Pamela Geller, activist and editor of GellerReport.com, traces her shift from apolitical New York career to anti-jihad activism post-9/11, citing victories like the canceled Ground Zero Mosque—backed by 40,000 protesters and a CNN poll showing 70% disapproval. She sued social media platforms in 2016 over Section 230 immunity, accusing them of silencing dissenters like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones while shielding leftist figures such as Linda Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan from scrutiny. Geller warns that unchecked censorship by a "tyrannical left" risks eroding free speech, comparing it to historical suppression, and insists her fight against "Islamic supremacism" is a constitutional duty requiring relentless resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, we speak with a freedom fighter who's been in this battle for 17 years.
It's Christmas Eve, 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.
Welcome back.
Well, over the Christmas break, we are doing a series of interviews, extended interviews, semi-biographical in nature, with some of our favorite newsmakers.
Some of them are pundits, some of them are political actors, some of them are people who come on our show from time to time.
And our next guest is someone we haven't spoken to in a while, but I was just reminiscing with her that back at the Sun News Network, I think it was in 2014 or something, we called her our freedom fighter of the year.
So let's check in with her to see the state of freedom in 2018.
I'm talking, of course, about our friend Pamela Geller, who is an activist, a columnist, a fighter, a pundit, and the editor of GellerReport.com.
She joins me now via Skype.
Pamela, great to see you again.
Thank you for having me, Ezra.
Well, it's a pleasure, and you are one of the bravest fighters out there.
I got to know you in part when you were fighting against the massive Victory Mosque that was being planned for the actual site of the 9-11 attack.
And I have to tell you, I didn't think you could stop it.
Why Immunity Matters00:04:06
I didn't think you could stop that mosque from being built.
They had the property.
They were getting the zoning.
They were politically correct.
But you managed to stop the Victory Mosque at the 9-11 World Trade Center.
I think it's a great example of what one person can do.
Because as you know, President Obama at the time had supported it very publicly at the IFTA dinner.
Mayor Bloomberg, the New York City mayor at the time, had his administration helping them, filling out the paperwork for funding and so on and so forth.
But 40,000 people showed up on September 11th to protest the triumphal mosque.
And public opinion does matter.
It does make a difference.
And that mosque was not built.
And imagine what a symbol that would have been to the global jihad movement.
It certainly would have usurped the burning towers, which is on many of their patches, as the symbol of Islamic supremacism and Islamic victory.
So these, you know, people think, what can I do?
Why should I go?
It matters.
It really matters.
And particularly now with the election of President Trump, which has activated the leftists in such a way that on the one hand, I've seen a serious encroachment on our freedoms.
On the other hand, they've really taken off the mask.
They've really showed people what they are.
And I think the American people, and actually freedom-loving peoples all over the world, like Canada and Europe, for the first time are seeing how malevolent this dogma, this ideology really is.
And so, you know, there's a yin and there's a yang in this.
It's certainly what we're seeing happen on social media.
And, you know, I filed suit against social media in 2016.
I filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice.
Why the Department of Justice?
Because under section 230 of the FEC code, the Department of Justice grants, the U.S. government grants immunity to social media giants from First Amendment lawsuits, which is why no one has been successful.
I've seen these lawsuits subsequent to mine.
They sound very good on paper, but they have immunity.
And we need that immunity lifted because today, social media is the public square.
You're so right.
The Supreme Court itself has said so.
The Silicon Valley billionaires say so in a bragging way.
And I had forgotten that you would fod that.
So we've spoken with tech writers like Alan Bukhari of Breitpart, who I think is the world's leading journalist about the abuses and censorship in Silicon Valley.
And that's Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
You're right, that is the key legal protection that lets these companies get away with it.
But let me back up a little bit because you jumped ahead to something I was going to get to.
Back in the 2010s, early 2010s, or even before that, you and I were on one side of the spectrum and then there was the other side of the debate and there was debates back and forth and people maybe called each other names or whatnot.
But there was a debate and both sides were allowed to have their say.
I think something changed, like a switch was flipped or something, and it moved from debating these issues to you can't even talk about it.
And instead of trying to rebut you, people would deplatform you, you in particular and me too here at the Rebel.
What caused the change?
When did the left stop debating and start silencing?
Well, the left's ideas cannot stand up to scrutiny and cannot stand up to challenge.
And so it is essential, if they are to win, and they do mean to win at any cost, that they shut us down.
Deplatforming Demons00:03:54
I remember during the Ground Zero Mosque controversy where I was on television really all the time, where Media Matters, a Soros-funded quote-unquote think tank, when in fact Media Matters is nothing more than a leftist smear machine, put out an edict.
And it was, the headline was, to all national media, stop having Pamela and Geller on television.
And I was scheduled to be on Chris Matthews that night, and I was canceled.
And I was never, with the exception of Fox, ever on any other channels again until, of course, jihadists opened fire on me and an event I was holding in Garland, Texas, a free speech event in support of the Hebdo, the Charlie Hebdo, slaying journalists and cartoonists.
So that, I mean, that was the first ISIS attack on American soil.
And so they had to cover it.
And of course, they had me on to attack me and tell me how wrong I was for standing for the freedom of speech.
Yes, I'm all for freedom of speech, but there's no butts.
Okay.
And so that's why you see that.
And of course, it started with myself and it started with you and it started with Spencer, Robert Spencer.
And of course, those on the right, the Trimmers and the Ephetes and those that only go so far were like, well, you know, it's okay.
It's Geller.
It's okay.
But what they don't understand is that it starts with us.
It doesn't end with us.
It's like John Stossel on Twitter was shocked.
He was shocked that YouTube had demonetized his videos.
And Krager, they're taking his videos down.
He's been demonetized.
This is how it begins.
This is the historical examples are numerous, Ezra.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I used to work for John O'Sullivan, the great newspaper editor, and he's a think tanker in Hungary now.
And he always said it's easier to fight in the first ditch than in the last ditch.
And I think about that a lot because a lot of people say, well, you know, Ezra's a little bit out there.
And Pamela Geller, oh, she's a little too blunt.
And can you just be a little bit more, you know, finesse?
And so because they don't fight in the first ditch, okay, well, now the front line is 100 feet closer to you.
And now it's 100 feet closer.
And it really is the trench warfare analogy fits.
And if you don't fight in that first ditch, well, the trench keeps moving towards you, and pretty soon you're engulfed by it.
Exactly.
We are battle-hardened.
And what the newbies, the trimmers are experiencing now, we have been through.
You know, we are the best fighters there are.
And sadly, there are only a handful of us now because they have systematically dismantled this movement.
Anyone who got involved in this fight, no matter how small.
I'm talking about the smallest bloggers.
I'm talking about a Twitter account with a significant following like an Amy Mech.
Everyone.
And I saw this as far back as 2005.
2005, I had the blog, I guess, which was Atlas Shruggs at the time.
It's the same site.
It's just evolved to GellerReport.com, where they took my site, Atlas Shrugs.
This is the left.
They created a mirror site called Atlas Jugs, and they photoshopped me in sexual positions with senior Bush officials and Glenn Reynolds.
It was absurd.
It was obscene.
It was sick.
And I was, at the time, really no one.
I mean, I had a small little following, but they nip it in the bud.
Three Different Stories00:14:29
It is an enormous machine.
And of course, if you talk this way, you are a conspiracy theorist.
But the fact is, there's conspiracy theory and there's conspiracy fact.
And one only has to look at what has been done to President Trump to see this method of warfare in full bloom, in full operation.
It's funny to say that.
A couple weeks ago, the head of Google went to a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill and was asked how much money the Russians spent on Google in the 2016 election campaign.
And he had an answer at his fingertips.
The answer, he said, was $4,700.
That's it.
So that's the mania of the media party over that.
But much more important is the meddling when YouTube, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, iTunes take someone like Alex Jones of Infowars, and you can take him or leave him.
You can like him or dislike him.
But which meddled in politics more when you spend $4,700 on Google ads, which is nothing?
It's not a molecule in the ocean or banning entire voices.
Milo Yannopoulos, again, you can like him or hate him, but he's banned now.
Gavin McInnes, like him or hate him.
He's banned now.
Laura Loomer, banned now.
Some of these people are personal friends.
Others, I just know of them.
I don't agree with every word they say, but they're banned.
Russia never banned an American from the media.
No, I mean, look, that's one giant myth.
They thought for sure they were going to win.
They never thought for a second that Hillary was not going to be president of the United States.
And so they, you know, it's all a distraction.
It's this huge deflection from what they did, from their treasonous activities during the run-up to the election.
And what they wanted to do, of course, was to tie President Trump's hands so that he couldn't, you know, he was so distracted he couldn't enact his policies.
But bravo to President Trump, because I can say this without compunction that he is the greatest president of my lifetime.
We needed a fear spider.
I mean, I'm sorry, but Romney, McCain, these were weak sisters.
These were 20th century candidates.
And this is a 21st century war in the information battle space.
And honestly, all we have is our individual voices.
And all we have to reach our readers, our followers, our supporters are our social media channels.
Listen, the million and a half, and it's just Pamela Geller Page.
It's not SIA and AFTI and the other organizations.
I have about six or seven on Facebook, for example.
But the million and a half, these people chose to follow me.
I didn't make them follow me.
Nobody automatically followed me.
There is no such mechanism for such things.
These people chose to follow me.
So it's interesting that Facebook is upending its very mission.
It's a very mission by objective is sharing.
The whole point of Facebook is, hey, to a friend, look at me, I'm at a party.
Look at me, or look at this.
I don't agree with this.
Or look at this.
This is outrageous.
Or whatever.
It's to share.
And so once you stop allowing the sharing, I mean, they're literally shooting themselves, not in the foot, they're shooting themselves in the heart.
They will go down.
Let me interrupt you on that, because we're on YouTube, which is owned by Google.
And one day in January, February 2017, they just cut off our ad money.
They just cut us off.
We were doing great.
It was enough to almost pay our bills.
I understand.
And I spoke with three different Google executives.
I even went to their headquarters here in Toronto.
And they basically didn't deny anything.
Their explanations weren't persuasive.
They had three different people told me three different things.
But what I got from them is they could not care less because they make their money from makeup videos and from cute kittens videos and from music videos.
And, you know, political commentary, it's a rounding error for them most of the time.
So when you say shoot themselves in the foot or the heart, you and I think so because we think free speech is the lifeblood of the social media.
But what about the alternative answer, Pamela, that you and I are outliers.
Anyone watching this video is unusual because most people are just playing a video game, watching a movie, you know, having a non-political life.
Agreed.
Agreed.
It definitely takes time.
There's no question about it.
But people are absolutely beginning to see this in the daily social fabric of their lives.
What I mean by that is people on Facebook who see a news story that surprises them and shares it.
They're not necessarily political, but somehow it came up vis-a-vis a friend or so on and so forth.
And they share it and suddenly they're in Facebook jail or suddenly they're blocked.
It's happening to regular people.
And what they're also witnessing in the pop culture that you refer to is their peers being silenced.
Their peers, but Kevin Hart was blackballed for tweets he made, I don't know how many years ago, and I don't know how many apologies ago, where he resigned from doing the Oscars.
But this is not exceptional.
This is now almost every day.
Somebody else has been banned or somebody else has been taken out.
I mean, look, as you said, we can disagree.
But this is Nazi-esque.
The burning of books, the silencing of ideas, the voluntary press restrictions that we see in the media.
We know this is not static.
This situation is fluid.
And we have enough historical examples to know where this is going.
And so we have to fight all that much harder.
I know people get tired.
I understand that people are fatigued.
Listen, I've been doing this since 9-11.
And if you told me on 9-12, 2001, that those standing in defense of freedom and those who opposed jihad slaughter would be the ones who are marginalized or the word you use was outliers or pariahs.
I would have had you baker acted.
But it goes to show you how powerful and inside the left, the hard left, is and has been for some time.
Because let's be honest, in the case of Sharia and the Sharia restrictions on our society, without their partners on the left, they could never have gotten so far.
I do lay this all at the feet of the left.
And so, but this is our job, Ezra.
I mean, our job is to create awareness and to educate, educate, educate.
It is slow and it is painful.
And we were getting increasing numbers.
And there's no question we were reaching a tipping point, which is why you saw the gavel come down.
How do I know that we're reaching the tipping point?
Apart from my own numbers, which were hundreds of thousands of viewers and readers a day, it was the election of President Trump.
He had everything, everyone, everything going against him.
Everything, except the common man, except Joe Sikpak, except the blogs.
Everyone against them but the people, as they say.
You know, you remind me that, I mean, your story is very interesting, how you were a severely normal person until 9-11.
Remind our viewers that, I mean, I could paraphrase it, but why don't you tell our, I mean, I think a lot of our viewers know you and love you, but remind us how you became a warrior princess, because before 9-11, you were not.
No, I was really not political.
Before 9-11, I was your quintessential New York City career girl.
I loved my job.
I was the associate publisher of the New York Observer.
I loved my life.
I loved my art, my music, my fashion.
I loved my city.
I really loved my city and New York.
And I was apolitical.
I lived in a sort of, I guess, a post-historical mindset where the good cop was on the beat.
The good guy beat the evil, the Nazis.
And I was not political at all.
I assumed my freedom.
I didn't even question it.
I never thought it could even be remotely in jeopardy.
I mean, even as a kid, we used to have a thing where if you're fighting with someone and they'd say, you can't do that, there was a line.
It's a free country, isn't it?
That was a line when we were a kid.
I mean, it was just part of our DNA, freedom.
And then 9-11 happened.
And I was shocked.
I mean, my whole premise of my thinking, my whole epistemology was wrong.
That freedom was not free and that you cannot assume your freedom.
And so I set about to understand what happened because I didn't understand what happened.
didn't know who had attacked us or why.
And when I found out, I didn't understand this ideology.
I did not understand the jihadic doctrine.
I began reading ferociously, you know, Bacheor and Ibn Warwick and Robert Spencer.
And the media wasn't talking about this at all.
And this to me at the time was like the 800-pound elephant in the room.
And increasingly, I found myself online because that was the only place where it was being discussed.
in an open forum, good, bad, and indifferent.
And the thing about online voices is after a while you get to know who's who, whose sources are credible, whose stories are credible, whose sources, who doesn't source, who says crazy things.
I mean, it doesn't take long, really, just basic common sense.
And so that's how it really started for me.
I would comment on these accounted jihad sites, some that don't exist anymore.
But the comment sections were more lively than the posts themselves.
The comment sections were everything.
And one time, I think it was a university student at Cornell, sent me the template for a blog and said, you should stop blogging.
And I'm like, what's a blog?
And he said, shut up and start writing.
I remember that.
And I did.
I started Atlas Shrugs.
And everything that people know about me, whether it was the ads, all the ads that I did, or the fight for Rifka Barry, or the Ground Zero Mosque, or the lawsuits, or the Muhammad Art exhibit, everything came from the site.
It was all organic.
People say you're a provocateur.
I am not.
I mean, I would see signs in the New York City subway, these vicious anti-Semitic, these anti-Israel signs, posters on buses and in the subway.
And I thought, this is outrageous.
So I created my own ads.
And that I never foresaw what would happen.
I didn't see that they were going to reject me because it was somehow saying in any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man, support Israel, defeat jihad.
And of course, I was cribbing from Ayn Rand on that civilized man statement that it would be rejected by New York City and I would sue and I would win.
And then that became news and the ads went up and the left and Islamic supremacists went nuts.
A popular Egyptian columnist, Mona Al-Taha Tahawi, was spray painting them in the New York City subway, got arrested.
The New York Post happened to be there.
I got shots of her being arrested.
She's screaming like a mad woman.
I became something of a, you know, a switch, a switch for people.
And this continued.
Rifka Barry, again, that started with a story where I read that a girl was missing and a couple of her friends wrote me and said, we're really worried about her.
And I remember writing to Robert Spencer at the time and I said, you think she's alive?
And he said, they never are.
And she was.
She turned up in Florida.
And then this thing becomes this huge story because CARE, the terrorist-tied co-conspirators, unindicted co-conspirators, were trying, working with the family to try to bring her back to this house where she had been threatened with her life.
She had converted out of Islam, kept it a secret for three years.
The mosque, the Noor Mosque, her family's mosque, had spied on her and found out she had converted on Facebook, if I'm not mistaken.
And her father threatened to kill her.
And so, yeah, that became a big fight with me to keep for me, was to keep this girl alive.
And again, it's always the people.
I mean, I may be a catalyst, but when I said, we have to send our Christmas cards, she got thousands and thousands of Christmas cards.
That wasn't me.
That was people.
And while I may have opposed the Ground Zero Mosque, it was the 40,000 people that showed up.
It was the people that wrote to their congressmen where it became, listen, I don't know what would happen today, but I can tell you when CNN did a poll on the Ground Zero Mosque, 70% opposed it.
It was deeply offensive.
I mean, on its face, it would be like building a Shinto shrine on Pearl Harbor.
It's simply not done.
Even the Pope withdrew the convent.
If you remember, there was a convent being built on the grounds of a concentration camp, and it caused a great deal of consternation and pain.
And they withdrew it.
It's just a decent human thing to do.
But you see, this hypersensitivity that we daily are demanded to respect this hypersensitivity.
Don't offend Muhammad.
Don't insult Islam.
Don't criticize Islam.
And if you do, you are wrong.
On the flip side, there is no reciprocity.
It's just interesting.
Of course, it's never pointed out, you see.
Offending Hypersensitivity00:16:43
You know, you made me think of other ground zero mosques or victory mosques.
Of course, the magnificent Hajiya Sophia Church in Constantinople, once it was conquered by the Turk, it became the Hajj Sophia Mosque of Istanbul.
And even in Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount of the Jewish Temple, Islam built its own mosque.
So there is a historic sort of territorial marking of great victories over infidels.
I have no doubt whatsoever that a Muslim mosque at Ground Zero would have been that, if not expressly, it would have de facto been a victory mosque.
Well, if I may add one thing to what you just said, I mean, there have been tens of thousands of Hindu temples that have been converted into mosques.
It is a conquest.
It is the symbol of conquest.
Never in the history of Islam, never, has there been a mosque of reconciliation and healing built on the site of a conquered land.
Never.
I mean, so it's, again, it's just absurd.
And, you know, the Hajjiy Sophia is the exemplar, and so is the dome.
And even more excruciating when it comes to the Temple Mount, which is the holiest Jewish site, is we are told by the Muslim world that we are not allowed, we, and I mean Jews, are not allowed to pray there.
Again, the uneven-handedness, the stark supremacism that is accepted by the world is what I find even now, even now, 18 years later, astonishing.
Yeah.
You've raised so many things that I want to ask you about, but part of it makes me, I mean, you told me your story of how you transformed after 9-11.
I feel like I was sort of woke to these issues even back then.
What I think flipped me into a free speech mode was when I was a publisher of the Western Standard Magazine, and in February of 2006, we published the Danish cartoons.
I remember.
And it wasn't on the cover.
It wasn't in a show-off-y way.
We were a fortnightly magazine.
I really, I genuinely thought that by the time our Fortnightly Mag came out, these would have been published everywhere else, at least in the tabloid sun newspapers.
But it wasn't.
And I want to tell you this: I was charged with the Human Rights Commission in 2006.
By the time they got around interrogating me, it was 2008.
They moved very slowly.
But what I want to point out, Pamela, is back then, I had the support, some of it warm, some of it grudging.
Even liberals.
In fact, Even our state broadcaster up here, Trudeau CBC back then, obviously it wasn't Trudeau CBC.
But even the leftist journalists, the state broadcaster, I wrote a book on the subject.
It became a bestseller.
It was well reviewed.
I even, you know, in my entire journey, I found only two journalists out of hundreds who criticized my decision to publish them.
And in fact, and I'm almost on my point here, there was a survey of working journalists done by Compass.
It's a Canadian pollster.
Yes, I know.
And Compass found that 70%, 7-0% of working journalists, like they phoned up journalists, said that not only did I have the right to publish them, but that their own media ought to have published them too.
So support for me was over 90%.
I tell you all that because that era is gone.
Oh my God, so it's so fun.
Go ahead, sorry.
No, it's so gone.
Wait, I'll give you an even stalker comparison.
1979, Salman Rushdie, the Satanic Versus.
You had Margaret Thatcher, who, by the way, was on politically opposing sides to Salman Rushdie.
He was a flaming liberal, as it were.
Of course, we know what Thatcher was a strong conservative.
She, when she called him to 10 Downing, she said, there's no politics here.
We will give you complete protection, round-the-clock protection.
I mean, the whole world, you know, stood with Rushdie.
And now you fast forward, and I'm scheduled to speak in the UK to lay a wreath at the site of the beheading of Lee Rigby.
And, you know, Islamic supremacists, hope, not hate, ridiculous groups that are funded by the UK government say we don't want to hear.
And I'm banned.
And I'm still banned.
And so is Robert Spencer.
I am banned.
While they are allowing in, the UK is allowing in the worst hate preachers, the inciters to genocide, inciters to Jew hatred, just, you know, welcoming.
They speak in Parliament in the UK Parliament.
But myself and colleagues and subsequent colleagues like Lauren Southern, these people were banned from the UK as well.
What does that tell you?
Well, it tells me that the land of the Magna Carta is dead.
Yeah, well, we've spent a lot of time focusing on that country and the case of Tommy Robinson in the last six months.
Our viewers follow it closely.
You know, not only were journalists supportive of free speech in the case of the separation of mosque and state, as I called it, but they were supportive, but even on a more basic level, they wanted to talk about it at all.
Now, I actually don't know how many would support it because they won't even utter a peep about it.
And if they do speak, I don't think they're actually speaking their own views.
I think they're looking over their shoulder worried, if they dare to support an Ezra Levan, a Pamela Geller, a Rebel Media, a Geller reporter, Robert Spencer, a Tommy Robinson, if they themselves even say, well, he's got a point there, then they will be marginalized and deplatformed.
So it's the mob has silenced people.
I don't know if the mob has changed people's minds, but it's certainly silenced them.
It's terrifying.
You know what it is?
This is what I thought after Garland, Texas, in my free speech event.
And I nearly named my book, my book Fatwa, this.
It's the assassin's veto.
That's what it is.
The assassin's veto.
That's very powerful.
It's about cantankerous characters.
Because, I mean, I find you charming and beautiful and brilliant and eloquent, and I'm a huge fan, and I'm not just buttering you up.
Everyone, I think a lot of people feel that way.
That's lovely.
But, you know, you speak very bluntly, but you're always careful about your role.
So I think you are very presentable, but some of the people who are fighters in this, they're flawed, as we all are.
I'm flawed.
Mark Stein, I think he's very charming also.
I do.
Michael Yiannopoulos, he's over the top.
He's a provocateur on purpose.
I agree with what you said earlier.
You are not a provocateur on purpose.
You provoke because the ideas are provoking.
It's not your goal to just provoke.
There's a substance.
And I will tell you, I don't think my ideas are provocative at all.
Just so that you know, I think they're elemental.
I think they're fundamental.
I live in a country who was founded on individual rights.
This is the founding principle.
I'll be close to loop on this personality.
I just want to give that little caveat for ahead.
Sorry.
I appreciate it.
And what I'm trying to get at here is some of the people who fight for freedom have something objectionable about them.
I mentioned Tommy Robinson.
He's a convicted criminal who's done time in prison.
It's just a fact.
There are other people, Milo's over the top.
Lauren Southern, I mean, she used to work for the Rebel, and we fired her.
Everyone has their flaw, but here's the thing.
You take your free speech champions as you find them.
You can't engineer the perfect free speech martyr because then odds are they wouldn't be doing something that would get them in trouble.
I think of Count Dankula, the Scottish internet personality who, in sort of a dumb joke, but it was a joke, trained his dog to see Heil.
Bad joke.
Maybe it was funny, I don't know.
A lot of things you can say wrong about the guy, but my point here is you have to take your free speech heroes even if they are flawed.
That's that first-ditch, last-ditch thing we were talking.
Alex Jones.
I actually am more sympathetic to his style and his omni-skepticism than others because I don't focus on his conspiracy theories.
I just focus on the fact that he's a dissident.
But if every single person I've listed, including you and me, there's something that could provide people with an escape hatch to supporting us.
Oh, she's too much.
He's over the top.
Did you hear that one time where he made a mistake?
Or remember 10 years ago when he swore?
I guess my point is, how do we handle the fact that there's this pretend Puritanism that if there's anything objectionable about you or me or the other names we've mentioned, the free speech and name-only people back away?
So that was a very long question.
I didn't mean it to be, but I guess...
No, it's not a long question.
Go ahead.
It's not...
It's actually a very good question.
I disagree with the premise.
I think the premise is false.
And what I mean by that is if I wasn't on the right and I wasn't standing in defense of freedom and I was on the left, I submit to you that I would have my own show on CNN where I might be on the view.
I would be a darling.
They would love my fashion.
They would love my wit.
They would love me.
What the left does is they take anyone, no matter how articulate or no matter how well presented, and they will mock and ridicule and make you toxic in the public square.
That said, to some of the other people you mentioned, I mean, I wince.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
I hate many of the things that some of the people that you have mentioned have done.
I'm not going to mention their names because I'm not going to join that crowd of naysayers.
But I so believe in the freedom of speech that I'll take a bullet for them because I believe in it.
Are they the best examples?
Certainly not.
But there are many good examples, but people that have been destroyed, that have been systematically destroyed in the media.
Where let's say I decided today that, you know what, I really don't want to do this anymore.
This is disgusting and thankless.
I'm at risk.
I'm living under a fatwa.
My family's at risk.
My family has been targeted.
I mean, it's just so incredibly evil what the left has done.
I couldn't get a job.
I mean, just Google my name.
They destroy people.
And what I think the problem is, is the right buys into it.
Buys into it.
Hook, line, and sinker.
Listen, the left, when something wrong goes down on the left, they circle the wagons.
Okay.
If it's Mallory or Saussure, vicious, anti-Semites leading the feminist movement, and they're still there and they're still calling the shots and this, and the left is still standing up for Farrakhan.
So is CNN.
That's what they do, which is evil.
But on the other side of the coin, you have the right, which doesn't circle the wagons.
No, they do.
They assemble a circular firing squad.
Okay.
And they run for the hills, which is why we have so few leaders, and which is why President Trump gave them all the finger, because that's what they so richly deserved.
So I don't think I, you know, my ideas, I haven't become out there.
Mine is a constitutional premise.
The country has moved so far away from our founding principles that I find it very frightening because a free society is contingent upon freedom of speech.
And without it, tyrants can rule unopposed.
And that's what you're seeing.
You are seeing a tyrannical left where our voices are shut down.
Look, there was a time, I'm sure for you as well, but there was a time when I spoke on college campuses, my colleagues as well.
And then you got the protests, the shoutdowns, where you, when you went, you could not physically speak.
And now we don't even get invited.
And the rare time where something happens, like an Ayan, Ayan Hersiyali, getting an award, an honorary degree, it becomes a brouhaha.
And she gets uninvited.
And that becomes such a fabulous story for the left.
Whereas Linda Saussure, who has said there's nothing creepier than Zionism, who is a proponent of Sharia, who believes in Saudi-style Sharia, she has the tweets to prove it, says that Netanyahu is a waste of skin.
I mean, just a disgusting, vile human being.
She's given the commencement address at Cunning.
And I organized a protest.
It was attended by thousands of people.
And of course, we're painted as, to your point, the loons, the, you know, the racists, the bigots, and so on and so forth.
So when you say, if there was a person, if there was a person that you described, who was presentable and articulate and lovely, and they would be mocked and destroyed and turned into garbage in no time.
That's what would happen.
You know what?
You've completely convinced me.
And you mentioned Mitt Romney.
You know, handsome, lived within the rules, paid more taxes than he was owed, declined his father's inheritance.
I mean, just like, could not be a more buy-the-book guy, and they still managed to destroy him.
And that's, that's, you're right.
That's the story of Trump is that don't apologize because it won't work.
And you're right.
I mean, I'm thinking of my old friend Gavin McInnes.
They put together a highlight reel of some of his worst things that he said, most of them out of context.
It looks awful in a highlight reel, and he was sacked from CRTV over it.
You could do that to Bill Maher of HBO.
I sort of like him on free speech, by the way.
But you could take any star of the left, put together a highlight reel, a quick compilation of them swearing, using profanity, using racial epithets, anti-gay epithets.
You could put together a 60-second highlight reel, and no one would pick it up.
They'd sort of laugh at him.
They'd say, oh, he's just joking.
You're right.
You've convinced me that these so-called flaws on our people, some of them are real.
But even if they are, like a Michelow is less outrageous on the right than an Al Sharpton or Van Jones is on the left, and they have their own shows.
Absolutely.
I mean, look, CRTV has never even had me on.
I mean, I am too toxic for them.
And as I said, I've been doing this for whatever, 16, 17 years.
I stand by everything I ever said.
And everything I ever said and everything I ever predicted has indeed come to pass.
It's all my books.
My first book was the Obama book.
I warned, that was in 2009.
I warned what his presidency would look like on Iran and on Israel, on climate change.
And I was right.
And I, in Stop the Islamization of America, I warned about the encroachment on our freedoms, on freedom of speech, on the Islamization of school curriculums, on the Islamization of the workplace, and so on and so forth.
And then, of course, in fatwa, that's the story of me being hunted in response to a very principled position on freedoms.
So I think that this apologize culture, it's a sign of weakness.
The point of saying apologize is say you are wrong.
Once you say you are wrong, we can undercut you.
Rebel's Voice00:04:32
We can cut you off at the knees.
So even though, and let me say this, even though President Trump, for example, after the Garland, my free speech event, he criticized me.
He attacked me rather vigorously.
I'm a huge supporter of his.
I really believe at the time he was new to it.
It was May 2015.
It's a funny thing, the fight that we're in.
There are many layers people don't understand.
They'll say, yeah, but you see in the Quran over here, it says X, Y, and Z.
Yes, but they don't know that it's been abrogated, or they don't know that it's been canceled out, or they don't know that it's preceded by kill them all, or so on and so on.
And so it's a tough battle.
Listen, Islam would not have spread as far and as wide over 1,400 years as successfully as it had had it not been a clever little onion.
You know, I mean, let's, you know, if we're going to call it for what it is.
So we don't have an easy battle.
Our battle is not an easy one.
And what they want people to do is walk away.
That's what they want.
They want, I mean, look, when I, I think maybe somebody else, if I had a flaw, I think maybe somebody else would have walked away when that Atlas Juggs website went up.
I found it shocking at the time.
Like, who would subject themselves to this?
I had a lovely life, a really lovely life.
But it was because I had that lovely life.
It's because I want everyone to have that lovely life.
And that would be my only flaw that I didn't walk away and say, oh my God, I'm not going to subject myself and then subsequently my family to this.
But I just, I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't sleep.
I couldn't sleep nights.
I don't think I could look in the mirror because I knew, because what's the word they use?
I was woke.
You know, I woke.
And there was no turning back.
It's like I took a bite of the fruit of knowledge.
Yeah.
I know that feeling too.
And I think about the Rebel and what is our purpose.
We have various purposes.
We're a livelihood for the people who work here.
We fill the gap from the other media.
There's many things we do.
Your role is essential.
The Rebel media is indispensable.
Unrivaled.
Thank you.
I was going to say that for me, it's a way to express myself, because if I did not have the rebel to express myself, I would go mad, shoving into the wind.
Yes.
So it's not a vanity project.
I mean, we have many voices.
We have many people.
I try in my own flawed way to push other people up on TV also to give them, and we've given birth to many great alumni, by the way.
Yes, you have.
But I guess what you just said is you feel compelled to fight on.
That is my personal animation for this project.
I want the Rebel to succeed as a business, as a job for its staff, as a launch pad for other talent.
But it is actually the way for me to shout at the world and try and stop it from running off the cliff.
I think that you and I have that small thing in common.
I agree.
I agree.
And shouting into the abyss is not freedom of speech.
We have to connect.
We have to build an army of Davids.
This is a long war.
And this is another thing.
People look back at examples, historical examples.
Every war is different and the same in various ways.
And this is a long war.
And you look back on the past 10 years, one can only imagine what the next 10 is going to look like.
And then 20.
The mind reels.
Well, my friend, it's been wonderful to catch up with us.
And I'm sure our viewers will find what you've said very instructive.
And you have turned me around on the question that I put to you.
So I thank you for that.
Folks, you can get all the Pamela Geller you like at GellareReports.com, very prolific writer who has been fighting this fight longer than most.
And she's got the scars to prove it, but you still keep fighting.
And we admire for that.
And we love you.
And we salute you.
And we hope you keep at it for a long time to come.
Bless you, Ezra.
Thank you so much for having me.
And thank you.
Well, that's our feature interview with Pamela Geller.
You can get all of her commentary at GellerReports.com.