devastatingly wrong decision, I guess if you have honor, you resign or you offer your resignation if you're not sacked.
You know, there are still some countries in the world where they have that kind of honor.
Occasionally you see it in places like Korea or Japan.
You see a political leader who did something wrong and he bows so deeply and he resigns in disgrace.
There are still some places in the world that have that kind of a code of honor.
Justin Trudeau's Canada ain't one of them, sister.
Sorry.
Lee writes, Canada is presently considered to be one of the easiest marks in the world for migrants and I sincerely hope I live long enough to see that problem corrected.
Yeah, but it's sort of a ratchet.
I mean, remember a few weeks ago we were talking to Alessandro Bocchi from Milan, Italy, and we were talking about Matteo Salvini.
Am I getting my Italian names right here?
Matteo Salvini, the Interior Minister, who said he was going to deport half a million illegal migrants.
Now he said that and he's talking tough and he cut off the flow into Italy.
But how do you deport half a million people?
Like logistically, how?
I mean, that's, what's that, 2,000 airplanes full?
That's just, that's just, how's it even going to happen?
How do you even check ID and gather and how?
And that's the thing, and that's why they're in such a rush.
That's why Trudeau is in such a rush.
That's why he set up a welcome station at Wroxham Road there, because he knows you get them in, they're never out.
They're never leaving.
James writes, could a check for $10.5 million be far behind?
Yeah.
I think you're talking about Abdullahi Farah, the Somali outlaw.
But there's so many people that could apply to, really, in the world of Justin Trudeau, except one.
The one moment that Justin Trudeau discovers that teeny tiny fiscal conservative inside him is when it's with the military.
Either the military veteran in Alberta, to whom Trudeau said, I'm sorry, you're asking for more than we can give, or the military base in Alberta that just shut down Maple Flag, the annual training event.
Isn't it funny, eh?
The only moment in his life Justin Trudeau is a fiscal conservative is when it's dealing with a soldier or a veteran, and if they're from Alberta, it comes out even stronger.
What a disgraceful man he is.
What a disgraceful man.
That's our country.
We'll keep fighting.
And you know why we have to fight?
We have to fight because it's right.
We have to fight because no one else will.
And we have to fight because one after another, the lamps are going out in Canadian media.
And by that I mean journalists are making the decision that they will take Justin Trudeau's cash.
They will take it or they will let their bosses make the decision.
Paul Godfrey, the CEO of Host Media, was thrilled with Trudeau's announcement of $595 million.
And he said in public for all his media, all his journalists to see, we should be doing a victory lap around the office right now in celebration.
He told his people what to think.
And every bloody one of them will take the cash.
You tell me if a single journalist at a single outlet leaves saying, I'm sorry, I'm not a government PR aide.
I'm not a stenographer.
Unyielding Journalists00:00:51
If you find such a person, bring them to my attention.
I'll salute them and I'll offer them a job.
But you will not see one person.
You will not see one of them.
But us, I swear to you on God's altar that I will not take a dime from Justin Trudeau.
And if I do, well, you will fire me that moment.
Or someone ought to.
I will not.
I will not.
Because then I'm not a journalist anymore, am I?
My friends, that's our show for today.
I hope you tune in.
Over the weekend, we've got some more YouTube videos going up.
Sheila Gunreed is coming home tomorrow from Katowice, Poland.
You can see the rest of her videos at RebelUN.com.
David Menzies, my desert rose, has returned safely to the warm embrace of our Toronto office.