Allum Bokhari warns tech giants like Google and Facebook are weaponizing censorship, from $4,700 Russian ad claims to leaked internal bias against Trump—including Eric Schmidt’s ties. Tim Cook’s "hate" rhetoric infantilizes users while PragerU, Peterson, and even The Rebel (1.1M YouTube subscribers) face suppression. Justin Trudeau’s $595M journalist fund mirrors Soviet-era media control, with Cheryl Sandberg allegedly pressured to censor "fake news." The trend signals a coordinated assault on free speech, risking the collapse of open platforms and independent journalism. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, my greatest fear for 2019, big tech censorship.
We'll have a feature interview with Breitbart.com's Alam Bokhari.
It's January 2nd, 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, and Happy New Year.
This is the first show of 2019, and we're going to look forward to what will happen in the world of tech.
Now, there was a time when tech was some obscure thing that only either the really cool or really nerdy kids were interested in, but now tech, well, that's just a code for every single thing we do.
There's not one of us who's not active on Facebook or Pinterest, or if you're in business on LinkedIn.
Our whole company, The Rebel, lives on the internet, YouTube, Facebook, everything.
And the thing is, that was wonderful when it was this great undiscovered frontier-style Wild West of freedom.
In fact, that's why we put The Rebel on the Internet when the Sun News Network shut down three and a half years ago, almost four years ago.
But now we're vulnerable to the colonization of big tech by social justice warriors and grievance mongers who are bringing censorship to big tech in a far more serious way than was ever done through the democratic institutions, even the Human Rights Commission.
So joining us now for the course of today's show is our friend Alan Bokhari, who's the senior tech correspondent for Breitbart.com, who is the leading journalist in the world covering the political colonization of big tech.
Alan, great to see you again.
Hello, Esau.
Would you agree with me that, I mean, maybe, of course, you would agree because it's your beat, but I think that the most important political beat in the world right now is not the Trump collusion narrative or the daily shenanigans in the White House or not even the EU fights, Brexit.
I think it is who will control the politics of the internet because that has the power to snuff out and de-platform political candidates of the highest order.
It has the ability to shape what we perceive the world to be.
I think that the battle for the political soul of the internet is the largest story of our time.
That's my view.
What do you think?
I agree, because as you said in your intro, tech now refers to everything, every aspect of our lives.
Everything we do, whether it's business, political speech, or just talking to our friends, we now do it online via some sort of online app.
So these companies have grown to such an extent and have such a level of importance in our lives and also know so much about us that they've in a sense become more relevant, more important to our lives than national governments.
But the flip side of that is they aren't subject to the rules and regulations of national governments.
They are not currently subject to the First Amendment or any protections on privacy or any part of the Constitution, really, because they're a private company.
And until they're subject to some level of official oversight and some level of regulation, they're just going to continue to have a totally arbitrary, tyrannical level of power over our lives.
And of course, when you think of the number of authoritarians we have coming out of Western University at the moment, social justice warriors, as he pointed out, this is extremely tempting to them.
And they've been putting pressure for the past year.
We've been seeing the results of their efforts in far left Silicon Valley in the increasing level of censorship we've seen from these companies.
And unless President Trump or Congress takes action, that's the future that we'll see.
We'll see more and more takeovers of these incredibly influential companies by the far left who want to control these companies, who recognize the amount of power they have and want to use it to get their way, to enforce their will and their values.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the power and the utility of the internet is how everything is so seamlessly connected.
But that's also its grave threat to us.
I mean, it wasn't long ago when many people were afraid to use their credit card on the internet.
They just didn't.
I mean, PayPal was exotic or obscure.
It just wasn't normal.
Now, almost everyone uses Facebook, 2 billion users.
We all bank online.
Now you can deposit a check by taking a picture of it on your phone.
We forget how ubiquitous it is and things we don't even think of as the internet.
But what's terrifying is that it's now connected and it's tagged, whether it's a cookie or a database file, to everything else we do or say.
It's our whole life.
You can't unplug.
Unless you're going to go full Unibomber live in the forest in a hut, you cannot unplug, can you?
No, you can't.
And interestingly, you mentioned the Unibil and people living in forests.
He's actually enjoying a bit of a renaissance on social media.
There's this whole movement, very sort of obscure.
I don't know much about it myself, called Pine Tree Twitter.
And it's this whole idea that you've got to unplug.
You've got to go live off the grid.
You've got to go disconnect from technology.
I think that's movements like that, sort of fairly fringe movements like that, is something we're going to see in the future in response to the growing power of these companies.
And honestly, I think we used to see marches in Washington because of Washington's political power.
I think we're going to see marches in Silicon Valley because the nexus of power has shifted.
It's no longer politicians who seem to control our lives.
It's a bunch of unaccountable Silicon Valley CEOs.
Yeah.
And what a tragic coincidence that the most left-wing city in America is in the San Francisco area, is the tech city.
It couldn't have been Dallas or Houston or Salt Lake City or Boise, Idaho.
It had to be the leftist city.
Two Years of Elite Backlash00:04:45
Well, listen, I promised that we would look at a few of the highlights of 2018 and then look forward to 2019.
And you helped us to select three video clips that you think are emblematic of some of the conversations in tech and politics.
And I'd like to play those for our viewers and have your comments on each.
The first is the shortest and the simplest.
It's from a December congressional hearing where Sundar Pichai, the senior executive of Google, was asked by a very sympathetic Democrat, Gerald Nadler, who actually receives tens of thousands of dollars in donations from Facebook.
He was given a softball question.
I was really surprised by it because the answer, if you would have known the answer in advance, I don't think it would have asked the question.
It's a Democrat asking Google, how much money did Russia spend on Google, which owns YouTube and others, in the 2016 election?
Was it hundreds of millions?
Was it millions?
Well, here's the clip with the question and the answer.
Now, according to media reports, Google found evidence that Russian agents spent thousands of dollars to purchase ads on its advertising platforms that span multiple Google products as part of the agents, the Russian agents campaign to interfere in the election two years ago.
Additionally, Juniper Downs, head of global policy for YouTube, testified in July that YouTube had identified and shut down multiple and shut down multiple channels containing thousands of videos associated with the Russian misinformation campaign.
Does Google now know the full extent to which its online platforms were exploited by Russian actors in the election two years ago?
We undertook a very thorough investigation.
And in 2016, we now know that there were two main ad accounts linked to Russia, which, you know, advertised on Google for about $4,700 in advertising.
We also found other limited...
A total of $4,700?
That's right.
Well, Alan, the answer was $4,700.
I mean, us here at the Little Rebel, we've spent that much on Google ads in our short life just on some little campaign we did once.
$4,700.
For two years, we've heard this theme that Russia bought the election through fake news and Twitter ads and Facebook ads.
$4,700?
That's not a lot of money.
That's sort of a joke, but a joke that's been taken seriously for two years by the mainstream media.
Yeah, well, the whole point about this idea that Russian disinformation swung the election is twofold.
One is to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump.
What we've seen in the past two years is this elite backlash against any form of any way in which ordinary people express their opinion.
And that includes elections and includes the Brexit referendum and includes comment sections on the internet.
And the whole idea is, you know, the election was illegitimate.
You know, the referendum was illegitimate.
It was all influenced and tainted by Russia.
So they have to push this idea that Russia and Russia had this huge influence on social media.
Obviously, they didn't.
It's total nonsense.
Even anti-Trump researchers like the political psychologist Brendan Nyhan have said the effect of fake news and propaganda on the election on voters was absolutely nil because what little Russian ads there were on Facebook and other platforms, they were targeted at political partisans who had already made up their mind.
So it didn't really swing any votes.
Now, Russia did play some role in social media, but their goal has never really been to swing elections one way or the other.
Their goal is to manipulate both sides and deepen divides between both sides.
It's very different and sound discord and doubt.
So it's very different from actually trying to influence an outcome.
And actually, this panic over Russia sort of helps them because it helps them achieve that goal because it deepens divides.
It makes us mistrust each other even more.
That's Russia's goal, not winning elections.
And this whole idea that they spent $4,700 or whatever on Google ads, it just shows you the depth of this conspiracy theory that Democrats are caught up in.
And the Democrats were saying social media sensitive is a conspiracy theory.
A lot more evidence for that than there is for Russia trying to influence people through Google.
Google's Internal Bias Squad00:11:52
Yeah.
Well, when Facebook shut down 30 or 40,000 Marine Le Pen sympathetic Facebook pages in France, that single act of foreign interference from Mark Zuckerberg in the French elections was far more effective and terrifying and under the radar and unreported and malicious, I would say, than anything Russia would dream of doing.
Let's move on to the next clip.
This was a big, big scoop that you guys got.
And I got to say, Alam, not only are you covering the important beat, but you're just getting, because of that, you're known in Silicon Valley as the guy to go to if you've got a leak, because the other mainstream media would bury it because they just love talking about, well, my new iPhone has this app on it, and maybe I can get some free demo.
I used to work, I remember when the National Post, when these tech companies would give out devices to journalists to try them out, like product test them, and they would keep them afterwards.
What's that but a bribe?
That's a $1,000 bribe.
I remember when Jonathan Kay reviewed some new hand phone and was in love with, of course, he was.
Anyhow, you're immune to that kind of colonization, to use that word again.
And so you get all the scoops because the dissidents in Silicon Valley know they can trust you.
And so you got a full one-hour video of a weekly town hall that Google has where they basically put their staff in a big theater and other people can join by remote.
This was never supposed to be seen outside of the inner sanctum of Google.
Just incredible.
I want to play for you an excerpt from a senior Google executive talking about partisan politics, the hate for Donald Trump, and the sorrow that he lost.
Take a look.
8:30 p.m. on Tuesday night.
I was at home with friends and family watching the election returns.
And as we started to see the direction of the voting, I reached out to someone close to me who was at the Javit Center where the big celebration was supposed to occur in New York City.
Somebody who'd been working on the campaign.
And I just sent them a note and said, you know, are you okay?
It looks like it's going the wrong way.
And I got back a very sad, short text that read, People are leaving, staff is crying, we're going to lose.
That was the first moment I really felt like we were going to lose.
And it was this massive kick in the gut that we were going to lose.
And it was really painful.
It did feel like a ton of bricks dropped on my chest.
And I've had a chance to talk to a lot of fellow Googlers, and people have said different words, similar concepts.
How painful is it?
How painful this is.
I think that's an incredible video, and that's a scoop that you got.
The fact that they were having this big staff cry is amazing.
But to me, the most powerful thing, and she said it three times, she didn't say the Democrats were going to lose, Hillary Clinton was going to lose, they were going to lose.
She said we are going to lose.
She said it three times, first quoting her friend embedded in the Clinton campaign.
I bet she was talking about Eric Schmidt, the senior Google executive who was a Hillary Clinton campaign volunteer.
Then she repeated it two more times: we were going to lose, because there is no division in the mind of a senior Google executive between the company and Hillary Clinton's Democratic campaign.
I don't even think she realized she was saying it that way.
And no one in that town hall meeting objected because they all think the same way.
Yeah, and that meeting featured the head, all the heads of Google.
It had the co-founders, Larry and Sergei.
It had the CEO, Sundar Pitch I, had the head of their chief legal officer, Kent Walker.
It had everyone you can think of.
And they were all distraught.
They were all holding this sort of funeral for the country just one day after Donald Trump won the election.
So what you saw was a total uniformity of values at the top of Google.
And Google maintained that their political biases don't filter down into their product.
But how can you know the whole idea of a bias is that it's unconscious.
You don't know the effect it's having.
And the other thing we don't know is what internal safeguards Google has to prevent bias from affecting their products.
We saw the Google hearing last month when Sundar Pitch I went to go and testify on Congress.
And one of the best questions I thought was Representative Matt Gates of Blurdy, he repeatedly asked Google, have you launched any investigation into political bias?
Because we've seen stories, we've seen leaked emails that we've got on Breitbart showing that there are groups of Googlers who do work inside the company to influence policy against conservatives and conservative media.
There was a concerted effort by Googlers, with the assistance of the director of monetization, who's now the director of trust and safety, to get Breitbart demonetized from Google's ads by cataloguing examples of so-called hate speech, not from articles, but from the comment section.
So we do see these anti-conservative efforts inside Google.
And the question is, what internal safeguards does the company have to stop the biases of their workforce getting out of hand?
What sort of review process do they have when they introduce new products?
We know they have a review process.
Every Google product is looked at by multiple people and reviewed by multiple people.
But we don't know if all the people reviewing them are all liberals or all left-wing or have a particular leaning.
And we don't know if they, I don't think they do.
They never told me.
I don't know if they explicitly control the politics in that review process.
It seems like it would be a good thing to do if they were trying to avoid political bias.
But I don't think they're very serious about doing that.
All right, let's take a quick look at that question and answer from that congressional hearing in December.
Have you ever launched an investigation into whether political bias is impacting the consumer experience?
Congressman, we do.
To the extent there are concerns, we look into them.
So have you expressly launched an investigation into political bias of your employees?
On our employees, you said?
Yes.
To the extent we always take any allegations around code of conduct across every issue seriously and we look into them.
You said to me yesterday that, as it relates to political bias, you haven't launched those investigations because there are so many redundancies and there is so much peer review that that would not be possible.
Is that still your testimony today?
Congressman, it's the way our processes work.
If you need to make a change in our algorithms, there are several steps in the process, including launch committees and user testing and our rate or guideline evaluation.
But at your company, your employees can get together and chat in groups, right?
Google groups?
Yes, they can.
One of those groups is the civil rights group, right?
We have many employee resource groups on which they can participate in conversations, yes.
Have you ever looked into the conversation into the resist group?
Congressman, no.
Does that strike, is that a surprise to you that there's a resist group?
I'm not aware whether such a group exists or not.
If there was a resist group, would that be the type of thing that you would want to look into?
You know, we have clear policies around how our products are built.
No, if there's a resist, you know that the resist movement is a movement built to resist the agenda of President Trump.
If there's a resist group within your company where groups of employees, not one, are getting together within that group to engage in discourse on company time with company infrastructure.
Does that strike you as the type of thing you would want to investigate?
Congressman, I'm not aware of any such group.
None like that has been brought to my attention and happy to follow up and understand the consent better.
Yeah.
Mr. Chairman, I seek unanimous consent to enter into the record a document from what purports to be Google employee Miles Borins, which is opposed to the Google group Resist.
Well, Alan, it raises a good question because Google is not just neutral.
YouTube, Facebook, all these companies are not neutral.
They are the largest hirer of lobbyists in Washington.
They've displaced the banks and the oil companies and the arms dealers as the biggest lobbyists and the biggest political donors.
And so you can imagine if a congressman asks a friendly question of Google, he'll get not just more donations.
And if a congressman asks a critical question of Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, whatever, he'll get fewer donations.
Now that's fine.
But what's terrifying that we can't track like we can track donations is, is there some internal squad within Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter that says, ah, that guy, that guy asked us tough questions.
Let's make sure anyone who Googles that congressman, that all the bad stories come up high, the good stories are down low.
And maybe let's demonetize his YouTube page.
And like what I'm saying is the secret efforts to marginalize Breitbart that you disclosed, why wouldn't they have similar efforts to marginalize political opponents?
Because an oil company couldn't do that.
An arms dealer couldn't do that.
But people who control the internet could do that.
And here's why Google and these other companies really need that process in place to make sure that anything they do is reviewed to ensure that there's no political bias.
Because the things we've leaked are things that Googlers have been discussing in private on their email lists or in these recorded meetings.
But not everything that happens at Google HQ is recorded or put down in writing.
And especially after these leaks, I think they'll be putting a lot less down in writing going forward.
So we don't know if there's a group of Googlers sitting around a cafeteria table discussing how to demonetize conservative media right now.
And there's very little way we'd be able to know that unless there's someone in the group who'd want to tell us about it.
So it's going to become harder and harder for the media to track these companies, especially as they become more paranoid and more safety conscious about leaks.
So we need to be asking ourselves what safeguards does Google have?
What safeguards should they have?
And how effective are they?
Yeah.
You know, it wouldn't surprise me.
We were talking earlier about people deconnecting, disconnecting from the internet.
It wouldn't surprise me if senior executives at these tech companies had all their official online communications, and then they carried around an old-fashioned pad of paper and a pencil or a pen, something ultra-low-tech that couldn't be forwarded, couldn't be disclosed in a search.
I absolutely believe that There is a disconnected Google where they have frank talks about people like you, about Breitbart, about people like us in a smaller degree, and that you wouldn't find it in a search.
And if there was litigation, they'd say, oh, we searched all our files and there's nothing because it's in a little, that's a little conspiracy theory on my part, but it would not surprise me one bit.
Tim Cook's Think Different00:15:46
I want to show one more video.
Again, this was from late in 2018.
It's from Tim Cook, the CEO who took over from Steve Jobs at Apple.
And I've shown this.
I did a show about this last month.
Compare this to the great 1984 TV ad that Apple made when they were introducing their computer against the conformity and linear thinking of IBM.
IBM's motto for really a century has been think, which is a great motto.
So Apple came along with Think Different.
And they had, I don't know if you remember that great ad that was showing 1984 everyone was like a zombie and this one woman came in and threw a hammer and smashed the screen in Big Brother and it was Think Different and 1984 doesn't have to happen.
It was this great, great, great ad about thinking differently.
Well, that was then, and here's Tim Cook of Apple saying what he thinks about anyone who thinks differently.
He calls them a divider now.
Watch this terrifying clip of Tim Cook at an anti-hate rally, which is right out of Orwell 2.
Take a look at this.
Perhaps most importantly, it drives us not to be bystanders, bystanders, as hate tries to make its headquarters in the digital world.
At Apple, we believe that technology needs to have a clear point of view on this challenge.
There is no time to get tied up in knots.
That's why we only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, and violence.
You have no place on our platforms.
You have no home here.
From the earliest days of iTunes to Apple Music today, we have always prohibited music with a message of white supremacy.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
And as we showed this year, we won't give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists on the app store.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
My friends, if we can't be clear on moral questions like these, then we've got big problems.
At Apple, we are not afraid to say that our values drive our curation decisions.
And why should we be?
Doing what's right, creating experiences free from violence and hate, experiences that empower creativity and new ideas, is what our customers want us to do.
I believe the most sacred thing that each of us is given is our judgment, our morality, our own innate desire to separate right from wrong.
Alam, I think that Tim Cook is doing something very tricky there.
He's conflating division, which means a difference of opinion.
He's complaining with hate, which is a negative emotion, which all humans have, with violence, which is a crime.
And I don't even know how you do something violent on the internet.
I guess you could talk about something violent, but it's hard to do so.
So he's throwing in the word violence there to denormalize division, which is another way of saying think different.
And hate.
None of us like to show hate, but if we take our hate and sublimate it into something constructive and positive, it can be a great fuel for constructive change.
I'm sure Martin Luther King Jr. hated Jim Crow laws and hated racism, but he turned it into something positive.
Hatred, division, and violence.
I'll tell you one thing, Apple isn't a safe place for thinking differently anymore, is it?
No, it's a very brave new world at the moment.
They've become the dystopia they used to make ads against.
And that whole thing at the end there was very sly how he was talking about we all want to choose between right and wrong.
We all have a responsibility to do that.
Okay, well, apparently Apple's consumers don't have that responsibility anymore because Tim Cook took it away from them.
They don't get to choose what's right and wrong.
They don't get to choose which podcast is fake news and conspiracy theories and which one isn't because Tim Cook's already made that decision for them.
And that's the real question here.
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem.
Who gets to make these decisions?
Does Tim Cook get to make them on behalf of the millions of people who use Apple products?
And that essentially infantilizes those users.
It says if you leave it up to them, they'll make the wrong decision.
That's the implication there.
And that's the question we should be asking.
Whatever we think of all the so-called conspiracy theorists or so-called hate mongers, who gets to decide who falls into those categories?
Is it a small number of unaccountable heads of corporations?
Or is it the millions and millions of people who use the internet and consider themselves intelligent enough to make those decisions?
Tim Cook said on stage what his users want.
Has anyone asked them?
It has to be in a survey.
When there's been surveys about hate speech, most people disagree with the concept.
When there's been surveys about political correctness, most people disagree with the concept.
This is something believed by elites.
It's not believed by ordinary people.
And even ordinary Apple consumers, many of whom are left-wing, I think they'd want to make their own decisions, make their own minds up about what they want to subscribe to and who they want to hear from.
And they wouldn't want some random CEO making that decision on their behalf.
Yeah, and even his point about right and wrong, and he uses the word sin, which is quite something coming from Silicon Valley that profits off every sin you can imagine.
That's division.
Right and wrong is the essential divide in all of humanity.
It's what separates us from animals as we believe in right and wrong.
That's division.
And he seems to hate intolerance, you could say.
He would phrase it in a more positive way.
It's incredibly Orwellian.
That is a different apple than the think different apple of that 1984 ad.
I find that very troubling, and there is no sign that these companies are going to slow down at all here.
I think 2019 is the year they go in for the kill.
And let's end with a couple minutes on that, Alan.
I appreciate your review of these videos from 2018 and our discussions around them.
I got to tell you, I'm a pessimist, and it serves me well being a pessimist, because that means I'm never disappointed when things go bad.
I hate saying I told you so because I'm always sad that I was correct.
I think 2019 is going to be a terrible year of deplatforming, unpersoning, censoring, the absolute merger between big tech and big government.
And I think that between you at Breitbart and us here at the Rebel, it would not surprise me if one of us was not left standing at the end of the year, not because of any business decision or any market failure, but rather because we were deplatformed by the Tim Cooks and Sandra Pitch Eyes of the world.
That's my extremely pessimistic prediction for 2019.
What do you think?
I think that would certainly follow the trend we saw in 2018, where we saw all sorts of figures being kicked off various platforms.
Whether it was Patreon, the crowdfunding platform, whether it was Twitter, whether it was Facebook, whether it was Google.
We even saw them target politicians.
So Marshall Blackburn wasn't allowed to run ads on Facebook or Google just a few days before the midterm elections.
We saw the Google shutting down your former contributor, Faith Goldie, from having ads just 48 hours before polls opened in Toronto.
So they've displayed this brazen willingness to interfere in politics and interfere in elections, and there have been no consequences.
Republicans controlled Congress and they called them into hearings, but they didn't actually pass any legislation saying you can't do this.
So they've learned now, these companies have learned they can censor, they can interfere in elections.
And the worst that will happen to them is a few negative headlines, maybe some leaks and maybe an embarrassing hearing in front of Congress.
But there's no actual legislation that's been passed.
So I think as long as that continues to be the case, we're going to see more of it.
We're going to see more censorship.
We're going to see a tighter and tighter control over the internet, which was supposed to liberate everyone and is now tyrannizing everyone.
Yeah.
You know, you mentioned our former contributor, Faith.
I sometimes look at our rebel alumni, and some of them moved on, some were hired away, some, frankly, we fired.
But they all were rebels.
And when they were with us, they were sort of safe from the censorship for some funny reason.
But whether it's Faith Goldie, Laura Loomer, who was kicked off Twitter, Gavin McInnes kicked off Twitter and other sites, Tommy Robinson kicked off Twitter, kicked off PayPal, Lauren Southern banned from the United Kingdom.
All those people are alumni of the Rebel.
And I keep thinking, well, why aren't they coming for the Rebel?
Now, they did try and come for us in August of 2017.
But I think that because everyone I just listed is sort of on their own in a way, although Gavin was with CRTV.
But this is how the censors build up a track record, build up precedence, build up courage, build up sort of a body count.
And they start with the really, really, really fringe, you know, the neo-Nazis.
Then they go for the slightly less fringe, Alex Jones.
Then they come for the slightly less fringe than our alumni.
And you see they're moving closer and closer to the center.
And they're building on the precedent they established with the most extreme cases that no one wanted to fight for.
No one wanted to fight for the neo-Nazi websites that were kicked off of GoDaddy or whatever or whatever their host was, because who wants to defend a neo-Nazi?
Okay, so they set the precedent.
And here we are a year or two later.
And a year from now, they're going to be, that's what I'm worried about, is that they're going to swallow up.
Well, I mean, we see PragerU, which is very mainstream conservative, having their videos censored.
Jordan Peterson, I mean, they're really coming close to the center.
Will the left ever care, Alam, or do they just know that the bullies in charge here are their allies, so they don't care about the principle of free speech because they know they won't be swallowed up by it either.
Well, the Democrats certainly won't care either because like, you know, Representative Gerald Nadler, who's now going to chair the same committee that questioned Sundar Pichai last month, is essentially in the pay of Google.
Google is his highest donor.
You won't hear much from him.
Or because they're ideological and multiple Democrats, when they've got an opportunity to question Silicon Valley CEOs, haven't asked them about censorship.
They've called it a conspiracy theory.
They've instead asked them what they're doing to shut down hate speech.
So they want more censorship, not less.
So you're not going to see anything from them.
On the left, the people who actually have a handle on the issue and are honest about it are the anti-establishment, anti-war left, people like Glenn Greenwalt, because they know that they're also in the firing line because the elites don't like them either.
And, you know, Facebook, for example, is advised by the Atlantic Council.
They're a neoconservative think tank.
And we see sort of neoconservative Bush type think tanks, you know, in the UK and the US talking about extremism and not just legitimate extremism like real extremism like Islamic terrorists and ISIS, but they're now talking about so-called far-right extremists as well.
And they're putting some of the people, some of your alumni in that category.
So it's the establishment right and the establishment left that want censorship on social media.
And it's the anti-establishment of both sides, I think, that need to unite to fight against it.
I want to leave with one last question.
It's a little bit about tech.
I think it's more about journalism.
And thank you so much for your time.
I always want to keep you longer than I can, and I'm really grateful for your time.
Two things in Canada, and I don't know if you would have followed them because you're based, you used to be based in the UK, now you're in the United States.
A few months back, the Toronto Star had what I thought was a shocking story.
It was a report of when Justin Trudeau met with Cheryl Sandberg of Facebook.
And this was leaked to the star by the prime minister's office.
It was meant as sort of a threat to Facebook.
And as you can see on the screen, the headline is basically Trudeau's telling Facebook, if you don't fix your, quote, fake news problem, we will fix it for you through the law.
So it was a personal private conversation.
Trudeau said to Cheryl Sandberg, fix it.
Oh, and he was very specific.
Fix it in advance of my 2019 reelection campaign.
So he was very precise.
He wanted it fixed before he was up for re-election.
If she didn't do his censorship for him, he would do it to her.
And obviously, she wasn't moving quickly enough because they leaked this story to the liberal-friendly Toronto Star, which ran it as a threat to Sandberg.
I thought it was a shocking revelation of Trudeau's thin skin and his plans.
It hasn't been followed anywhere.
So that's exhibit A and Exhibit B, Alan.
So that's the stick.
Exhibit B is in Canada.
Justin Trudeau just announced a $595 million fund for journalists for media companies who are having a tough time.
The equivalent in the United States, because we're one-tenth the population for the states, that would be like a $6 billion slush fund.
But Trudeau said it's only for journalists that he could, quote, trust.
That's how the Toronto Star again reported.
So you got the carrot.
If you're trustworthy, we got $595 million for you.
And the stick is, we're going to ban you as fake news.
I think 2019 could be the year the lights go out for independent journalists.
I know that sounds so pessimistic, but I just don't know what else to make of these two exhibits I've just mentioned to you.
What's your take?
Well, that is essentially state-run media you now have in Canada, all of it, because if they're all taking money from the government, they're no longer independent of the government.
So what Trudeau is doing there is essentially trying to make all of the Canadian media his personal pravda.
Media Under Pressure00:04:15
You know, in a sense, they are already, I assume, because from what I hear, most media is pro-Trudeau in the same way that most media was pro-Obama when he was in office in the U.S.
So in a sense, it's already happening, but this will make it even more the case.
The government paying off every single journalistic outlet, that's incredible.
That's making the entirety of media essentially no longer independent of the government.
That's amazing to me.
It's even more incredible than pressuring Cheryl Sandberg because, you know, that's happened in other countries as well.
It's happened in the U.S. We've seen Silicon Valley CEOs being pressured saying, you know, what are you doing about fake news?
What are you doing about hate speech?
Angela Merkel back in as early as 2015 was pressuring Mark Zuckerberg to crack down on hate speech.
So all of these European politicians, all of these, and Canadian politicians now also, and Democrats in the U.S. are pressuring these Silicon Valley companies to become their own personal censorship wing.
And the only way to counter it, I think, is for the grassroots who do believe in internet freedom to rise up and demand their own legislation, their own protection from these tech companies and their own politicians who want to use them as agents of oppression.
Yeah.
Well, I wonder if that will happen.
Sometimes I think in the luxurious, comfortable, postmodern West, we just enjoy ourselves too much.
We don't like to get revved up about things.
We'll just watch another movie on Netflix or play another video game or just go out and enjoy this sunny day.
I'm worried that we are too complacent.
And we used to be good at fighting for freedom.
Now we're just good at enjoying freedom.
And we don't know how to fight for it anymore.
And I feel like it's slipping away.
I hope, Alam, that when we talk again for our year in review next year, first of all, I hope that we will talk again a year from now, that both of us will still be around in the internet.
And second of all, I hope that my prophecies here are wrong.
They're not conspiracy theories.
I have not posited anything I could not prove.
I've just made predictions that I think are dire.
And I hope and hope and hope that my predictions are false.
I have yet to see evidence to make me change my mind, though.
Last word to you, my friend.
Yeah, certainly what I'd like to see over the next year is more, I'd certainly like to report on more grassroots activity because I think that's the only, especially with the Democrats in charge of Congress, that's the only way to push back against it and ensure there'll be an independent media on the Internet.
There'll be space for independent voices.
Because what we've seen over the past four or five years is essentially the robbery of the generation.
My generation especially was given this great gift of an open platform, the internet, where you can say whatever you want and challenge mainstream media.
And that's just been suddenly and rapidly taken away over the past three years.
And I think there are a lot of people in the country, in the U.S. and elsewhere who are pretty angry about that.
Yeah.
Well, I am angry about it, and it is an existential threat to us here at the Rebel, which I think is the point.
We have 1.1 million YouTube subscribers.
They all voluntarily want to hear what we have to say.
We have, I'll tell you, it's not much of a secret, 3.4 million people who are affiliated with the rebel in some way or another, whether following us on social media or who are engaged with our petitions, 3.4 million people, which is quite a lot for a little country like Canada, but a lot of our viewers are foreign.
But all it takes is one person, if they're the president of Google, YouTube, Facebook, whatever, to shut us down.
I hope we'll be here in a year, my friend.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you.
All right, there you have it.
Alan Bokari, the chief technology correspondent with Breitbart.com.
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
It's the most important political beat in the world, and I think 2019 will be the year of reckoning.
That's it for today.
On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.