Andrew Scheer’s April 11 Facebook post—publicly visible despite Liberal MP Salma Zahid’s claims—showed outreach to Scarborough Imams, including Omar Subedar, a publisher endorsing Trudeau and wife-beating under Islamic law. His Bukhari Publications promotes Sharia governance, while polls reveal 65% of Canadian Muslims backed Liberals in 2019. Meanwhile, Josh Hawley’s Senate hearing exposed Twitter’s bias against conservatives, like Hunter Avalon’s reinstated YouTube ban, and David Suzuki’s alleged role in pipeline protests. Subedar’s selective language—avoiding "Islamophobia"—and Scheer’s guest vetting raise concerns about outreach strategy. The episode underscores tensions between free speech, religious advocacy, and perceived media bias in Canada’s political landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
He met with some Muslims in the GTA and he posted some pictures and comments to his Facebook account.
Well who did he meet with?
What did he say?
And these folks he met with, what did they say?
I go into it in some detail.
I hope you'll find it interesting.
Hey, before I get to it, can you do me a favor and go to the Rebel.media slash shows and sign up to be a premium member.
First of all, it's cool to say you're a premium member of the Rebel.
I mean, that's pretty cool.
Second of all, it supports us, helps pays the bills.
Third of all, and perhaps most importantly, it gives you access to the video version of my show.
And that's going to be interesting because today I show you what these Facebook photos look like and I show you images from one of the Imam's own website.
I can describe it to you on a podcast, but wouldn't you like to see it with your own eyeballs?
That's what the premium content subscription gets you.
So go to the Rebel.media slash shows, eight bucks a month, do it.
Here is the show.
Tonight, Andrew Scheer does outreach to the Muslim community.
What do liberals think about that?
What do conservatives think about that?
It's April 11th, and this is the Answer 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.
Here's a new tweet from a Muslim member of parliament named Salma Zahid.
She's a liberal.
She says, yesterday Andrew Scheer met with Imams and Muslim leaders in Scarborough, but he didn't tweet about it and access to the Facebook post is restricted.
Why is he hiding this outreach?
Worried about his base?
Does he have different messages for different audiences?
Hmm.
And as you can see by her tweet, it's a Facebook post.
And Zaheed took a screenshot of it.
And it doesn't look particularly secret to me, got to be honest with you.
Looks like a posed photo op that was obviously designed for circulation.
Sheer wrote, as you can see, today I visited with Imams and others from Toronto's Muslim community to reaffirm my commitment to protecting religious freedom and my condemnation of anti-Muslim hatred and bigotry.
Thank you for the important discussion.
Now there's a very interesting choice of words in there.
I'll get back to that in a minute.
Something interesting.
I don't know if you noticed it exactly.
I'll come back.
But let me just finish up with this Salma Zahid, Muslim liberal.
And she seems agitated by this whole thing.
A bit paranoid, maybe even.
She did a series of tweets about it.
Although I'm not sure if she actually did any of this herself or if the liberal war room just told her what to say, as they tend to do these days with women, especially in the Liberal Party.
Anyways, here's a link to the Facebook.
Sorry, this is her next tweet.
She says, so this is a series.
She says, here's a link to the Facebook post.
The gear icon under his name means a customized audience.
His other posts have a globe icon for a global audience.
Who is he allowing to see this post and who is he hiding it from?
I don't think she wrote that herself to you.
Now it sounds a bit weird because Facebook is all about sharing.
Andrew Scheer has almost a quarter million followers.
It's for propagating stories and pictures to his supporters.
I think she's a bit paranoid.
I'm not quite sure.
I'll keep reading.
She did one more tweet.
Let me read her last tweet.
She said, looks like the yellow vestors found out anyway, and they're not happy.
And she links to an antifa left-wing website that grabs a few random Facebook comments from people who criticize Shear's photo op.
Now, I think that's odd because I think her earlier tweet was implying that it was a secret Facebook post.
I'm not even sure if that exists.
And when people later on pointed out, hey, Selma, this whole thing's public.
She writes one last tweet.
She says, to those pointing to the two public posts below, the original one with the restricted view, mouse over the clock icon, and you will see they were actually posted Wednesday afternoon and backdated.
Glad he's reaching out.
Just unclear why his instinct was to hide it.
Okay, she's really getting lost in the weeds there.
But I think as Fred asked, is she really glad that Andrew Scheer is reaching out to Muslims?
I doubt it.
She's a liberal.
The liberals have a lock on the Muslim vote.
Here's a poll suggesting that 65% of Canadian Muslims voted liberal last time.
This was from N. Veronics.
Suggests only 2% voted conservative.
Now, I'm not sure how statistically accurate that is, but I believe it in general because Trudeau made a conscious decision in the 2015 election not to even try and bother to win the Jewish vote.
I mean, look, Stephen Harper had pretty much locked that up by being so pro-Israel, there really was no way to be more pro-Israel than Harper.
And there's never been a Trudeau instinct to be pro-Israel anyway.
Sorry, to out Israel, Harper.
Trudeau's always been hostile to Israel and to Jews, frankly, a little bit.
Trudeau's brother, Alexandre, who was his policy advisor during Justin Trudeau's leadership campaign, I don't know if you remember, but he actually made a propaganda film in cooperation with the dictatorship of Iran called The New Great Game.
And from a sheer mathematical point of view, why bother trying to win over Jews when there are only a few hundred thousand of them in the whole country and there are now four or five times as many Muslims in Canada because of open borders immigration.
So instead of trying to win the Jews, Trudeau appointed as his right-hand campaign organizer this guy, Omar Al-Jabra, the Saudi-born former head of the Canadian Arab Federation, an anti-Semitic NGO that actually called for the terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, to be legalized in Canada.
Al-Jabra would condemn Canadian officials even visiting Israel.
He's so extreme, he had Trudeau go to even the most dangerous mosques in Canada to campaign, including a mosque in Montreal called the Asuna Wahhabi Mosque, that the U.S. Pentagon says was a hotspot for recruiting terrorists.
Here's Trudeau bragging about campaigning there.
Because I spend a lot of time running from the Bangladeshi to the Pakistani to the Magadha to the Asuna Wahhabi Mosque.
I cover all the different communities.
It's clear now that the SNC Lavalan thing has blown a hole in the side of the Liberal Party's ship.
And now that the carbon tax is becoming more and more unpopular.
So what can Liberals talk about these days?
They've decided everyone who isn't a liberal is just a racist.
An Islamophobia.
In the past 24 hours alone, half of Trudeau's cabinet has repeated the exact same talking points about the threat of neo-Nazis and white supremacists and Islamophobes in Canada.
It's the number one issue to the liberals.
Just in the last 24 hours, they've decided this.
If all else fails, call people racist.
Now, they used to call Canadians sexists too, but they can't really do that now that Trudeau has proven himself to be a fake feminist.
But look at this.
They're all, all, all, all calling conservatives racist.
It's pitiful, but it's all they have left.
And the media party runs with it.
All right, enough about the liberals.
I just wanted to show you, first of all, the weird messaging by Salma Zahid, the liberal, or whoever wrote her tweets for her, and how the liberals are making their desperate last six months before the election all about calling people racist.
But back to Andrew Scheer's actual visit.
And actually those Facebook images of it.
It's not hidden.
It's the first thing you see when you go to his Facebook page.
At least it was the first thing I saw.
It doesn't look hidden to me.
And back to the message wording for a second.
Let me read that to you again.
Today I visited with Imams and others from Toronto's Muslim community to reaffirm my commitment to protecting religious freedom and my condemnation of anti-Muslim hatred and bigotry.
Thank you for the important discussion.
Now there are more than a million Muslims in Canada.
Many are citizens.
It is appropriate that the leader of the opposition and a man who would be prime minister meets with them, with any group of Canadians.
He seeks to be the prime minister for the whole country.
He says he reaffirms his commitment to religious freedom.
That sounds good to me.
Of course, our Canadian ideas of religious freedom are quite different than religious freedom in Islamic countries, like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Omar al-Jabra is from Saudi Arabia.
In places like that, Islam is dominant and superior, and all other religions are either banned or submissive.
In fact, in Mecca, infidels aren't even allowed to visit the city.
So I'm sure Andrew Scheer meant the Canadian version of freedom of religion.
And he says he condemns, quote, anti-Muslim hatred and bigotry.
That's what I wanted to focus on a moment ago, because that's different than the leftist word, Islamophobia.
Islamophobia is a made-up word, of course, but it means people who are afraid of Islam.
But Islam is a religion, a doctrine, a set of ideas, a political philosophy.
Muslims, by contrast, are individual people.
Some might be religious, some aren't.
Some are religious in different ways.
Some are political, some aren't.
So saying you're against anti-Muslim bigotry means you're against the baseless hatred of someone because they are a Muslim person.
Which is different than saying you're against hatred or fear of Islam, the religion.
And that's a very important distinction, because that is the deliberate tactic of the left, that vocabulary, Islamophobia, because it calls you a bigot, a hater, if you dissent from the Muslim religion of Islam or the politics of Islam, which you surely must do, by the way, if you are a Christian or a Jew or Hindu or Sikh, because it's incompatible.
You can't agree to the theology of Islam and be a Christian or a Jew.
It's incompatible.
In fact, I know a number of Muslims who are anti-Islam, against the doctrine.
I know a number of ex-Muslims, a number of Muslim reformers.
The phrase Islamophobia is used to shut up any criticism of Islam as a religion, just to shut them down.
So I noticed the wording.
Shear didn't say Islamophobia, and I'm glad he didn't.
Advice on Maintaining a Marriage00:09:39
And I immediately noticed, as I am absolutely sure you did, these two women, these two young Muslim women who are not wearing hijabs, let alone niqabs.
In fact, as you can see, he's making physical contact with at least one of them and their pretty hair.
That's the main photo on his page, as you saw.
There are only those two women in all of the pictures associated with this Muslim meetup.
The rest are men.
Look at this.
Look around the table there.
You can see, yeah, there are the two women there.
Flip back to that last photo for a second.
Oh, go back a little bit.
You can see one of the women on the left, the second one in, and one of them you can just see your hands on the right, but there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen guys.
So it's just the two attractive women and the guys.
So it's a very strategic choice.
Only two women.
And it shows that Andrew Scheer is friendly with Muslims, but not with Islamism or symbols of political Islam, which the Niqab and the Hijab are.
That's such a hot issue right now in Quebec, especially because of the Bill 21 Birkhapan.
But here's the photo, and I flashed it for a second there.
Here's the photo that Andrew Scheer took that is halal.
No women in this picture, just the Muslim men who will feel free to publish it on their mosque websites because those two uncovered girls aren't in the shot.
Now, I don't know who those two guys are on the right, the guy on the right and the guy right next to Shear.
I'll dig into it more.
I'm doing some research on it, but I absolutely and immediately recognize that guy on the left.
His name is Omar Subedar.
That's his name.
Here's his Facebook page.
He's an Islamic teacher, publisher, unelected politician, a big wheel.
He's a huge fan of Justin Trudeau.
They've met so many times, and Subedar has promoted Trudeau so much.
He's also a huge fan of Patrick Brown, the disgraced former leader of the Ontario BCs, who was driven out because of a sex scandal.
Now, I know Omar Subedar because he has a lot to say.
Obviously, he's an anti-Israel extremist.
This is from his Facebook page, a page saying Israel doesn't exist, has never existed, pro-PLO.
I mean, obviously, it goes without saying he's obsessed with anti-Israel, anti-PLO memes.
That's not even news these days.
He's cleaned up his Facebook page a bit since I last did a report on him.
But just for example, he shared a page called There Is No Israel.
But in the word Israel, the S was a dollar sign.
He calls Israel an apartheid state.
Of course, he does.
He says it's a puppet of NATO to colonize Muslim Arabia and steal their oil.
He supports George Galloway, the anti-Semitic British politician who has publicly given money to the Hamas terrorist group.
That's sort of gross that that's one of Shear's new friends.
But in addition to preaching and Facebooking, he's also a lecturer and a publisher.
This is his company, Bukhari Publications.
He now calls it Bukhari Academy.
And I know this from when I reported it back in the Sun News after Trudeau slithered up to this guy.
Subedar publishes books.
He publishes advice to Canadian Muslims on how to live.
He wants people to live according to the laws of Islam.
That's Sharia law.
He believes in the theocracy.
And one of the things that this Omar Subedar is an expert about is how to treat women.
He's a ladies' man, so to speak, an expert.
He's got lots of lady advice, and he shares it with the men in his community.
Here's some advice he wrote called Maintaining a Marriage.
Maintaining a marriage.
Andrew Scheer's new friend starts off by explaining that in Islam, Allah has, and I quote, He has made the husband officially in charge of managing the relationship by saying men are in charge of women.
And he says, Allah has given precedence to men over women.
And he says, the wives, on the other hand, have an obligation to be obedient to their husbands.
Now, maybe he's just being what we might call old-fashioned.
I mean, no problem, right?
I mean, obedience, I'm sure he doesn't mean in the way that a child has to be obedient or a pet has to be obedient, right?
Well, let's let Omar Subedar speak for himself.
He says, if for some reason the wife becomes stubborn, arrogant, or disobedient, even after the husband is doing his part, then Allah has introduced a three-point dispute resolution plan.
Whew, did you know that?
The first, says Omar Subedar, is for the man to give his wife some advice, to sit her down and tell her the way things are going to go.
But what if that doesn't go so well?
Well, the second point in this three-point plan is, and I quote, forsake them in bed.
If the problem persists after exercising the first measure, then the husband should refrain from having sexual relations with her.
I'm not making that up.
Now, I'm not sure how many women watching my photo would think that refraining from relations with this fella is a punishment.
But look, shakuna songgu.
Everyone's got their tastes.
There's someone out there for each of us.
Thank God.
Look, I'm just joking around, but it's step three that is the real cause for worry.
I mean, Omar Subedar going on a sex strike is one thing, but let me quote to you point three.
This is Andrew Scheer's new friend.
So just to recap, step one, to a disobedient wife is to give them advice, give them a lecture.
Step two is to punish them by not having sex with them.
But here's step three, and I quote verbatim at length so you'll see the whole context.
This is Andrew Scheer's new friend, Omar Subedar, who says, strike them.
If the problem still does not get resolved, then as a final resort, Allah has permitted the husband to discipline his wife by striking her.
However, this does not imply that Allah is promoting domestic violence.
The Prophet, praise be unto him, has made it very clear that the beating should not be agonizing in any shape or form.
He mentioned in the sermon during his farewell pilgrimage, and hit them lightly.
The objective of striking her lightly is to discipline her and to make her realize that what she's doing is unwarranted.
So he's telling Canadians, in English, to beat their wives.
Now he's clearly a moderate because he said, now don't make it agonizing, fellas.
You just got to hit them lightly.
You know, light punch.
Don't break any bones, fellas.
Just a light slap, okay?
He actually goes on to recommend a foot-long, heavy stick.
That's how they do it in the old country.
But not agonizing, fellas, all right?
I swear to God, this is what this guy's publishing here in Canada.
Not back in Pakistan, here in Canada, in English.
It's what he does for a living.
And he has thousands in his flock.
His advice on how to handle women, strike them.
Allah has permitted it.
Just don't make it agonizing.
Just hit her.
She deserves it.
Allah says.
Now, like many Canadians, I have Muslim friends.
Like most Canadians, I reject Islam, the religion.
It's not incompatible to have Muslim friends, to like Muslims, to reject the religion.
We do that with every religion.
Separation of church and state, separation of mosque and state.
In fact, many Muslims come to Canada themselves to get away from Sharia law and to get away from Muslim Imams who tell men that it's okay to beat their wives.
Now, of course, Justin Trudeau loves this guy, and the feeling is mutual.
But Andrew Scheer, does he know who Omar Subedar is and what his views on wife beating are?
I'm not sure which is worse.
If Andrew Scheer just doesn't know, or if he does know, and per Sama Zahid's weird Twitter conspiracy theory, somehow tried to keep his particular choice of new friends on the lowdown.
Which do you think happened?
Stay with us for more.
Search Results Manipulated00:14:46
Welcome back.
Well, a funny thing happened to me yesterday when I was making my video about things Jason Kenney could do to stop environmental extremists in Alberta.
And one of the things I wanted to show was a new law introduced in South Dakota against riot boosting.
That's a new word I had never heard before.
It means people who promote, agitate, fund, organize riots.
They call it riot boosting.
So I typed into Google, as you can see here, riot boosting law South Dakota.
It doesn't get more precise than that.
But look at the results that came up.
The very first one is a rebuttal to the law by the ACLU, then an environmental condemnation of it, then another condemnation, then the ACLU rebutting it again, and then again and again, left-wing or environmental groups denouncing the bill.
The very last item on the first page is a Washington Post story that's neutral.
But in that first list of 10 results, you'd think I would have the riot-boosting law South Dakota, but in fact I did not.
I had to keep searching more and more and more and clicking through more and more and more anti-riot boosting commentary before I could get to the thing that was being criticized.
You see what I'm saying?
I wanted to see a document, an official document, so official it's on the government's own website.
But Google would not let me get to that document, even though I described it perfectly, without first making me look at a dozen rebuttals, counterpoints, and denunciations.
Had I grown bored or lost interest, I never would have got what I was searching for.
Now, was that the fact that typing in riot-boosting law South Dakota wasn't clear enough?
Was there some reason that that was pushed down and the criticisms were pushed up?
Well, I'll never know.
But our next guest says that there are things afoot that we don't know that the U.S. Congress is trying to find out.
I'm talking about our friend Alan Bokhari, the senior tech correspondent for Breitbart.com.
Alan, great to see you again.
Good to see you, Ezra.
What do you think of my little anecdote?
It's just a personal story, but I found it quite odd that I described a law in a state perfectly, and yet it did not show up in the first dozen or so hits, but criticisms did.
I wanted to see it.
It wouldn't let me.
That is interesting, and we know during the net neutrality debate, these tech companies were artificially promoting – well, it certainly looked that they were pushing pro-net neutrality posts up their search results.
Now, the idea of Google search engine manipulation has actually been alleged by Donald Trump.
The mainstream media called it a conspiracy theory, of course, but it's actually been proven now because a couple of months ago, Breitbart released an exclusive story in which a hidden blacklist was found within Google that allowed the company to manually adjust search results on YouTube.
And in that same leak, a member of Google's trust and safety team admitted that they occasionally do the same thing for so-called controversial search results on Google's main search engine.
So it's now been confirmed, thanks to these Google leaks, that Google manipulated search results on YouTube and on its main search engine.
And they're doing so for political topics.
On YouTube, they deliberately adjusted their search algorithm to kick pro-life videos out of the top 10 search results.
We've now seen news from other sources that Google pushes conservative websites out of new search results.
So this is all confirmed now.
The Democrats, of course, will still call it a conspiracy theory because it's in their interest to do so, but the facts speak for themselves.
Yeah, I mean, I, of course, have been watching the marginalization of Tommy Robinson in the United Kingdom.
We here at the Rebel have tasted some of that censorship, but I would have thought that something as official as a government, a state legislature of South Dakota, would be immune to this.
No, that actual government legislature, the Senate of South Dakota, was pushed below a far left-wing activist group called the ACAU.
It was just a little tasty example.
And I just, I wonder how much of the world around me that I think I know is not real, because if so much of our world comes from the internet and what we search, if someone's putting their finger on the scale, we start to lose touch with reality, don't we?
Because we, I mean, we walk around in real life, Alam, and we try and observe things, but we think the internet is a window, but it's a very contorted lens.
It's not a clear glass window, is it?
Not at all.
And it's an interesting example that you use because Google and YouTube maintain in public that they're non-political in their approach to search, that they only, if they promote certain sources, it's only to promote so-called authoritative sources.
But there's nothing more authoritative than a government website.
So it's very surprising to me that that government document was so hard to find on Google search, whereas left-wing advocacy organizations were so easy to find.
Of course, on YouTube with the re-ranking of abortion results that I mentioned, the so-called authoritative sources were all left-wing pro-abortion propaganda.
Now, as you said, this is quite insidious and it's hard to discern.
In fact, there's been research showing that search engine bias is a lot more dangerous than media bias because ordinary users of Google search and other similar services, they just automatically trust the first page of search results.
It hasn't registered with people that these results could be manipulated.
And the vast majority of users, I don't know the exact number, but it's well over 70%, possibly over 90%, will not go past the first two pages of search results.
And more than half will not go past the first five search results.
So if you manipulate those search results, especially on a controversial, politically charged topic like abortion or the environment, then you can easily control what people are seeing and what information they receive in this supposedly free internet.
Yeah.
Well, forgive me for indulging by telling you that personal search experience, but I use Google probably 100 times a day for trivia, for a restaurant, for a map.
And the fact that I can no longer trust it is deeply unsettling to me.
I think it is also to some people in the U.S. Senate, not as many as it should.
But your reporting in Breitbart.com tells us that there's recently been an inquiry in the Senate led by Ted Cruz and other senators have participated.
Tell us a little bit about this latest round of investigations.
Is it Twitter that's in the hot seat now?
Well, Twitter, Facebook, and Google were all supposed to send representatives to this hearing in the Senate, which took place yesterday.
Google once again declined to send a high-ranking member of their team, so the lower-ranking member they wanted to send was simply denied by the senators.
And interestingly, this hearing came just one day after a Democrat hearing in the House, the House Judiciary Committee, now run by Russia gate pusher Jerry Nadler.
And it's interesting to watch the contrast between those two hearings.
In the first one, the Democrat-controlled one, it was all about hate speech and extremism online and how the social media platform needed to do more to stop it.
So that hearing was pressuring the social media companies to do more censorship and be more politically biased.
Whereas the second one in the Senate, still controlled by Republicans, was organized by Ted Cruz, who's been very vocally opposed to Silicon Valley bias, one of the earliest senators to speak out on it, possibly the earliest.
And that really exposed how Silicon Valley actually is censoring conservatives.
And what I found interesting about it was Ted Cruz started the discussion by framing it around solutions.
So it's not retreading oil around.
We already know that they're biased.
So Cruz is outlining how it could be tackled with potentially antitrust law, with reform of legislation to strip their immunity if they don't stop acting in a biased, non-neutral manner.
And there were several key moments, key stand-up moments in the hearing.
You know, Twitter's representatives were left speechless at one point because they've consistently avoided giving a straight answer to the question, are you a neutral platform?
But what's the problem with the cloud?
I think we have a few of them that we've taken, I think, from Breitbart, actually.
Let's play about a minute or so.
This is Ted Cruz pressing Twitter on, are you neutral that all people have like a stage that any theater that any actor could rent to put on a play?
Or are you a publisher that chooses and curates and edits and censors?
Let's run a bit of that clip, and I think this is taken directly from Breitbart.
Gentlemen, let me start with a question that I have asked both of your companies more than once, which is a simple and straightforward question that I'd like to get a simple and straightforward answer to, which is, and let's start with you, Mr. Manje, does Twitter consider itself a neutral public fora?
Twitter strives every day to be an impartial platform where all voices can come and speak.
Mr. Manje, you answered this recently in the House and gave an answer that was a long paragraph and it didn't answer it.
So I'm going to try.
I don't actually expect to get an answer because I've asked you this before.
But are you able to answer yes or no, whether you consider yourself a neutral public forum?
I didn't testify in the House, sir.
I'll answer the same way.
Please please do that.
Which is that Twitter is an open internet platform where people from all stripes and political affiliations all around the globe come and speak.
So recently, the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, said, quote, I don't believe that we can afford to take a neutral stance anymore.
I don't believe that we should optimize for neutrality.
Does this represent the policy of Twitter?
I have not seen that quote, sir.
Do you agree with it?
That is not how he is building the platform and how everybody who comes to Twitter every day.
I think it's important to note, sir, that three-quarters of our users are overseas and that we are a global company that is staffed globally.
All right, Mr. Yeah, I don't know what that answers to questions that were not asked, no answers to questions that were asked.
That's got to be frustrating for Senator Cruz or for anyone who wants an answer to that.
Yeah, and Cruz said at the start, you know, part of the hearing was about transparency and getting some answers on how tech companies actually enforce their policies.
And clearly, that wasn't happening at that committee.
But it's important that the questions were asked.
And as you all saw in that clip, there was one point where Twitter's representative couldn't answer about 10 seconds.
And it wasn't just Cruz also.
There were other senators at the hearing.
What we're seeing in the Senate now is a sort of new group of Republican firebrands who are very, very focused on the tech issue.
You have Josh Hawley as well, who's been taking Google to task especially.
And you also had Marsha Blackburn on the same committee.
She herself was a target of Silicon Valley censorship during the 2018 midterm election.
She had her ads banned by Facebook and Twitter.
So we are going to see, I think, more attention given to this issue in the Republican-controlled Senate.
But at the same time, the Democrats and the House are now using their control of committees to pressure Silicon Valley to do more censorship.
So we're really seeing this battle emerging for control of social media with the Republicans pushing for less censorship and the Democrats pushing for more.
And they're both going to use their political weight to achieve that.
What worries me is that when a Democrat threatens a tech company, the tech companies know it's going to be backed with regulation because the Democrats won't hesitate to legislate.
Whereas Republicans still have this faction of free market conservatives who just want a totally hands-off approach, despite the fact, as I believe it was Ted Cruz who said on the committee that these companies are now bigger and more powerful than Standard Oil, than Bell Telephones, than all the other monopolies that have been broken up and regulated in America's history.
I have to say that if I once thought that Donald Trump might be the man like Teddy Roosevelt to trust-bust the Silicon Valley giants, I no longer believe he has that zip in him.
I just don't see it.
If a guy won't build a wall, I don't think he's going to bust up the social media trust.
Let me play a clip.
You mentioned Josh Hawley from Missouri.
I am not familiar with him.
And that's one of the good things about these senators who are taking a run at it.
They're younger, they're more tech-savvy.
In some earlier iterations of these Capitol Hill grillings, it's clear that the people who are asking questions maybe at most have a Facebook page at home that their kids show them how to use.
So Ted Cruz seems to know stuff.
And here's a clip of Josh Hawley in the Senate, who I think clearly knows his stuff.
Take a look.
There are protocols on any number of issues, yes, sir.
And including about deplatforming.
Let me explain.
First, just answer that question.
Is there a protocol?
There are many workflows and protocols and you make the protocols public for the review of when you ban people like the Unplanned movie and Jesse Kelly.
We make those protocols as it relates to the human reviewers.
Will you make those public?
I think you're aiming at a very important question, which is transparency.
Why don't you just first answer my question?
Will you make those public?
Will you commit today to me?
You said earlier that you are a pro-transparency company, that you want to embrace transparency.
So you have your chance now.
Tell us you'll make the protocols public.
Will you make them public?
It's not up to me to make them public, sir.
I mean, again, the reference there for folks who don't understand, there is a pro-life movie that was simply deleted from Twitter.
Push the Wrong Button00:06:00
Their account, Jesse Kelly, a humorous conservative commentator from Texas, simply deleted.
And it was later found out it was done by humans, obviously, not just an algorithm, and they would not explain the rationale.
All the errors, Alam, seem to go one way.
In fact, I can't even ever remember a liberal or a Democrat being deplatformed at all, let alone by mistake.
Just a quick note, and I'm not sure if you know this, Alam, one day we went to our Facebook page and it said, you've broken the terms of service in a post.
Press the button to unpublish your whole page.
They didn't tell us what we did wrong, what post out of our thousands did it.
And the only button we pushed, there wasn't a yes or no, it was unpublish your whole page or not.
And I got in touch with senior Facebook executives here in Canada, and they, after hours, said, oh, it was a glitch.
That was all they would say.
It was a glitch.
So the glitches only happen one way, don't they?
Absolutely.
And YouTube as well.
They recently permanently banned Hunter Avalon, who's a very mainstream conservative YouTuber who had over 500,000 subscribers.
And then about an hour later, they reinstated him, saying it was all a mistake and error.
So this always happens to conservatives, and it always happens one way.
And you also have to think about Audenrigg grassroots conservatives who aren't able to get a response from the press departments of these massive companies.
They're probably being banned by accident every day without any recourse.
And this is, you know, Josh Hawley is really a sinner to watch on this issue because he really understands it inside out.
And he asks exactly the right question.
Why aren't these protocols public?
We know that Twitter has an algorithm that suspends people and we know it goes for manual review.
We don't know who does the manual reviewing.
We need to know that if we're going to hold them accountable.
Yeah, you're so right.
I mean, I actually didn't have a friend at Facebook.
I just went onto LinkedIn and I spammed every single person on the Canadian executive list of Facebook.
I just, I mean, imagine just saying, you've done something wrong.
We're not going to tell you what you did wrong.
We're not going to tell you when you did it wrong.
But take our word for it, you did something wrong sometime.
And therefore, push this button and you will be the one who deletes your own website.
That was the weirdest part of it.
They didn't have the courage or the intellectual honesty to delete our website.
They said, so push this button.
And it was only one button.
Alum, there wasn't a yes or a no.
It was now you destroy your own.
Now take the pill.
It was so, so weird.
And again, I find myself talking about me and the rebel.
I don't particularly mean to, other than I think we are, like Breitbart is in the United States, we are the target of this in Canada most acutely.
Are you optimistic or are you pessimistic here?
Are things getting better or worse?
Well, I'm optimistic about the Senate because we've got these new senators now who really do understand the tech issue.
But at the same time, you've got Democrats applying pressure in the other direction from the House.
And as you said, the executive branch, Trump has talked a lot, tweeted a lot about social media censorship and bias.
But at the same time, he has people like Jared and Ibanka in the White House who, certainly Jared, I think, agrees with the liberals on this and is quite friendly to Silicon Valley.
He gave them extra protection to the USNCA, the new trade bill.
I think the point about errors and suspensions highlights one of the points Cruz made, which is that Section 230 reform is absolutely essential to solving this problem.
That's the piece of legislation that says tech companies are allowed to censor use-generated content without any recourse.
If that part of Section 230 came out, suddenly the courts would open up to ordinary users who want to actually hold these companies account for mistaken suspensions.
And I think then you'd see companies becoming a lot more cautious about who they suspend and why.
And hopefully, the end goal, I think, for all users should be acquiring, winning back, taking back control from the social media giants.
Yeah.
Because if you go back.
Sorry, go ahead, Alam.
I didn't mean to interrupt you.
Yeah, just to close the point, it's all about giving control back to the users.
There's absolutely no reason for any social media company to ban lawful content.
If people don't want to see certain types of lawful content filtered out of their feed, they should be given the choice to do that, but it shouldn't be imposed on them by Silicon Valley.
There's no reason to do that.
The same algorithms used to suspend certain types of content can be turned into optional filters that users press and press a button to turn on or off, just like Google Safe Search.
The technology is already there.
They have it.
The reason they aren't doing it is because they want to keep that control and because Democrats and the media are pressuring them to keep that control.
Yeah, it's just as bad up here in Canada.
Another day we'll have to have you help us analyze the threatening moves by Karina Gould, the so-called Democratic Reform Minister up here, or Democratic Institutions Minister who is moving to censor the internet.
You know, Alam, I was going to close by saying the best thing that could happen would be for Twitter to ban Donald Trump in a fit of censorship because finally he would understand how catastrophic this will be to his presidency.
But as soon as I was formulating those words in my mind, I thought, well, hang on, they are banning him.
On several occasions now, they've simply deleted videos that he's tweeted.
So they're sort of conditioning even him that they will censor him if they bloody well please.
Last word to you.
And Facebook banned his immigration video during the 2018 election campaign.
I mean, that's open election interference with a campaign video from the president.
And Twitter actually did delete his account.
They called it a rogue employee.
Twitter's Censorship Cycle00:04:45
Another one of those mistakes.
So, you know, it's already happened.
They're already suspending all of his supporters.
They're already suppressing pro-Trump populist media on Google search.
It's already happening.
It's just, you know, the question is, what is he going to do about it?
Well, this is terrifying stuff.
Hopefully, neither you nor I will simply be unpersoned, deplatformed, and evaporated like the South Dakota riot boosting law is being thrown down the memory hole.
That is so bizarre because there is nothing more official than the legislature of South Dakota, but apparently that's not legit enough for Google.
Great to see you again, Alam.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks, Israel.
All right.
There's our friend Alan Bokari, the senior tech editor of Breitbart.com.
Stay with us.
more ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday about six things Jason Kenney could do to get Alberta's oil and gas sector back on his feet.
March writes, virtually every member of the mainstream media is a riot booster.
And Trudeau and Obama and Notley, and especially the most prominent CBC hosts.
Well, you're not speaking metaphorically.
David Suzuki, perhaps the most prominent CBCer now that Gian Gameshi was cashiered, he personally attended the riots in Burnaby against the Transmountain pipeline, or at least the illegal blockade.
I'm not sure if he was there when the rioting happened, but I know he came to give support whether it was before or after the riots.
So yeah, they don't just do it through the media.
They do it in person.
Hansen writes, great recommendations, Ezra.
If those could be passed in BC, I'd be happy to see David Suzuki get charged and put away for riot boosting.
Well, yeah, I mean, riot boosting, we have incitement to riot.
We have conspiracy.
This just makes it very particular, and it allows people to sue civilly, and I think you get triple damages.
So let's say you're an oil company and someone smashed up your terminal and cost you $50,000 in damages.
You can sue and get triple.
That would make these environmental groups avoid you.
Ron writes, while what you propose for Kenny is worth adopting, I don't see how it will get pipelines built.
You're correct.
It's not going to get pipelines built if there are these three problems.
Number one, Justin Trudeau.
Number two, BC's Premier Horgan.
And number three, the courts.
You're right.
Yeah, you're right.
I think we need to change the culture to demonize and denormalize the law-breaking scoff law foreign lobbyists and to normalize working.
Trump is doing that in America.
When he showed up at that campaign rally with a sign that said Trump digs coal, a decade worth of coal demonization was stopped in its tracks.
Now, there's still a lot more work to do, but Trump doesn't demonize coal like Obama did and like Trudeau does.
Speaking of Trump, I think he may be the only pipeline Alberta gets in the next five years.
The Keystone Excel.
On my interview with Mark Murano, Anna writes, Greta Thunberg really creeps me out.
Also, she has these crazy eyes.
Reminds me of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes.
You were so right about it on your show last night.
I have the same feeling she has successfully started a mass psychosis among her peers, which spreads like a wildfire.
It reminds me of the Children's Crusade from 1212.
She does have crazy eyes, and I'm not saying, like, you know, some people are cross-eyed.
I'm not making fun like that.
I'm not even making fun of how she looks.
I'm talking about what she does.
She styles her hair with the pigtails, and she dresses like a child of tender years, although Mark told me yesterday, I think, that she's 16.
And the way she looks like that, that's not a mannerism or a tick.
That is dramatic acting, and it's super creepy.
I think it really is creepy.
I have to look into the Child's Crusade of 1212 because even just hearing those words is creepy, but I want to learn because surely there's nothing new under the sun.
And if there was some childish cult 800 years ago, perhaps what we're seeing in this global warming mania is an echo of that.
Deciding to Invite Guests00:00:56
Thanks for the tip.
Well, what do you think about my review of Omar Subedar?
If you were Andrew Scheer, would you meet with him?
Do you think he did his due diligence on that guy and said, look, I just got to meet with him.
I just got to meet with somebody.
I can tell he put some thought into it.
There were two uncovered, attractive Muslim women who were prominent in the photos.
That sends a different message than covered hijabis.
He did not use the word Islamophobia.
He said anti-Muslim bigotry, which is more precise and therefore doesn't sweep up legitimate criticism of Islam.
I don't know if he vetted his guest list.
And if he did, I wonder why he decided it was okay.
We'll have to ask him one day.
I'm sure he'll sit down for an interview with us any day now.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rubber World Headquarters, you at home.