Ezra Levant exposes the Associated Press as a "liberal fog machine," accusing it of omitting key details in Justin Trudeau’s SNC-Lavalin scandal—where $48M in bribes, including $30K to prostitutes for Saadi Gaddafi, were paid—while falsely claiming no wrongdoing. He also alleges Google’s surveillance culture mirrors authoritarian regimes like Romania’s Stasi, firing employees like James DeMoore for dissent and rewarding ideological conformity. Meanwhile, Levant heads to the UK to fact-check Tommy Robinson’s trial amid BBC bias claims and conflicting police body cam footage, directing listeners to TommyTrial.com for updates. [Automatically generated summary]
Hi team, hi rebels, mates, gov, hey gov, it's Ezra Levant here.
I am saying all those British things because I'm actually off to the UK tomorrow to cover Tommy Robinson's one of his many trials.
But today I have a Canadian story with a bit of an American twist.
Today I talk about the Associated Press, a massive newswire service that pumps news into literally thousands of American newspapers.
And they're actually one of Facebook's official fact checkers.
But they're damn liars.
And I think I prove it pretty convincingly today.
You tell me.
By the way, I know a lot of folks listen to the podcast where they can't watch TV.
They're driving.
They're taking the bus, whatever.
They've got something else on the go.
They're cooking, maybe.
But may I encourage you to consider buying a subscription to our TV version of the show?
Even if you can't watch it, boy, it's a good way to support us.
It's $8 a month, which isn't that bad.
In fact, if you buy for a whole year in advance, you get it for $80, which is a discount, as you can tell.
If you type in the coupon code PODCAST, you get even more money off.
That's at therebel.media slash shows.
You get this and you get Sheila Gunread and David Menzies too.
All right, without further ado, here's my show about the Associated Press and their fake news.
And hey, if you like this, I'd be grateful if you gave it a good rating on the podcast.
All right, here you go.
You're listening to a Rebel Media Podcast.
Tonight, an official fact-checking news agency makes up a completely fictional story about Justin Trudeau's SNC Lavaland scandal.
It's March 11th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
You've heard of the Associated Press, or AP, as it's also known.
It's a massive news agency, a wire service, it's still called, even though we live in the wireless era.
It's actually more than 150 years old.
AP-Zuckerberg Trick00:06:18
It's basically competitor news companies sharing stories amongst each other so they don't have to all send a reporter to cover any one particular event.
There are other companies like it, Reuters, here in Canada, the Canadian press, or CP as it's called.
It makes sense commercially, but it's also a terribly homogeneous view of the news.
It's a bias magnifier.
It's a competition destroyer because all the newspapers run the same thing written by one reporter.
And because it's so much cheaper than each newspaper sending their own reporter to any given news event, it's so common.
I bet the majority of what you read in a newspaper or listen to on the radio is from the great liberal fog machine of AP, CP, or Reuters.
Here's an AP story about AP.
A couple years ago, Facebook gets serious about fake news is the headline.
So this was published one month after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, and the Democrats and the media and the Democrat media were trying to figure out how they lost when everyone, especially the super smart people, like here's the New York Times, saying Hillary Clinton was a 90% plus lock on winning.
And besides the Russian hacking theory, they came up with the fake news excuse that people were just too stupid to vote for Hillary because they weren't reading the right news.
And by that I mean the left news.
And by that I mean news like the Associated Press.
Here, let me read a bit from this AP story about how awesome AP is.
Facebook is taking new measures to curb the spread of fake news on its huge and influential social network.
It will focus on the worst of the worst offenders and partner with outside fact checkers and news organizations to sort honest news reports from made-up stories that play to people's passions and preconceived notions.
Hey, do you trust Mark Zuckerberg to tell you what news is honest and what news isn't?
Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg to re-engineer your perceptions of the world to get rid of your passions and preconceived notions?
I have to say, I still find it hard to believe that Zuckerberg is not in jail.
I think he's violated more people's privacy than every peeping Tom in history combined.
He's been caught breaking the law pretty much every year.
And every year he just says, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to do that.
He makes a few more political donations, hires a few more lobbyists, and it's all good.
I never get tired of looking at this sweaty, shifty lizard here.
Remember this?
Do you feel like it's a backlash or that you feel like you're violating people's privacy?
Do you feel like you're adequately portrayed as a, because I want to wonder about the person who actually created this thing.
Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of stuff happened along the way.
I think, you know, there were real learning points and turning points along the way in terms of building things.
If I knew what I knew now then, then I hope I wouldn't have made those mistakes.
But I can't go back and change the past.
I can only do what we think is the right thing going forward.
So before we move off this privacy thing, and I thought that was fascinating.
Okay, you want to take off the hoodie?
No, I never take off the hoodie.
I know you don't.
There's a group of women in the audience that wish you would.
The girls.
Whoa.
All right.
Sorry.
That's okay.
Yeah.
So naturally, that most trustworthy of men, Mark Zuckerberg, chose the Associated Press, AP, to be part of his censorship panel.
Let me read some more from the story.
The social network will make it easier for users to report fake news when they see it, which they'll be able to do in two steps, not three.
If enough people report a story as fake, Facebook will pass it to third-party fact-checking organizations that are part of the nonprofit Pointer Institute's International Fact-Checking Network.
Five fact-checking and news organizations are working with Facebook on this.
ABC News, the Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Politic Fact, and Snopes.
Facebook says this group is likely to expand.
Oh, got it.
So ABC, whose chief political correspondent just happens to be George Stephanopoulos, formerly Bill Clinton's right-hand man, that sounds like it'll be nonpartisan.
Or Snopes, which is a weird homemade blog that calls itself a fact-checker, but it's been revealed to be a homemade blog run by a left-wing activist, and they spend their money on, well, according to this Daily Mail report, they're being discredited.
They weirdly use their revenue for, yeah, prostitutes and porn stars and things.
So yeah, that's who's in charge of the truth, folks.
Anyways, both ABC and Snopes have since quit, but the Associated Press continues to be the gold standard for Facebook to censor other opinions.
Let me read just one more line from the AP story about how awesome AP is.
Stories that flunk the fact check won't be removed from Facebook, but they'll be publicly flagged as disputed, which will force them to appear lower down in people's newsfeed.
Users can click on a link to learn why that is.
And if people decide they want to share the story with friends anyway, they can, but they'll get another warning.
Wow.
So AP, which like I say, is simply a collection of journalists.
They're not saints.
They're not priests.
They're not experts.
And what's an expert on the news anyways?
Aren't you the expert on news?
Aren't all of us, each of us, in our own way?
Each of us gets to make our own choices, whether you like a left-wing slant or a right-wing slant or no slant or if you just want to ignore the news altogether and watch sports.
Anyways, I wanted to tell you the background about the Associated Press and how they claim to be the most accurate people in the world, so accurate that they will tell their rivals, their competitors really, that they're not accurate and that Mark Zuckerberg will literally interrupt your newsreading experience to force you to read an objection, a rebuttal from the AP, and you have to keep clicking on buttons to say, yeah, you really do want to read the news site that the Associated Press says is a lie.
Nothing Passed For Scandal00:15:21
We all know how we are on the internet.
We're impatient.
There's so much out there that's fast and free.
We expect it to be fast.
We expect websites to load in less than a second.
We hate it when there's a pop-up ad we have to close.
We hate it when we have to enter any information like our name or fill out a form.
So I bet half the point of putting in all those extra steps when the AP flags a story as fake is not to try to convince you that AP is right and your conservative news site is wrong, but just to make it such a hassle that you'll just abandon it and you won't actually click through.
And then there's the weirdness of it.
It's like when your website says there's a security risk on a site, you just skip it.
That's what they're trying to do here.
That's the AP-Zuckerberg trick.
They're both shifty.
Okay, so to the news of the day.
We've all been talking about the SNC Lavaland scandal for a month now.
It's the biggest scandal to Rock Trudeau since he joined Parliament.
First, Jody Wilson-Raybold, his former attorney general, resigned.
That's huge.
Then his best friend and his longest-serving assistant, Gerald Butts, resigned.
That's huge.
Then Jane Philpott, regarded as one of the most competent cabinet ministers, resigned in solidarity with Jody Wilson-Raybold.
That's huge.
This thing is real.
Even if Trudeau keeps doing that weird thing where he blames the victim, where he gaslights him, you know what that phrase gaslight means.
It means to tell someone, oh, you're crazy.
No, no, no, he never did that to you.
It's all in your mind.
That's called gaslighting.
That's what he did to Rose Knight, the young reporter in Creston, B.C., that he sexually assaulted in the year 2000.
He said this.
That the same interactions could be experienced very differently from one person to the next.
And I am not going to speak for the woman in question.
I would never presume to speak for her.
But I know that there is an awful lot of reflection to be had as we move forward as a society on how people perceive different interactions.
Like I said, I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way, but I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.
I respect her right to have a, you know what?
That's a nice way of calling someone a liar.
You're telling them they didn't experience it.
It's imaginary.
That's exactly what Trudeau and Butts are saying now about Jody Wilson-Raybold.
So yeah, huge scandal.
It's not going away.
For the first time ever, it's really denting Trudeau's polls.
The India Trip fiasco didn't do that.
The Chinese fiasco with their hostages didn't do that.
The Saudi fiasco, the NAFTA renegotiations fiasco, all these fiascos, they never really pulled his numbers down.
But this one is, I mean, look at how manic he looks.
This is him trying to look like everything's totally fine.
It's totally fine at a rally the other day.
Hello, Karado!
Great to see you all!
How are you all doing today?
Are there any liberals in the house?
Holy moly.
Whoa.
That reminds me of this.
We've never seen you behave this way before.
I know.
Have you ever felt this way?
You are gone.
Yeah, it is a little manic.
So what did the fact-checkers at the Associated Press have to say?
What's their big briefing to their American audience?
Remember, they're mainly an American outfit.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is engulfed in a scandal in which nothing illegal has happened and no financial or sexual misconduct is alleged, but the follow could topple him in the elections this fall.
AP's are Gillies reports.
Really?
Nothing illegal, nothing wrong?
That's what the tweet says.
Here's the story when you click on through.
Canada's no sex, no money scandal could topple Trudeau by Rob Gillies.
Oh, really?
Let me read a little bit from this Associated Press story.
There's no money, no sex, and nothing illegal happened.
This is what passes for a scandal in Canada.
Yeah, those small time Canadians, nothing to see here unless you're some hayseed from tiny little Canada.
And can we talk about the real criminal, Donald Trump?
I'm not even kidding.
That's their next sentence.
U.S. President Donald Trump has been engulfed in allegations involving possible collusion with Russia and secret payments to buy the silence of a porn star.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing a controversy that seems trivial by comparison, but could topple him in the elections later this year.
Got it.
Trump is engulfed.
He's engulfed in allegations.
But it's Saint Trudeau who's paying the price.
The world is so cruel.
But is any of that true?
This is going to thousands of American outlets.
AP writes, nothing illegal happened.
But hang on, how do they know?
The matter hasn't been investigated yet, not by the Mounties, not by an independent inquiry, not even by Trudeau's own lapdog, the hand-picked ethics counselor.
The parliamentary committee hearings, as limited as they are, they're not even done yet.
And you'll recall the Liberals on that committee voted against asking the Prime Minister's office to release internal memos on the matter.
But to the AP and what, the 2,300 newspapers they serve, they've seen enough.
Nothing illegal has happened here, people.
What is he doing to the uniform, Killer Hogan?
Please!
Oh, you went too far.
I must report this.
It would be worth my life if I do not report this.
It's only until tomorrow, and he's going to take it off again.
After he steals the tank.
Who?
From the Panzer Division.
Oh.
He brings it here into the press.
Oh, I've seen nothing.
I was not here.
I did not even get up this morning.
Yeah, that's the Hogan's Heroes version.
Remember that old show?
And then there's the David LeMetti version of Hogan's Heroes.
That was that guy's name was Schultz.
Here's Trudeau's new Attorney General.
Can you see the resemblance?
Part of that.
But if someone approached you and said an election is at stake, would that be a persuasive argument to you?
Again, it depends on the context.
The leading case for the United States.
So wait, sorry, just to stop, an election could be a reason for an attorney general to interfere in a criminal prosecution.
That would be appropriate.
I'm not saying it would be appropriate or inappropriate.
But on the face of it, there actually has been a crime.
Sorry to tell the AP that.
Section 139 of the Criminal Code says everyone who willfully attempts in any manner to obstruct perverted defeat the course of justice in a judicial proceeding is liable for up to 10 years in prison.
Trudeau's office interfered 20 times, according to Jody Wilson-Rabel.
10 meetings, 10 phone calls, plus texts and emails.
And the pressure continued even after she had made her decision to prosecute.
The AP says, quote, no financial or sexual misconduct is alleged.
Really?
On what planet?
Of course, SNC Lavaland paid $48 million in illegal bribes in Libya.
And as this chilling story here shows, their bribery is pretty much everywhere they work, including right here in Canada, where they corrupted public bids on bridges, hospitals, anything.
They were treating Canada like a banana republic.
Oh, and no sex, that's what the AP said.
In fact, SNC Lavaland spent millions of dollars for prostitutes, porn, and wild parties for Saadi Gaddafi.
That's the son of Muamar Gaddafi.
This was part of their bribery.
Here's how Trudeau handled that question in parliament.
This is what SNC's intervention looked like.
$30,000 worth of Canadian prostitutes given to Muammar Gaddafi's son.
This is the so-called victimless crime that our woke feminist prime minister is moving mountains to cover up.
When did the prime minister learn that SNC Lavalin paid for prostitutes for Muammar Gaddafi's son?
Right Honorable Prime Minister.
Mr. Speaker, every step of the way, we will stand up for Canadian workers.
We will stand up for good jobs right across this country.
And we will do so in a way that is consistent with our values, with our expectations, and with the rule of law.
Yeah.
Let me keep reading a little bit from the AP story.
People south of the border would be astonished to think that this is the type of scandal that they have in Canada, said Eddie Goldenberg, a former advisor to former PM Jean Cretchen.
Now, most Canadians would know that Cretchen was a liberal, like Trudeau is.
So Eddie Goldenberg is just defending his lifelong party.
It's not really surprising, but few Americans would know that.
Remember, this story was written for Americans, the thousands of newspapers to pick up AP wire copy.
So the first person they quote defending the Liberals is a lifelong liberal.
But they don't mention that he's a liberal.
Why?
Why not?
Because they know it would take away from his credibility, because they know it would show his bias.
Goldenberg actually says something amazing.
He says, there is a political correctness here.
Nobody wants to go after an Indigenous woman minister.
It's become politically incorrect to question the former minister.
Holy moly.
So the Liberals play the race card when making appointments.
They play the gender card.
I understand one of the priorities for you was to have a cabinet that was gender balanced.
Why was that so important to you?
Because it's 2015.
Yeah, right on.
But when an Aboriginal woman criticizes Trudeau for being corrupt, well, she only got away with that because she's an Aboriginal woman.
That's an incredible thing to say for a liberal.
Sort of shows their whole identity politics game is a cynical ploy, and that at the end of the day, they don't really listen to anything women or minorities say.
It's just their gender and race that they care about is window dressing.
There was nothing female or Aboriginal about Jodi Wilson-Raybold's decision to block Trudeau's interference in the SNC Lavaland prosecution.
Her race or her sex were irrelevant to that.
Here's some more for the story.
They quote a professor named Robert Bothwell saying, it's a pseudo-scandal.
It's crap.
What the hell?
You were doing business in Libya and you were not bribing, said Robert Bothwell.
Hang on, didn't this same story, a few paragraphs earlier, say there was no crime, no financial scandal, nothing?
And now they're quoting a guy saying, all right, fine.
They paid $48 million in bribes.
Sure, but you know, that's how it's done over there.
Stop being so small time.
Oh, and if you thought Goldenberg's racial critique of Jody Wilson-Raybold was weird, get this.
The director of public prosecutions is also nuts, and so is Wilson-Raybold.
These people are delusional.
Delusional?
It's against the law to bribe, to be corrupt, to corrupt a public procurement project, either in Canada or in Libya.
It's illegal, and it's against the law to interfere in a prosecution of such corruption.
That's illegal.
But the Associated Press has found another old liberal to call Jody Wilson-Raybold and the head of public prosecution, who also happens to be a woman, by the way, to call them nuts and delusional.
Maybe they're hysterical.
He left that word out.
Who is this weirdo?
Bothwell.
Look at him.
Who is this weirdo calling everyone else weird?
I'd actually never heard of him, but I had a hunch.
I thought, if you're trying to get this guy, well, I typed in his name to the big online database of Liberal Party donors.
And would you look at that?
He is a year after year multi, liberal donor, if you add it all up.
Funny how that wasn't disclosed in this story.
Remember what Jody Wilson-Raybold said about liars in the media running errands for the prime minister?
He was like, quote, if Jodi is nervous, we would, of course, line up all kinds of people to write op-eds saying that what she is doing is proper, end quote.
Yeah, I guess we've found one of those shills for Trudeau, Rob Gillies and the Associated Press.
Look, they're liars.
They are a fake news factory.
They mislead.
They omit key facts.
They spin.
And I bet that 99% of Americans who read this story simply don't know any better.
I mean, if you read an AP story from Greece or from India or from Thailand, you would take it at face value, wouldn't you?
Wouldn't you?
But because we're from Canada and we've been paying close attention to the story for weeks, we can see the facile lies that they're telling Americans.
Americans should know they're being lied to by the AP.
But Canadians should know it too.
So the next time AP says they're fact-checking someone else, someone, something, anything, next time AP blocks your Facebook search, realize that they are the liars.
And not just random liars.
They're Trudeau's liars.
Stay with us for more.
As we started to see the direction of the voting, I reached out to someone close to me who was at the Javits 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 him 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.
That's an excerpt from an internal Google YouTube staff meeting mere days after Donald Trump surprised left-wing Silicon Valley and won the 2016 presidential election.
Senior executives at Google and YouTube were literally in tears.
And they spoke about Hillary Clinton's campaign in the first person plural, as in we, not she, but we, as if Google itself were an integral part of the campaign team.
That incredible bias continues to this very day.
And joining us now with another incredible story on the subject is the same man who brought us those leaked videos of the Google staff meeting, namely Alan Bokari of Breitbart.com.
Inside Google's Political Purges00:14:24
He's the senior tech reporter over there.
Alam, great to see you again.
Another day, another great story about the politicization of the tech industry.
Tell us a little bit about the case of, and I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name right, Mike Walker or Mike Walker.
Here's your story called Google Manager said company must stop fake news because that's how Trump won.
Tell me a little bit about this Mike Walker and what he did to blow the whistle on them.
Hi, Ezra.
Good to be on.
So this isn't a leak as such because the employee, Mike Wacker, has posted his allegations on Twitter.
So this is a public allegation he's made.
And what he did was he's a software engineer at Google and he went on Twitter and posted an email he received from a colleague with the name redacted.
And his colleague at Google says that when he posted a comment regarding fake news on Google search, someone at the company then reported it to Human Resources, even though he didn't say he was in favor or against just he said he cautioned that we needed to be careful.
What happened next, says this Google employee, was his manager brought it up in his weekly one-to-one meeting and quote made him feel very uncomfortable for having an opposing view.
And here's the crucial part.
He then said, according to this employee, that quote, we need to stop hate speech and fake news because that's how Trump won the election.
So this was Mike Wacker, is he still working for Google?
I mean, we put his tweet up on the screen there while you were talking about him.
So he's obviously going outside the corporation.
He obviously can't get satisfaction to his concerns inside.
Has he been sacked yet or has he quit them already?
Well, his Twitter profile says he's still at the company.
I have every reason to believe he is still at the company.
So he is, I believe, an employee at Google blowing the whistle here.
Wow.
Well, the last time someone was in this position, James DeMoore, who in a very polite manner, I must say, in fact, sort of a nerdy, super polite manner, talked about gender biases and how Google might address those in a way that wasn't, you know, anti-male or something.
I thought it was a very thoughtful discussion.
He was sacked right away.
Do you have any reason to believe that this conservative dissident won't be sacked?
Or do you think they're just making sure they have a legal pretext for doing so?
Well, Google has very little tolerance for any questioning of its political agenda.
So, you know, this Google employee certainly did a very courageous thing by coming out and posting his concerns.
The one thing that might save him here is that, you know, he didn't leak it to anyone.
You know, he's not trying to collude with anyone.
He posted it publicly.
And he says in following tweets that I'll just quote him directly, in these situations, one should first make a reasonable attempt to resolve such matters internally.
I think that's a reasonable point to make.
And then he goes on to say, in both this case and other cases, I have made a good faith attempt to do just that.
However, those attempts did not resolve my concerns, which led me to my current course of action.
And he talks about multiple incidents, multiple concerns, and many conversations that drove him to publish the email.
And he says, you know, this is just a representative example.
It's an isolated incident.
Others have had similar experiences.
So what he's saying is, you know, this isn't just one isolated incident.
It's part of a wider trend he's seen at Google.
And two, he's saying that, you know, he first tried to resolve a matter internally before going public.
And I think that's been a reasonable course of action.
You know, first you try and solve it internally.
And then when that doesn't work, and if it's part of a bigger, wider problem, then I think it's fair to go public and blow the whistle.
Yeah, I mean, he tweeted about human resources at Google.
And when I think of human resources, I think of someone who's behaving badly, someone who's calling sick and isn't really sick, you know, someone who's maybe being sexually gropey or hands-y at work.
I don't think of it as a political hygiene outfit.
I'm reminded that in the former Soviet Union, for example, on a battleship, they would have political officers as well as naval officers.
They would have like a political hygiene inspector making sure everyone on the battleship was being a good communist.
Like they would have bizarre counterproductive things just to ensure ideological conformity.
It sounds like the HR department at Google isn't about normal HR.
Let me read this quote from Mike Walker or Wacker or Walker.
I don't know how to pronounce it.
Here's the one.
Again, this is from your story, Ellen.
In particular, HR, Human Resources, is not impartial.
Their actions provide clear and convincing evidence of favoritism, and they have abused their power and authority.
It sounds like HR is how they dress up their political purges.
They say, oh, no, This isn't politics.
This is just HR.
Yeah, that's actually what I've heard from, you know, many of my own Google sources have said the same thing.
They've been saying the same thing since 2017 when James DeMoore was fired.
And you mentioned his case earlier.
In fact, one of the things that came out in his lawsuit was that when an employee threatened to hound DeMoore over his non-progressive viewpoints, Google's HR department not only failed to take action against the employee who directly threatened him, it actually ended up firing DeMoore instead.
At the same time, Google has, it tolerates Antifa inside the company.
Antifa obviously is this violent organization that regularly threaten and intimidate and in some cases physically attack members of the Republican Party and conservatives.
We've reported in the past on widespread Antifa sympathies within Google.
That was also something that came out in the DeMoore case.
So there's clearly this double standard at Google where the most radical form, radical forms of left-wing behavior, including pretty violent extremist left-wing behavior is tolerated.
Whereas moderate conservatives, not even moderate conservatives, James DeMoore doesn't describe himself as a conservative.
He's just a political moderate and independent, get fired for questioning progressive narratives.
You know, I can only imagine what it's like to work at Google.
We see pictures of their offices, and it looks like these very progressive workplaces where there's beanbag chairs and lots of pinball games.
And it's very childish, frankly.
And maybe they want that childlike sense of discovery.
Maybe that's a good way to run a company.
I don't know.
But I also think about the dystopian view of what it might be like to work in a tech company.
I don't know if you ever watched that science fiction movie called Ex-Machina, which was modeled after, like, I mean, it's a very clear homage to Google and this sort of bizarre, quirky bosses.
And in this case, in the case of Ex-Machina, I'm sorry to talk about science fiction, but it was a dystopian view of how all their employees are sort of spied on by the company itself.
And in that case, and I know this is a work of fiction, I'm just using it as an analogy, that your cell phone is spying on you as you talk, which actually isn't that big of a stretch these days.
I wonder what it's like to work in there.
Is it, are you being constantly monitored?
Like, you know, that Amazon Echo or Alexa, or Google has a version too, I think.
Do you think that every keystroke you make is recorded?
Every conversation you have is listened to.
I think a guy could go crazy with paranoia working in a search engine trying not to have his own mind probed for political.
I mean, not a probe, but like, can you even have a private conversation at Google?
It feels like a creepy place sometimes.
Well, when you talk to employees inside these companies, they do sometimes come off as paranoid.
And certainly every single tech source I know uses some form of secure encrypted communication to contact me.
They don't use any Google products.
They use apps like Signal and Telegram, which are end-to-end encrypted.
They don't collect any data.
And the reason they do all this is because they know the tech companies is not just science fiction.
Cell phones are listening to you and collecting your data.
And inside Google, I know that, and one employee was actually fired over this.
They do monitor what your keystrokes, essentially, they monitor what you search for inside the company.
So if you search for the wrong thing too many times, then you might get fired.
I believe one employee was curious about the James DeMoore case and was searching for files related to it.
And he was fired just for that.
So yeah, Google is, if you're an employee at Google, the general assumption is, yes, they are watching you.
They know what files you're accessing.
They know what searches you're doing inside the company.
Everything is locked.
Wow.
You know, I mean, I can understand a company having privacy and a company wanting to know what the employees are doing in general during work hours.
But that truly sounds like a place that breeds paranoia.
And I think, on the other hand, you know, if I may be permitted one more tangent, you let me talk about a science fiction movie for a minute.
Perhaps you'll give me one more tangent.
And I know a fair number of people who used to live in the former Soviet Union.
And the Soviet Union trapped a lot of people who were free thinkers, free talkers, even just plain old eccentrics, even people with a quirky personality.
They would run up against trouble right away.
But whereas it was oppressive to eccentrics or people who cared about freedom, it was like a Petri dish for those who had an authoritarian streak within them, sociopaths who gamed the system and realized, oh, I can thrive in this authoritarian regime.
I can work the system.
I can be an informant and tip off the KGB or in East Germany, the Stasi.
I can use a security pretext to get rid of a rival, a personal rival, whatever.
And so it trapped the best of people and it brought out the worst in other people.
I bet Google has a perverse culture within it that rewards surveillance and snitching and tattling.
It's just the more I think about what it would be like to work there by this tweet from Mr. Walker and what James DeMore went through, it sounds like a terrible way to live.
Well, yes, I mean, it's sort of like a more extreme example of, you know, what we see with ordinary people on social media and, you know, and conservatives in the media as well.
You know, we have these sort of professional hall monitors almost now in the media whose job it is to monitor the Twitter feeds of people like you and me for anything that can be turned into a negative story, anything that can be used to de-platform us.
And conservatives inside Google face a very similar situation where they're constantly watched by far-left colleagues for anything that can be reported to HR, however slight.
There was one employee we reported on who was reported to HR for sharing a national review article internally.
Oh my God.
You know, national review articles.
You know, I tell you, you're getting me going here.
We've been charged with an offense in Alberta for putting up a billboard that the government didn't like.
And it reminded me of something I learned when I was a kid during the Cold War, and I recently confirmed it.
Alam, you probably know this, that in Romania, you needed to register your typewriter with the police.
You had to take it to the police, you had to apply for a license.
You had to explain why you needed a typewriter, and you had to give them a sample of how that, because each typewriter has a slightly different, like a fingerprint of how the keys would hit the, you have to leave a sample with the police in case your contraband typewriter was found to be writing Samizdat.
So that's an insane way to live.
But at least you could sneak a typewriter.
You could hide one.
You can't hide from Google.
You cannot hide from Google.
No, I actually didn't know that about Romania and the typewriters, but it's potentially much worse today because our versions of typewriters today, things like Google Documents, Gmail, not only does Google control them all and can ban you from them at any time without any recourse, everything you type on there is monitored.
Like when you draft an email on Gmail, Google knows what you've written, even if you haven't, even before you've sent the email.
So if you imagine the Romanian government being able to track every keystroke of every citizen that bought its, that had owned a typewriter, that would be the equivalent of Google.
So it's actually worse than what Romanian communists were capable of.
Suing for Privacy?00:04:14
Yeah.
Well, I tell you, this has been a very depressing conversation, but Alamant reminds me again, and I don't say this just to flatter.
I say this to everyone.
I mean, that you, I believe, are the most important journalist on the most important beat in the free world right now.
And I know that sounds like an over-the-top statement, but it's a theme we come back to time and again on this show.
I truly believe our freedoms are at stake and our politics and our democracy.
And I thank you for the work you're doing.
Thank you, Ezra.
All right, there you have it.
Alan Bokhari, the senior tech correspondent for Breitbart.com.
I encourage you to read his latest story about the one Google employee who had the courage to go public.
Stay with us.
more ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
You know what?
I received a phone call this morning at 7 a.m.
I was up.
It was from Tommy Robinson in the United Kingdom who said, as I'm on trial tomorrow, and I sort of forgot to mention it to you.
I said, what are you talking about?
You've got your contempt of court case on March 22nd.
He said, no, mate, we've also got a case in Peterborough in the United Kingdom at 10 a.m. tomorrow in the county court.
But it's Tommy on the offense.
He's suing the Cambridgeshire police for harassing him.
He was out at a football game.
That's what they call soccer over there with his family.
And he was having lunch in a restaurant with his family, his wife and kids.
And the police barged in.
There must have been half a dozen.
And just sort of in a shocking mood, get out of here.
Get out of here.
Get out of this.
Get out of town.
Get out of this restaurant.
And he was, what are you talking about?
What are you doing?
And he had the presence of mind to film it on his phone.
And his kids were screaming and crying.
And he was saying, what have I done wrong?
And the manager of the restaurant comes up and says, he's just sitting here.
There's no problem.
And the cops eject him and frog march him out of town.
It was insane.
And Tommy's suing them.
And that's actually going to court tomorrow.
And Tommy called me up at 7 a.m. this morning and he said, Ez, I just realized there's not going to be any reporters there that I know.
And if the BBC sends someone, obviously they're there to Barry not to report accurately.
Can you come?
And I said, oh, brother.
I mean, I love to come, but it's a short notice starting the week by totally rearranging the week.
So I said, fine.
So actually, as soon, by the time you watch this, I will actually be on an airplane going to the UK.
I land first thing in the morning and then I drive up to Peterborough.
So I'll be there at 10 a.m.
Be a little sleepy.
And I'm going to cover this case.
And I think it's important because it's Tommy hunting the bad guys instead of being hunted.
And he tells me the police have tried to settle with him a few times.
Obviously, they don't want the information coming out.
They were wearing those body cams, which I think is a great innovation.
It protects both people, citizens, and the police from lies, right?
And Tommy says that he's seen some of the body cam footage where one of the cops who was harassing his family later says on tape, what are we doing here?
This is so wrong or something.
Anyway, I'll let you know what I see in court tomorrow.
So I'm not going to be here Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
I'll come back Thursday night.
So I'll be back in the studio on Friday for my regular nighttime show and for my Battleground show, which I do at 12 noon on Fridays, Eastern time.
But of course, we'll have the show.
We always have a show.
The show must go on.
Sheila and or David Menzies will cover the bases Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for the nighttime show.
And I am sure they will have clips from what I'm doing in Peterborough.
And if you want to get all my updates from Tommy's trial, go to TommyTrial.com.
So that's why I'm not going to be here tomorrow.
I hope you accept my judgment that this is the right thing to do, not only editorially, but politically and to help Tommy.
And I just think that I said, well, can we get someone else to go?
He says, Edis, you got the legal background.
You know my case and people trust you on the Tommy file.
I said, yeah, that's right.
I should go.
So that's where I'm going.
Let me know what you think of that.
Tune in tomorrow when Sheila or David cover Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.