Ezra Levant and Alan Bokhari expose World Press Freedom Day (May 3rd) as a farce, revealing how governments like Trudeau’s $595M media bailout and tech giants—Google, Facebook, Twitter—orchestrate censorship, banning conservative figures like Laura Loomer and Alex Jones while demonizing outlets like The Rebel and Breitbart. A Google Canada study, excluding The Rebel, underscores ideological targeting, while Trump’s focus on mainstream media over Silicon Valley’s power risks repeating 2016’s deplatforming tactics. Unchecked corporate control of speech threatens democracy itself. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, it's World Press Freedom Day, which to most people means World Censorship Day.
By most people at least, I mean people in power, Facebook, Google, places like that.
They took the opportunity to censor conservatives.
And Justin Trudeau announced a whole bunch of plans to root out what he calls fake news.
Fake news, of course, is defined by any news that he doesn't like.
It's on my podcast today, and I talked to Alan Bokhari about it.
He's a senior tech editor at Breitbart.com.
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All right.
Here's today's podcast.
Tonight, it's World Press Freedom Day, which means it's actually censorship day.
It's May 3rd, 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 is government.
But why publish them?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Freedom.
Look at it.
It means being free from something.
And the biggest something we have to be free from these days is government.
That applies especially to the media.
Since while it's important to hold corporations to account and to hold individuals to account and other organizations, unions, clubs, whatever, the most important political function of the media is to shine a light of public scrutiny on the government.
So being free from the government is what we generally mean by press freedom.
Yes, there are other threats to free speech, to a free press, especially now that social media companies like Google and Facebook rival the government in power, but essentially it's the government and the corruption of those big companies is at the hands of the government most of the time.
I tell you that, because when the government therefore declares that it's World Press Freedom Day, that's the moment to check to make sure your wallet's still in your pocket because you're about to be fleeced.
I mean, the government promising to protect free speech is like a fox telling you they really want to make sure everything at the hen house is okay.
You leave it to me.
It's Robert Conquest's third law.
Remember that one?
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Now, if you're wondering what that means, the example I always like to give is a city's taxi commission.
It's usually dedicated to keeping out forms of transportation, just the same way the Dairy Commission is dedicated to keeping out foreign dairy.
You get my point.
And look at this from our dearly beloved Justin Trudeau.
Statement by the Prime Minister on World Press Freedom Day.
You know, it's like when Trudeau says how much he likes women, he supports women, what a feminist he is.
You know, it's something we would just know if it were true.
If you truly, you know, respect women, you don't go around saying it all the time.
The fact that he never shuts up about it is sort of a clue that it's not true.
Same thing with press freedom.
Let me read a bit from his statement.
Today we celebrate the important role journalists play around the world.
We also take a hard look at the current state of press freedom and remember those who have died in pursuit of the truth.
All right, so far so good.
I go no beef with that.
But then get this.
The theme of this year's World Press Freedom Day is media for democracy, journalism and elections in times of disinformation.
Journalists today face grave and throwing growing challenges in their work to provide the public with reliable and quality information.
Oh, I didn't know that freedom in the press had themes.
I thought it was just freedom, you know.
But no, it's only the freedom for a certain kind of journalism.
And look there, Trudeau thinks that journalism that has disinformation about elections, that's not good.
So you see, journalists have grave challenges, says Trudeau, but not from him or other governments.
No, he's their savior, as this press release shows.
The enemy of good journalists is bad journalists, and Trudeau will be the decider of who is who.
Like when the Global Mail broke the huge story about Trudeau firing his Attorney General, Jodi Wilson-Raybold, when she refused to drop criminal charges against his friends at SNC Labland.
Remember what he said about that story?
The allegations in the Globe story this morning are false.
Neither the current nor the previous Attorney General was ever directed by me or by anyone in my office.
Except it wasn't fake news, was it?
It was 100% true.
Trudeau called it unreliable or disinformation and whatever else he said, but in fact, it was accurate.
Imagine if Trudeau would be the arbiter about reporting about Trudeau.
Yeah, that's what he wants to do.
Let me read some more.
The digital age has made sharing information easier than ever before, but it has also given way to online spaces that peddle disinformation and reduce complex issues into oversimplified, toxic us versus them narratives.
Journalists increasingly find themselves competing in these online spaces against malicious foreign agents and opinion makers who would rather manipulate people and foam and division than inform the public and create a common set of facts.
Okay, got it.
So Justin Trudeau is telling us that it's toxic to have an us versus them narrative, unless it's Trudeau, and he's calling his enemies, oh, I don't know, climate deniers, or when Trudeau's best friend, Gerald Butts, actually called me and the rebel a Jewish Nazi because I criticized Trudeau.
So that's not toxic, you have to understand.
But Trudeau wants you to know the enemy of journalism is not him.
It's journalists, or at least ones he doesn't like.
Good to know.
Let me read some more.
Independent fact-based reporting is vital.
Few professions have the power and responsibility to enrich conversations, open people to new ideas and perspectives, and widen the lens on the challenges we face.
But journalism actually isn't a profession.
It's an activity.
It's not like being a medical doctor or an engineer where there are professional standards.
Anyone can be a journalist, and Trudeau sort of hates that now, because that means anyone anywhere can say anything about him, not just professional journalists he can control either through threats or outright financial bribes or just who gets to be a journalist.
We all get to be journalists in a democracy.
Let me read some more.
By introducing measures to support Canadian journalism and provide better internet access to underserved communities, the government of Canada is taking steps to make sure Canadians have access to reliable and trustworthy news sources.
Hmm.
So he's talking about, when he says, support the media, he's talking about his $595 million media bailout there.
That's what he means by support Canadian journalism.
Does anyone actually believe that will make the press freer?
Do you believe it?
And he says he's going to help us figure out what journalists to trust.
Oh, okay.
And then get this.
This summer, Canada and the United Kingdom will also co-host a media freedom conference in London to find ways to combat disinformation and support and defend media against censorship, imprisonment, personal attacks, and abuse.
It is unacceptable that journalists face these threats and more for doing their job and standing up for their fellow citizens.
Now, I'm all for keeping journalists free out of prison, including, for example, Tommy Robinson, our former reporter who was arrested and jailed for 10 weeks for reporting outside of court in the United Kingdom.
And I would remind you that Trudeau's government told the United Nations to ban us at the Rebel from reporting on UN conferences.
That's what the UN told us when they wouldn't let us in.
So they don't really mean it.
But what's more troubling is that in the same breath, Trudeau says he's for more journalistic freedom.
He then immediately says he's against disinformation.
Well, hang on, isn't that just a word for journalism he disagrees with?
Like that Global Mail story about how he fired his Attorney General because he couldn't corrupt her.
I said at the start that the main threat to free speech and the free press is from governments, but they have gotten smarter about it.
If they were to try to censor someone like they did to Tommy by throwing him in prison, that only turned Tommy into a martyr.
And it embarrassed the state when Tommy's conviction was thrown out by the Court of Appeal.
Much easier just to lean on companies like Twitter and YouTube to do your censorship for you.
No fuss, no must, no appeals, no fingerprints, no transparency, just done in secret.
I mean, the pressure on companies to do this censorship is not itself always in secret.
As you know, just last year, Justin Trudeau personally treated Cheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, told her that if she didn't crack down on his conservative critics online, he'd do it for them by regulating Facebook.
Here's United Kingdom MPs grilling YouTube's anti-terrorism chief, telling him to censor Tommy Robinson, who isn't a terrorist, he's actually against terrorism, but they were telling YouTube and Google to censor him nonetheless.
You just watch him into this.
Your algorithms on YouTube, when you are searching for national action, will then promote the likes of Tommy Robinson and Britain First.
This is despite the fact that the Finsbury Park mosque, where somebody was killed, and that's recently been in the headlines, despite the fact that videos of Tommy Robinson were cited as part of the online radicalization of Darren Osborne in the Finsbury Park court case, YouTube continues to promote them videos.
What have you got to say about that?
We are working to make sure that videos that promote hate or promote violence, if they violate our policies, are removed from the platform.
If they walk right up to the line, we have also, at the encouragement of this committee, developed a new enforcement mechanism to limit the features that these have.
They should not be appearing in our recommendation engine.
If they are, I will take this back to our team and see what the problem is.
That went on for quite a while.
It wasn't just the Labor MPs who wanted Tommy shut up.
And Trudeau himself has actually named us here at the Rebel by name as fake news, which is precisely the people he says he's going to use the government to combat.
Here's a little video mashup we made of Trudeau and Ahmed Hassan reading the exact same script word for word.
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives and the member opposite engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
It's disappointing to see the conservatives engage in handling rebel media conspiracy theories.
It is disappointing to see the conservatives engage in handling rebel media conspiracy theories.
Yeah, he loves the freedom of the press, don't he?
Well, yesterday on the eve of World Press Freedom Day, Facebook struck.
They just deleted it.
Just deleted.
Some of the biggest names in conservative putter tree.
Now they threw in Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam, anti-Semite, just so they could say they were after one guy who wasn't conservative.
But the rest were conservative.
They deleted Tommy Robinson months ago, but now they deleted Laura Loomer, a rebel alumna.
They deleted Milo Yiannopoulos, a mischievous but harmless gay conservative provocateur.
And they deleted one of the most influential YouTube journalists on the right, a Facebook, sorry, a commentator named Paul Joseph Watson, who we've had on our show before.
He's harmless, never violent, always anti-violent, but they just deleted him.
No explanation, no reason, just cuz.
All of these people were influential in getting Donald Trump, I might point out.
We'll have Alan Bokhari on in a moment to talk more about this.
But my point from earlier stands there's a merger between big government and big media.
As you know, the head of censorship in Canada at Facebook is this guy, Kevin Chan, who used to work in the Liberal Party's leader's office.
So yeah, it's pretty much a merger between big government and big tech.
Same with all the tech companies, especially in the U.S. They're all jammed full of former Obama executives.
Google's senior VP at the time, Eric Schmidt, was an actual Clinton campaign worker.
It's a merger.
And look at this, today from Google Canada.
Google News Initiative partners with CJF to help tackle fake news.
CJF is a Canadian Journalism Foundation.
I'll read just one line for you.
Looking to address concerns over Canadians' capacity to identify authoritative information online, today the Google News Initiative announced a grant of $1 million to the Canadian Journalism Foundation to bring news-wise to vote-aged Canadians.
The goal is simple.
Help all Canadians understand the difference between fact-based journalism and fake news in the digital world.
Well, hang on, is that the big threat to journalism?
Other journalists?
So this really isn't a press freedom announcement.
It's an anti-press freedom announcement.
It's not widening journalism.
It's not promoting citizen journalism.
It's not encouraging citizen journalism.
It's promoting the demonization of journalists that the official people don't like.
Official people getting huge money from other official people to comply with and enforce the official narrative.
By the way, they based their plan on this bizarre study by the liberal-linked, quote, research firm called Ernstcliffe that studied Canadians' choices of news, and they included the alternative left-wing site called rabble.ca, which is a union lefty site in Canada, being around for more than a decade.
And the conservative site they tested was the U.S. site called Breitbart.com, which I like, and I read it, but it's American.
It's not really Canadian at all.
I wonder if they secretly tested the rebel, but just didn't want to release the results.
How odd that is that would test an American site in Canada.
Anyways, the oddest part of it all is that the Canadian Journalism Foundation is not about increasing journalism, but it's about decreasing it, not about supporting journalism, but rooting it out, limiting it to those approved by big tech and big government.
Tech Giants Meddling in Elections00:07:14
How sad.
But let me close with a gaffe.
Now, as you know, a gaffe is defined as when a politician actually tells the truth by mistake.
And Justin Trudeau tweeted about World Press Freedom Day.
And then this MP, see, that's Trudeau's tweet.
And then this MP here chimed in.
His name is Ken Hardy.
He's a Liberal MP from British Columbia.
He actually used to be a journalist once upon a time, and he said, On World Press Freedom Day, remember that a free press isn't free, and a lot of the free stuff you see online masquerading as news isn't, to be honest, about the most trustworthy outlets these days are the CBC, especially radio, Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star.
Well, at least we know who's getting the 595 million bucks in bailout money, right?
But that's the thing about World Press Freedom Day.
It means the government doesn't get to choose which journalists are acceptable and which aren't.
It means big monopolies don't get to choose.
It's actually the opposite of that.
Does anybody else care about this?
Or is everybody else being bought off somehow?
Stay with us for more.
I was given no reason whatsoever for being banned by Facebook or Instagram.
So I'm dangerous.
Someone who makes meme videos laughing at social justice warriors.
Or is handing the power to decide who gets to have free speech to a handful of giant politically partisan corporations dangerous?
What's more dangerous?
They put me on a list with terrorists, human traffickers, and serial killers because I criticize modern art and modern architecture.
Because I dare criticize mass immigration.
Because I dare criticize a belief system.
Yet you still host Antifa accounts which threaten to assassinate the president.
You still host accounts belonging to the sicko who sent death threats to Ben Shapiro's family.
This is truly, truly clown world.
That's our friend Paul Joseph Watson, who I think is one of the best conservative communicators out there.
Although he's based in London, he has a massive following worldwide.
And he took a real interest in Hillary Clinton in 2016, publishing some wildly successful critical videos of her that I think helped win the battle for Donald Trump.
You certainly can't ascribe that win to any one person, but collectively, I think it's taken as conventional wisdom now that Donald Trump won the battle on the internet through Twitter, through Facebook, through YouTube.
Hillary Clinton outspent Trump by several multiples.
In traditional campaigning, Trump had grassroots voices like Paul Joseph Watson.
Is it a coincidence that those voices were all wiped out when clearly, as Paul Joseph Watson himself has said, actual terrorists, actual violent thugs continue to have their social media footprint?
Joining us now via Skype is the senior editor of Breitbart Tech, our friend Alan Bokhari, to talk more about this.
Alan, great to see you again.
Hi, Ezra.
And you were playing that clip from Paul earlier.
He used the phrase that I was thinking of when you invited me on this show, which is, you know, clown world.
Yesterday, World Press Freedom Day, we had all of these bans.
And I think you were just mentioning that the mainstream media would prefer to talk about fake news, while at the same time, these unaccountable Silicon Valley executives are deciding for millions and millions of people, billions in fact, what news sources they're allowed to read and what news sources they're allowed to share and which ones they aren't.
We've handed this power over almost every news outlet now to essentially Mark Zuckerberg.
Without Facebook, it's almost impossible for a news outlet to survive, especially an independent news outlet without the resources of the mainstream media.
You probably know this better than anyone.
The independent media is totally dependent now on these huge social media platforms that can take away your freedom of speech at any moment.
And I think it's a real crisis for democracy when corporations are allowed to circumvent free speech rights like this.
And Republicans often just hold up their hands and say, well, it's the free market.
Well, you know, it's not the free market.
It's the First Amendment.
And if you let a corporation dominate the public square, you have to also hold them to the standards of free speech that you have in your society.
Yeah.
You know, obviously our friend Tommy Robinson is running for public office in the UK.
I've been watching, in fact, I was doing a live stream referring to his campaign's Twitter account.
So not the Tommy Robinson personal account, but Tommy is a legally registered candidate in an official government election to choose a member of the European Parliament.
And literally while I was on TV talking about it, his Twitter account was shut down.
Not his personal account, but his campaigns account.
I can't think of anything more meddlesome in an election than a San Francisco-based tech company with a huge shareholder, Prince Alwadwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, just deciding we're going to unperson an official candidate just in the middle of an election.
I don't know how much, I mean, I don't, I think the whole Russian collusion thing was a bit of a joke and a scam.
But what I observed with my own eyes in real time was some corporate decision in San Francisco to delete, to take away the voice of a candidate in an election.
I find that terrifying.
Yeah, this is the new tactic of authoritarians who want to circumvent democracy and circumvent the freedoms that we've grown accustomed to in liberal countries.
Just the other day, news broke that activists had pressured MasterCard to hold a shareholder meeting on setting up a so-called human rights council to monitor hate speech and the far right who use their services with a view to cutting them off.
So instead of going to the government now, going to the courts where they're going to have a much tougher time of demanding censorship, or they have to get around in America, anyway, the First Amendment, where they have to get around political rights that have been on the statute books for centuries, they're now going straight to corporations like MasterCard, like Facebook, like Twitter, and they're trying to get what they want that way.
They're also doing it with the Second Amendment in America.
They've convinced Citibank and others to deny service to gun store owners that are engaging in perfectly legal activity, like the sale of high capacity magazines that's still legal in the U.S. and simply getting banks to stop doing business with them and getting rid of them that way.
Corporations vs. Political Power00:12:58
So it's a new tactic that the whole left is using.
Instead of doing it democratically, winning elections or legally winning court cases, they're just trying to pressure a few unaccountable corporations and CEOs into doing their bidding.
And it's very ironic given that the left used to be this, you know, the ideology of the working class against the power of big business.
Now it's been totally turned on its head.
Yeah, it's terrifying.
Now, of course, they've been practicing.
I mean, I remember when Emmanuel Macron became the president of France, shortly before that, 30,000 pro-Maureen Le Pen Facebook accounts were just deleted.
Just poof, 30,000.
And we have to take the word for it.
We have to take Zuckerberg's word for it that they were fake accounts.
But what does that mean?
I mean, here's my point about what fake news is or isn't.
I have believed for two years that that whole Russian collusion thing was fake news.
And Robert Mueller's inquiry suggests that it was.
So I would call the New York Times and the Washington Post fake news.
They may call me fake news and everyone, as they say in French, chacu na songgou.
Everyone has their own taste.
We all get to call each other fake and that's what an election campaign is about.
We all get to vote based on what we think is true and right.
And by the way, if we like to read news that's of questionable veracity, we can choose to do that too.
If we think someone's a liar, but we should vote for them anyways, we can do that too.
I think that it's not just media power, it's political power that these people are taking away from us.
They're making the final decision about what is fake or not.
And that should be everyone's individual right to make that decision.
Right, and just compare it to the pre-digital era.
I mean, you know, National Inquirer has been around for a long time.
They've published questionable stories.
Gossip magazines have been around for a long time.
Their entire MO is to publish hearsay.
So this is an entirely new standard that's being applied and it's only being applied to the right and it's impossible to meet.
And that's on purpose because they want to deplatform the right because they can't win on a level playing field.
You mentioned election interference.
It's absolutely election interference.
And Facebook did not just do that in France before the election.
They did it in the US before the midterms.
They suspended 800 independent media pages.
They did it in Brazil.
They used WhatsApp, which they own, to destroy a number of pages supporting Bolsonaro.
It didn't work.
They did it in Italy and Germany.
And interestingly, you mentioned Twitter banning the campaign accounts of Tommy Robinson.
They also banned the campaign account of Carl Benjamin, better known as Saguna Faqad.
And he did not use his account personally.
His personal account has been banned, but he did not use his campaign account as a method of ban evasion, which would have been against his rules.
It was purely run by his campaign staff to update followers on campaign events.
It was a political campaign account for the purpose of the European elections.
So that is absolutely election interference.
And the interesting thing about that is normally Twitter's quite good on getting back to me with a comment explaining why someone has been censored or kicked up the platform.
They explicitly didn't in that case, which is quite suspicious.
And there have been lots of cases where British politicians have lobbied the tech companies, establishment British politicians, have lobbied the tech companies specifically on the question of Tommy Robinson.
And I wonder if there wasn't some MP or some government minister putting the heat on Silicon Valley there.
Well, yeah, we would.
Because the other terrifying thing we have to contend with now isn't just the authoritarianism of the Silicon CEOs themselves.
It's that authoritarianism joining with the authoritarianism of establishment politicians, both in the West and elsewhere.
You know, you said something I hadn't thought of before.
Maybe I had, but you articulated it.
Normally, it's governments being lobbied by companies.
And in fact, I think Facebook or Google, I think Facebook is now the largest spending lobbyist in America.
But what you just said is correct.
And I played a clip of it earlier, of members of the UK Parliament lobbying Google YouTube to silence Tommy.
So normally, the power is in the government.
The money is in the private sector trying to lobby the government to do their bidding.
But here, you had government MPs lobbying a more powerful private company to do to Tommy Robinson what they couldn't do.
How ironic that the power has shifted.
They were lobbying Google YouTube.
But I want to read your article.
I'd see your latest article.
It's put up on the screen for a second.
It's called Link Banning is Facebook's terrifying new censorship tool.
So they've banned people for life.
They've banned Tommy Robinson, banned Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, Alex Jones.
But now they're banning anyone who talks about them.
Like, here's a link to what they're doing.
Boom.
That's banned.
I've seen reports of that happening to rebel video.
Someone puts a rebel video on Facebook.
and Facebook calls that against the rules and they have to delete it.
Now, they haven't done that to us yet, but people who share our stuff are having their Facebook pages locked.
Exactly.
And this is a formula not just for banning high-profile targets like Infowars or high-profile individuals like Tommy Robinson.
It's a formula for banning all their supporters as well, because the one way to get around censorship is if all your supporters keep sharing your content.
If they're getting banned for doing that as well, not only will your content be completely removed from the platform, but also your supporters will as well.
So that takes the election interference to a whole new level.
They're not just banning individuals and politicians and political figures.
They're banning all the people who might go out and vote for them and convince their friends on Facebook to vote for them as well.
It's an entirely new level of censorship.
And it's just Facebook doing it now.
But as we've seen in the past, other Silicon Valleys tend to, other Silicon Valley companies tend to follow the leader.
So if one company like Facebook sets the level of censorship, you can expect Twitter and YouTube and Google to follow soon after.
Most likely, that's what happened in the case of Alex Jones and Infowars' ban.
It was one company after the other kicking them off the platform.
Yeah, that was incredible.
I think he was banned by six or seven companies in a 24-hour period, including companies that went back and historically deleted everything he had done with them for years, which is a very Stalinist move to destroy history.
I mean, obviously, hundreds of things that Alex Jones had published were fine.
And then it was like the old Roman emperors and their damnatio memoriae, where they would damn the memory and annul the memory and scrape the faces off of paintings of anyone who was deemed a non-person.
I really think that's terrifying.
I got a question for you.
I mentioned earlier that the greatest beneficiary of the political journalism, the citizen journalism on social media, the citizen journalism, is Donald Trump.
I mean, Brexit was sort of a warning tremor.
Donald Trump, now you've seen populists have success.
Mario, sorry, Matteo Salvini in Italy.
You mentioned Yair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
I believe that the depth and breadth of the censorship we've discussed over the last 10 minutes, if allowed to continue, will make Donald Trump unelectable in the year 2020.
He is the power user of Twitter, and yet I haven't seen him do a thing about this.
Why not, Alam?
Well, the one trend we've seen from these tech giants over the last two years is more and more censorship targeted at the right.
And the obvious aim of it is to ensure that something like 2016 never happens again.
Every analyst noted that Donald Trump's digital campaign in 2016 totally outclassed Hillary Clinton's.
Brad Parscale, who's now Trump's campaign manager, says that Facebook was the one tool that helped them win in that election.
And look, beyond the leaks showing the censorship and the adjustment of search results, you only have to look at the reaction of the Google executives in that video we leaked on Breitbart, just crying in meltdown after the election, totally angry, determined to never let it happen again, to use their power, as they said, to push their values.
You know, Silicon Valley believes they helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016 and they're determined to stop it happening again in 2020.
So this really is the most urgent problem for the campaign, for the president, if they want to have a serious shot in 2020, because it's not a case like, you know, Donald Trump won by a fairly small electoral margin in the swing states that got him elected.
It's not like Brazil where there was a massive landslide.
You know, this is a case where big tech companies can have a serious impact.
And the other thing, if I was in Donald Trump's shoes, that would really frustrate me is how, as you said earlier, all this power is shifting to Silicon Valley.
It's almost like the president doesn't matter anymore.
Politicians don't matter anymore.
Corporations do.
You mentioned, I think I also wrote in an article about two weeks ago about how tech companies are being lobbied like governments, something you hit on as well.
You know, look at history.
Lobbyists have always followed power.
So, you know, in the medieval era, you had courtiers hanging out at the palaces of kings and queens trying to win their favor.
When democracy replaced kings, the courtiers turned into lobbyists.
They moved to state capitals and began their lobbying there.
Now they're moving to Silicon Valley.
If the lobbyists are going, that means power is shifting and it's shifting in a very anti-democratic direction.
Well, help me out.
I agree with every word you said.
But here's what I don't get about Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is a Manhattan brawler.
He was a property developer, which in Manhattan has got to be one of the toughest things.
You got to deal with other cutthroats.
It's high-stakes deals.
You got to deal with the unions that aren't always straight.
You got to deal with city regulators.
Like, I can't imagine a tougher business to be in the United States.
And he's a brawler.
You know, he's got a reputation.
If you punch him, he'll punch you back twice as hard.
He gives his enemies brawler nicknames.
Like he has this reputation as a brutal brawler.
And yet I haven't seen even hard words for Silicon Valley.
I've seen him on Twitter denounce companies for doing something wrong.
He denounces GM and threatens them with tariffs if they don't move a factory back to America.
I've seen him, one of his first tweets was saying to Boeing, you better get that price down for Air Force One or contract canceled.
I remember that one.
Where is this pugnacious bully character that we love or hate, depending on your point of view?
Where is this bully Trump to the guys who are actually trying to kill him?
Well, look, this is a big problem.
I mean, Donald Trump grew up and lived in the age of TV.
He's very much a TV-oriented person.
And you can see from his Twitter account where his attention is focused.
You know, if CNN publishes a dodgy story about Russia, he'll immediately tweet about it.
But he didn't immediately tweet about what Facebook was doing yesterday.
He will occasionally call out Google.
He will occasionally call out Twitter.
But you can see he just spends far more time tweeting and talking about the mainstream media and their bias.
And that really isn't a threat to him.
No one really likes the mainstream media.
No one trusts them.
The real threat is all these social media platforms that all of his supporters are forced to use and which help get him elected in 2016 and will help get him unelected in 2020 if he doesn't do something about it.
Big Problem With Trump00:05:20
And, you know, there's no easy answers.
There's no easy executive solution.
But, you know, there are a lot of tools that the president has.
He could potentially ask the DOJ to start an antitrust investigation into Google.
Google has banned its competitors from video search results.
It's banned news from news sites from new search results, something that Donald Trump actually did talk about, and he was called a conspiracy theory for it, but it's actually true.
It was leaked out a few weeks ago.
He could put pressure on Congress to do something.
He could put pressure on state governments to do something.
State attorney generals, he could simply talk about it more.
But he prefers to talk about CNN at the moment.
And I think that's a fatal error.
And it'll cost him in 2020.
Yeah.
It's very strange.
Let me throw one last thing at you, being very generous with your time.
I was looking through a study that was used by Google Canada, and they just announced a $1 million project in Canada to root out fake news, and we know what that means.
And they tested two.
So it was a study done by a liberal-leaning research firm called Ernstcliffe.
It's a lobby group.
And they tested a bunch of things.
One of the things where they tested alternative media, and they chose two.
There's a Canadian alternative media called rabble.ca.
It's a union group.
It's a left-wing thing.
I don't read it, but it's there.
And then the conservative alternative they tested, they didn't test the rebel.
They tested Breitbart.com.
Now, I love Breitbart, and I think a number of Canadians get their news from Breitbart.
But you're really American-focused, and you focus on the UK and things too.
I wonder if that's because they were afraid of testing the Rebel, or I wonder if that's because the Trudeau liberals hate Breitbart, and that's a symbol for all the things they don't like.
I just found that very odd that a Canadian study about Canadian news, Canada, Canada, Canada, the left-wing alternative they used was Rabble, and the right-wing alternative was Breitbart.
I'm just puzzling over that.
You know, what's your thoughts?
I don't know if I've explained it well enough for you to give an opinion about that, but why would the Canadian government be testing citizens' views on Breitbart.com?
I can send you the study if you want to look at it.
That's very strange.
I mean, to my knowledge, we don't even have a dedicated Canadian affairs reporter.
It's possible that the left simply don't spend a lot of time trying to understand the right-wing media, so they'll just pick whatever's in the headlines or whatever they heard about once they'll do everything they can to avoid right-wing media.
You know, they have to go, you know, left-wingers have to go to a safe space if a right-wing speaker comes on campus.
So they literally can't come into contact with it, which is very different to, in my experience, to conservatives who will read every news source, even news sources they dislike.
So it's possible that the person in charge of that study simply doesn't have a clue.
But honestly, I'm not sure beyond that.
Yeah, it was just very odd.
And I thought since you're here, you're the senior tech editor for Breitbart, I'd ask you, well, very strange days.
And one day you might wake up and we might be gone.
And we might wake up and you might be gone because that's what happened to Paul Joseph Watson and other friends.
And on World Press Freedom Day, no one seems to give a damn.
And it makes me very sad.
Well, I mean, we'll keep fighting, and I know you will too, Alan.
I appreciate you being on the show today.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right.
Take care.
That's our friend Alam Bokhari, the senior tech editor of Breitbart.com.
Forgive me for being sad, but I think that these are sad times if you care about press freedom.
And I think Orwell's predictions are coming true too quickly.
And those who ought to be motivated to fight back, they don't seem to be.
Stay with us.
Your letters are next.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about a moose jaw teacher bullying a student with a Make America Great Again hat.
Betty writes, that teacher is a goddamn liar.
The school should have disciplined that teacher.
I think you're right.
I mean, and forget about the lying.
The lying is the least of it.
If someone is willing to threaten a child, yeah, the fact that they lie about it is neither a surprise nor the worst of it.
What's so gross is how the school equated the bully and the bullied one and lied to the media.
The media were thrilled to go along with the cover-up.
So weird.
Harold writes, I'm exceptionally steamed by the Saskatchewan MAGA hat travesty.
Why are there not consequences to stop this kind of hateful bigotry?
Well, it's sort of obvious, Harold, because the target of the hatred and the threat, you got a punchable face, was a conservative kid wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
If it was a liberal kid, oh, we wouldn't have heard the last of it, and that teacher would have been fired and his union wouldn't have backed him up.
On my interview with David Menzies, Paul writes, billionaire liberal cronies get taxpayer handouts in the name of saving the planet from certain destruction in 12 years, and the liberals actually announce it as action on climate change.
Hateful Bigotry Bias00:00:46
Yeah, you know, I wonder if anyone actually thinks that a carbon tax or free fridges for billionaires will change the weather.
Does anyone actually think that through?
Because there are floods in Ottawa, we must tax you more.
Does the inverse or reverse mean if we tax you more, there won't be any more floods in Ottawa?
Does anyone think that's how the world works?
Don't answer that.
If Catherine McKenna here, she would probably be putting up her hand.
Folks, that's our show for today and brings us to the close of a week.
Thank you so much for being part of the Rebel.
We will have YouTube vids throughout the weekend and I'll be back on Monday.
Until then, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.