Ezra Levant and Alam Bokhari dissect Trump’s May 29 executive order targeting Silicon Valley censorship amid Minneapolis riots, where Mayor Jacob Frey and AG Keith Ellison enabled Antifa violence while Twitter suppressed Trump’s "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" tweet—ignoring pro-riot posts. The order aims to curb Section 230 shielded bias, like Google’s $10B fines and leaked plans to marginalize Trump’s populism, but faces legal hurdles from trillion-dollar platforms. Grassroots Republicans and institutions like the Claremont Institute may push back, yet tech’s "messiah complex" (Bloomberg, Zuckerberg, Gates) persists, treating users as pawns in globalist agendas. The episode frames 2020 as a clash between Trump and unaccountable Silicon Valley elites. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I take you through Donald Trump's new executive order for fighting Twitter censorship and other Silicon Valley bias.
I also take you through some videos from last night's riots in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In both cases, I think it helps to have the video version of this podcast.
And I know I say that a lot, but it's true.
We're primarily a video medium.
And to get the video version, you have to become a member of what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's $8 a month or $80 for the whole year in advance.
And you can just get it at RebelNews.com.
And it supports us, and you get video version of the show plus Sheila Gunrid's show and David Menzies' show.
Okay, here's today's show.
Tonight, Antifa burns down Minneapolis with the assistance of its mayor.
But Twitter thinks Donald Trump is the problem.
It's May 29th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
Twitter's Role in Censorship00:15:50
The only thing I have to say is government about why I'm others.
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Rioters burned down Minneapolis last night.
It's nominally in response to an act of police brutality against this man, George Floyd.
He was killed.
Cops crushed him.
Apparently, it was in response to an alleged forgery incident, which is a nonviolent crime.
The four cops involved in that were fired.
And I think they'll probably be charged.
The one in particular, the strange details, that cop that put his knee on his head worked security at the same nightclub as Floyd, the victim, himself did.
It's very strange.
But the details, I think, are secondary.
The video, the brutality, is all that mattered.
And the city was torched and looted.
I have become more conservative in my middle age on most things, immigration, pro-life, nationalism.
But I have become more liberal on two things.
Trade deals and police brutality.
Just this week, our own Kian Bexty was strong-armed out of a Trudeau press conference for no reason at all, other than Justin Trudeau's personal staff hate him.
Obviously, there's no comparison between that and what happened to George Floyd, other than both were physical acts of violence committed by police in excess of their lawful powers.
Again, no comparison in degree.
But I'm getting a little sick of it.
Our David Menzies was literally thrown to the ground by police, acting at the behest of that coward, Ron McClain, last year.
In both cases, we're suing.
We're suing the York Regional Police who assaulted David, and we're suing the Privy Council office for blocking Keen's access to the press conferences.
But look, those are the remedies of a corporation with some legal know-how and supporters who are generous enough to crowdfund our expenses.
And we've got some patience.
But what if you're a poor black man in Minneapolis?
This is awful to watch.
And if you're black, you surely identify with him.
And it confirms your worst fears about the police.
But there are plenty of people who would take that apparent injustice and exploit it for political purposes.
I say that everyone in America condemned this from the top to the bottom and of all parties.
But it's an opportunity.
Take this guy, Keith Ellison.
He's the Attorney General of Minnesota.
And that's him posing with the Antifa handbook.
They're a violent leftist street gang.
Here's the Attorney General.
Do you see the problem here with him endorsing the terrorist group that torched the city?
Well, probably you don't if you're a Democrat.
I mean, if that were a white Republican who was praising a white racist militia and who had a track record of being abusive to women, as Ellison does, well, that white Republican would be out in a heartbeat, but Ellison is a black Democrat and he was the first Muslim congressman in America.
It would be racist to criticize him, you see.
Minneapolis isn't what it once was.
It's now the city of Ilhan Omar, the largest Somali population in America.
How's that going?
Do you feel more comfortable living under American law or do you feel more comfortable living under Sharia law?
Sharia la I'm a Muslim.
I prefer Sharia.
Sharia Lang, yes.
You prefer Sharia law over American law?
Of course, yeah.
Of course, yeah.
And do you find most of your friends say how it feel the same way?
Yeah, of course, if you're Muslim, yeah.
Oh, that's how it's going.
But it was politicians and activists and antifa, and I think a city that's being cooped up for two months, going stir crazy from the pandemic.
And of course, the media lighting the fuse, and the place just blew up.
Here are people looting stores, stealing televisions, stealing clothes, just smashing things.
Not sure what the connection is between looting and George Floyd.
That's just stealing.
That's just opportunistic theft.
Is that fighting against the system and the man?
Yeah, not when you're burning down small mom-and-pop stores owned by black businessmen.
No.
Take a look at this clip from MSNBC.
I want to be clear in how I characterize this.
This is mostly a protest.
It is not, generally speaking, unruly, but fires have been started, and there's a crowd that is...
Yeah, got it.
He's standing in the middle of a riot zone.
It looks like Mogadishu, frankly.
Total war zone.
Fires burning all around him.
No law, no order in sight.
And he says, oh, it's just a protest.
It's a peaceful protest.
He reminds me of Baghdad Bob, Saddam Hussein's spin doctor in the Gulf War.
I liked this video that I found online.
Lawful black gun owners standing guard outside their own businesses.
They weren't going to let their life's work be torched by Antifa or Black Lives Matter or looters or anyone.
And they sure weren't going to rely on politicians like Ilhan Omar or Minneapolis' cartoon of a liberal mayor.
His name is Jacob Fry.
When rioters started to attack a police station, seriously, a police station, Fry ordered the police to surrender.
He ordered them to run away.
Or as he put it, I love this, he said to evacuate.
The danger was the danger became necessary, and I made the decision to evacuate the third precinct.
What?
Yeah.
Believe it or not, in the last mayor's election in Minneapolis, he was not the most anti-police candidate.
He actually beat the guy who actually wanted to disarm police.
So the city burns, riots, mobs, looting, but no policing.
The mayor says policing is racist or something.
This feels like Obama's America, not like Trump's America.
And it is actually.
Minnesota used to be Republican, obviously, if you can believe it, but the generation of mass immigration, especially from Somalia, has changed that.
Don't think Trudeau hasn't noticed.
Here is Trudeau's Somali cabinet minister, Ahmed Hassan, with Somalia's Ilhan Omar.
Hey, didn't that mayor sort of remind you of Trudeau too?
Anyways, Trump was watching all this, of course, and he didn't like what he saw.
So he tweeted this at 1 a.m. last night.
Said, I can't stand back and watch this happen to a great American city, Minneapolis.
A total lack of leadership.
Either the very weak radical left mayor, Jacob Fry, get his act together and bring the city under control, or I will send in the National Guard and get the job done right.
Those thugs are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen.
Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him the military is with him all the way.
Any difficulty, and we will assume control.
But when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
Thank you.
I think he's right about the total lack of leadership.
Telling police to run away and let black neighborhoods burn isn't leadership.
The city is indeed out of control.
Here's how Jacob Fry answered that.
Weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions.
Weakness is pointing your finger at somebody else during a time of crisis.
Donald Trump knows nothing about the strength of Minneapolis.
We are strong as hell.
Is this a difficult time period?
Yes, but you better be damn sure that we're going to get through this.
He even looks the part, doesn't he?
He's the perfect anti-Trump.
But look again at that second tweet by Trump.
If you click on it on your computer, you can't actually read it.
You get this warning.
This tweet violated the Twitter rules about glorifying violence.
However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the tweet to remain accessible.
Learn more.
And if you click through that warning, you can see it, but you can't retweet it.
You can't like it.
You can't share it normally.
All the normal social media tools are removed.
And of course, there's the denunciation of it all.
Just like Twitter did earlier this week to Trump when he warned about voter fraud in mail-in balance.
Twitter is going to war against Donald Trump.
But look at that.
They claim Trump was glorifying violence.
They didn't say that about the rioters, though, who were doing violence and glorifying it.
They didn't say that about Minnesota's Attorney General Keith Ellison, the abusive boyfriend who poses with an anti-fa terrorist manual.
There are literally thousands of tweets glorifying the riots, calling for the riots, whipping up the riots, calling for murder right now.
I don't know if a single one of them has been censored other than that of the President of the United States, whose constitutional duties, if you care about such things, include an oath of office to, quote, support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
It is absolutely Trump's job to stand up to violent political riots, which are a species of terrorism, especially if the mayor won't.
Trump said he's ready to send in the National Guard.
He appropriately consulted with the governor, a Democrat, I might add.
Perhaps his flourish, that rhyme, looting and shooting, is not quite as somber as the censors at Twitter might like, because as you know, Twitter is nothing if not dignified.
But there's nothing wrong with the tweet.
But Twitter has declared war on Trump.
They made it clear they're going to not only limit him and what he says, but they're also going to shame him and rebut him and attack him in the guise of being neutral.
Well, Trump has had enough.
Yesterday afternoon, he rolled out his executive order on preventing censorship.
I'll read some of it to you.
Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy.
Our founding fathers protected this right with the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people.
That's a good way to start.
Those are words Trudeau probably wouldn't ever say, but Trudeau does say some free speech clichés sometimes.
He just doesn't mean them.
Here's Trump, and I think he means them.
In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to handpick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet.
This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic.
When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.
They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.
That's exactly right.
And the reason that's important is because if you're just a bulletin board where anyone can tack up a poster, you're not a publisher.
You can't be held liable for the words that other people put on you.
But if you actively police and center and choose what goes on your bulletin board, well, that's what Twitter is doing.
Well, here's what.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events, to censor, delete, or disappear information. and to control what people see or do not see.
As president, I have made clear my commitment to free and open debate on the internet.
Such debate is just as important online as it is in our universities, our town halls, and our homes.
It is essential to sustaining our democracy.
That's true.
It's the town square now.
If you're not allowed online, it would be like a generation ago you not being allowed to go to a physical meeting hall, a town hall.
Just not allowed.
The internet is where we live so much, as the pandemic has shown us in a weird way.
Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse.
Tens of thousands of Americans have reported, among other troubling behaviors, online platforms flagging content as inappropriate, even though it does not violate any stated terms of service, making unannounced and unexplained changes to company policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints, and deleting content in entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse.
Exactly.
When Trudeau censors me, I hate it.
But there are some rules, and I have some recourse.
It's expensive, it's slow, it's an uphill battle, but there is a process.
What do I do if I'm suddenly deleted on YouTube or Twitter?
There's no Twitter court.
I don't even know who would have done it to me or why or who complained or what I did wrong.
Now, there's a lot of interesting commentary in the executive order, but I'm going to skip over it in the interest of time.
But here's the key part.
And you've heard me talk about this before about a year ago, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
It's what makes social media companies unsuable.
Section 2, protections against online censorship.
It is the policy of the United States to foster clear ground rules promoting free and open debate on the Internet.
Prominent among the ground rules governing that debate is the immunity from liability created by Section 230C of the Communications Decency Act.
It is the policy of the United States that the scope of that immunity should be clarified.
The immunity should not extend beyond its text and purpose to provide protection for those who purport to provide users a forum for free and open speech, but in reality use the power over a vital means of communication to engage in deceptive or pretextual actions stifling free and open debate by censoring certain viewpoints.
So just to be clear, when an internet company allows something to be published, you can't sue them.
It's like a phone booth.
The phone company doesn't regulate what people say when they talk on the phone in the phone booth, so you can't sue the phone booth or the phone company for what people say through it, right?
Same with the internet.
Unless the phone company would actually, I don't know, have someone listening in on your calls telling you what you could or couldn't say or telling you to say something else, then it would be an active publisher, a participant, a censor, an editor.
Section 230 provides the internet version of that phone booth.
It protects them.
It also legally protects the internet if they positively do censor things that are awful, like illegal child pornography, just as an example, if it's done in good faith.
But it doesn't protect political meddling.
It is the policy of the United States to ensure that to the maximum extent permissible under the law, this provision is not distorted to provide liability protection for online platforms that, far from acting in good faith to remove objectionable content, instead engage in deceptive or pretextual actions, often contrary to their stated terms of service, to stifle viewpoints with which they disagree.
Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike.
When an interactive computer service provider removes or restricts access to content and its actions do not meet the criteria of subparagraph C2A, It is engaged in editorial conduct.
It is the policy of the United States that such a provider should properly lose the limited liability shield of subparagraph C2A and be exposed to liability like any traditional editor and publisher that is not an online provider.
Okay, that was a little long, but what's happening now is under this order, the Section 230 immunity that's basically a huge subsidy to the Internet, since it absolutely removes from the Internless lawsuits, including defamation lawsuits that bedevil other publishers.
So Section 230 will only apply to Internet companies going forward if they act in good faith, including that they not engage in the following things.
A, deceptive, pretextual, or inconsistent with the provider's terms of service, or B, taken after failing to provide adequate notice, reasoned explanation, or a meaningful opportunity to be heard.
Tech Giants Under Scrutiny00:15:57
So from now on, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, they can't trick you, they can't lie to you, they can't have secret political filters.
They can still be immune to litigation like a phone booth is, but only if they are truly neutral and fair, like the phone booth is.
And I think the most interesting part is a call for a review of internet companies in concert with the states about the following.
Increased scrutiny of users based on the other users they choose to follow or their interactions with other users.
Algorithms to suppress content or users based on indications of political alignment or viewpoint.
Differential policies allowing for otherwise impermissible behavior when committed by accounts associated with the Chinese Communist Party or other anti-democratic associations or governments.
Reliance on third-party entities, including contractors, media organizations, and individuals with indicia of bias to review content.
And acts that limit the ability of users with particular viewpoints to earn money on the platform compared with other users similarly situated.
It's like he's talking directly to me.
That's exactly what happens to us, the demonetization, the shadow banning, the de-boosting, as YouTube calls it when they smother your content and downrank it.
All of that happens to us.
We talked about two things today, the riots and looting in Minneapolis, and then the president's executive order, including the review of social media.
In a way, the two things couldn't be more opposite, more different, less related, but they are related.
Because social media is how we learn about the world now.
It's how we talk amongst each other.
It's how our leaders communicate to us, and vice versa.
It's how criminals foment riots.
It's how politicians react or not.
Twitter has decided that this riot is the moment they're going to deplatform the president of the United States, but let the fires of the riot keep burning.
Trump has decided this is the moment he's going to push back.
I expect more riots before the 2020 election.
It's the George Soros way.
He's a major funder of Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
He likes this chaos.
He thinks it hits Trump.
It makes Trump look chaotic and out of control, and it takes away hopes for an economic success that Trump was counting on.
And I expect that Twitter and the rest of Silicon Valley knows that if they don't knock Trump out now, his second term will be something they and all other liberals hate.
We're in the big battle now, folks.
I wonder how it's going to end.
Stay with us for more on this.
The choices that Twitter makes when it chooses to suppress, edit, blacklist, shadow, ban are editorial decisions, pure and simple.
They're editorial decisions.
In those moments, Twitter ceases to be a neutral public platform and they become an editor with a viewpoint.
And I think we can say that about others also, whether you're looking at Google, whether you're looking at Facebook, and perhaps others.
Well, there you have it, Donald Trump reiterating the difference between being a neutral platform, like a bulletin board or my favorite example, like a phone booth, versus being a publisher with editorial opinions who is legally responsible for their conduct.
Joining us now via Skype is our friend Alam Bokhari, a senior tech correspondent for Breitbart.com.
Great to see you again, Alam.
Hey, Ezra.
Hi, you and I have been talking about this very subject for years, really.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
And when I first heard of this, I thought, what's communications decency?
That sounds like a law about obscenity or pornography.
And indeed, it is.
But it's the source of the immunity for tech companies.
If they just behave neutrally, no one gets to sue them for publishing a bad thing if they did it in good faith by accident, right?
So that was the source of their legal immunity that's probably worth billions to them because they're just not sued like a newspaper is.
But if they're going to start acting like a newspaper, they're going to be on the hook for it.
That's basically my takeaway.
Is that your takeaway from this executive order, too?
Absolutely.
The thing to understand is a social media platform can't really function without this legal immunity because they'd have to take, assume legal responsibility for what millions and billions of users post on their platform.
That's an impossible legal risk to take.
So it would destroy social media companies' very business model.
So you'd think they'd be especially keen to preserve it.
And yet, with all this censorship we've seen over the past four years, they're now acting like publishers who do have legal responsibility for what they publish.
So they're threatening their own legal immunities really.
That's central to their business model.
And I think that's why this has been a huge focus for Republican lawmakers and indeed Democrat lawmakers as well, because they know this is crucial to the way the internet works right now.
The problem with it is that, in my view, not the legal immunity for hosting content, that's defensible, but the law also contains legal immunity for taking down content, something I don't think they need, because they do that in a much more limited number of cases than compared to what they host.
You know, what often gets lost in this debate is the fact that I don't think social media platforms or tech platforms need to censor anything that's First Amendment protected, even obscenity.
So, you know, Google, when it still believed in free speech, had, you know, going way back to, you know, the very start of the company, has had a safe search option that you can voluntarily turn on or off if you want to filter out obscene results.
So these platforms can very easily develop custom filters for any kind of content you can imagine and then leave it up to users what they want to filter in and filter out.
The reason why they don't, they haven't been doing that over the past four years is because they want to control information.
They and other progressive elites realize they're losing the public debate, they're losing elections, and that unless they clamp down on free speech, unless they get back control over the flow of information, like the good old days of cable news when MSNBC and CNN filtered everything that Americans got to hear, then they're going to continue to lose.
They can't win on the basis of facts.
They can't win a fair debate, so they have to censor public debate instead.
You know, that's a great point, because of course you still can find indecent or obscene things on the internet in a hurry.
And you're right, that safe search or parental lock, or these things are available if people willingly take them or want them, and a lot of people do.
I mean, a lot of parents want to put filters on what their kids see.
But this is about Google executives putting filters about what grown-ups can see without the grown-ups choosing it.
I mean, the choice of YouTube or sorry, in this case, Twitter, putting huge warning alerts on Donald Trump's political opinions is so far removed from communications decency.
And it's so hamficious.
I've got to ask you this.
Alan, you and I were always saying, when is the president going to do something?
And I thought he would never would.
It's almost like Twitter wants to pick a fight.
And boy, they've picked one now.
Is this part of a strategy by Twitter?
Because, I mean, they're doubling down.
They're having blinking lights and flashing buttons and hiding things and rebuttals.
And they're even being snarky.
There's a little Twitter public policy team that's being snarky to Trump.
What's their strategy?
I'm just shocked by how brazen Twitter is.
I think they think they're bigger than the president of the United States.
I don't know.
Maybe they are.
What do you think?
It is brazen, and they're still doing it today.
They hid another one of Trump's tweets about the riots in Minneapolis, falsely claiming he was glorifying violence.
He was simply saying that, you know, if the looting and riots continue, then military force will be used.
Perfectly valid statement for a head of government to say.
Meanwhile, they haven't taken down, done anything similar to tweets from Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, encouraging, you know, tanks of terrorism in Israel.
So there's no sense of fair standards here at all.
And, you know, going back to what you were saying earlier, these companies are harsher on valid political speech than they are on actual obscenity.
And that should tell you something.
I personally think that everything should be optional.
If they insist on having these stupid categories like hate speech and fake news, you'd think that at the very least they'd allow users to choose whether they want to filter that in or filter that out or not.
And yet they don't.
And the reason for that is because they want control now.
These are not the free speech platform that they were 10 or 15 years ago.
Yeah.
Oh, exactly.
They don't want to let you make that choice.
And by the way, I wouldn't trust their filter.
What they consider hate speech, I would probably consider breaking news or an alternative point of view or just, you know, I mean, they deem hate speech speech, frankly, that they hate.
How is this going to happen?
Because I've seen a few other tech people like Tyler Winklevoss, who was one of the early executives of Facebook that got bought out.
He sort of has an independent spirit and he seems to be mocking Twitter a little bit.
How are the rest of the social media companies like Twitter picked this fight and Trump's responding to it, but his response will really hit every social media company?
I see the Winklevosses seem to be siding with Trump, if I'm not mistaken.
Are there other tech spokesmen, for example, I don't know, Peter Thiel, who's been an ally of Trump?
Is there anyone out there, Zuckerberg's been trying to have a monas vivendi with Trump?
Are there other tech leaders who are weighing in on this yet?
Well, you know, I think behind the scenes in Silicon Valley, especially some of the venture capitalists, they're not happy with the way Silicon Valley has conducted.
These big tech companies have conducted themselves over the past few years.
There are all sorts of people in Silicon Valley who are uneasy with the political bias.
We saw what happened to Palmer Lucky.
This genius who invented the Oculus Riff revolutionized VR gaming.
Then he sold it to Facebook.
He joined Facebook.
And then Facebook essentially forces him out of the company for supporting Trump.
They even tried to force him to endorse the libertarian candidate just to satisfy their own far-left employees.
It was an insane story.
So there are many people in Silicon Valley who are definitely uncomfortable with the political climate there.
Going back to other tech companies, you almost feel sorry for Twitter because they just seem totally in over their head.
Facebook conducts themselves in a very Machiavellian way.
They outsource all their politically biased decisions, these third-party liberal fact-checkers.
They're now outsourcing censorship to this Facebook Supreme Court.
It's all to create a chain of plausible deniability so they can wash their hands.
Obviously, it's not going to succeed.
They're still ultimately responsible.
But they're going about it in a much more clever, much more sly way.
Whereas Twitter just seemed to be flailing around, censoring the president's tweets, taking the decisions themselves, not giving themselves plausible deniability.
They've sort of deliberately put themselves in the crosshairs.
And that shows, you know, Twitter is a much smaller company than the other tech giants.
They have much fewer resources.
But again, I think the biggest threat among the tech giants, especially when it comes to political election interference, and I might do a column on this shortly, is Google.
Google has the two biggest search engines in the world, Google and YouTube.
YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world.
They have more control over the flow of information, including political information, than any other company.
And we've already seen, we've seen leaks footage that I published on Breitbart two years ago.
Their executives saying that they want to make the populist movement, the Trump movement, a blip in history.
And it's crazy to think they won't use that vast power in the next election to sway the result.
And I think we'll be seeing a lot more about that over the next few months.
Yeah, well, look, it's almost June.
So June, July, August, September, October, November.
It's six months barely.
Well, it's called six months to the election, less than that.
Yeah, for around 150 days.
Yeah, sorry, about five months.
And Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, not only do they have all the media themselves, they are the media themselves, they have an army of lobbyists.
They're the top lobbyist spenders in Washington.
They have some congressmen and senators on their side because they know these guys are liberal.
I'm wondering if it's too late, if in the next five months, Trump can make a dent in the problem or if they're just going to brazen it out.
Because what can you really do in the next five months?
Go ahead.
The problem is this executive order, while it's a positive step, it shows words are going to be backed up with action.
It can only be the beginning.
This is not going to fix censorship overnight.
Sources in DC tell me there was pushback from the career bureaucrats in the Commerce Department and other areas.
So it's going to be a struggle to get anything done.
And you've got to keep in mind, Facebook has faced over $10 billion collectively in fines from the FDC in the US and from European regulators of privacy violations.
And while they did alter their policies on privacy because of all that scrutiny they received because of the fines, they're still going.
So that's kind of like the level of punishment you have to deal out to these tech companies to get them to change anything.
And I think this executive order, while it's positive, it's just the first step in doing that.
Yeah, that's true.
So I don't think it's going to be fixed by the election.
And I think the challenge this election for Republicans is how are you going to circumvent these tech giants?
How are you going to get the message out in spite of their censorship?
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, $10 billion sounds like an awful lot, but these companies are, you know, in some cases coming up on a trillion-dollar valuation.
That's, you know, you give a $10 billion fine to Facebook, they'll go up in the stock market because people say, oh, that's it?
Oh, good.
Let's keep going.
I don't think they are really afraid of anything.
A last question.
Do you think Trump will find allies anywhere?
Do you think there will be some other power source out there that wants to push back, or are there just too many dollars being sloshed around?
And is it just too much inertia?
Is it just Trump versus the world again?
I think there's some signs of change in conservative institutions.
The Claremont Institute, for example, is one think tank that hasn't gone along with this sort of pro-big tech line that some of the DC think tanks have gone along with.
And I don't think the base will tolerate it for much longer.
This is crucial to them.
This is their accounts as well.
You know, whenever a big politician like Trump or a big media commentator gets censored, that's always headline news.
But there are also thousands and thousands of ordinary Republicans, ordinary members of the grassroots, who have had their Twitter account and their Facebook accounts taken away.
And that discontent is not going away.
And if Republicans think they can just coast by and not do anything serious, I don't think the base will let them.
And I think Republican politicians should understand if they let this continue, they're not going to win elections ever again.
Surprise Twitter Move?00:03:40
Yeah.
Okay, I got one last question.
I said that was the last question.
I got another last, last question.
They're censoring Trump.
They're restricting Trump.
They're throttling Trump.
They're de-boosting Trump.
They're hiding Trump.
Things in the past they only did to little guys like you and me.
What's the likelihood that they will actually suspend Donald Trump from Twitter?
I think that would probably be something that even Twitter with all its blue-haired social justice warrior employees would not be stupid enough to do.
With these tweets, they're sort of going a step.
They're not taking a step beyond adding little notices, hiding them behind warning messages.
They know if they actually took down one of President Trump's tweets, then it would be a non-stop barrage of potential regulations, investigations, negative media coverage that they wouldn't be able to escape from.
I think they know that's a step too far.
But, you know, anything's possible.
I'd be slightly surprised, but not too surprised if they did that.
But, you know, many, many people in Silicon Valley and in the Democrat media complex want that to happen, no doubt.
Well, we're in very interesting days.
I think Twitter picked a fight.
I wonder if Donald Trump can win it.
Alan Bocards, great to see you again.
Keep up the great work at Breitbart.com.
We enjoy reading you.
You've been on the story for years, far ahead of everyone else.
Thanks, Ezra.
Good to be on.
Cheers, you too.
All right.
Stay with us.
your letters to me next.
Hey, welcome back.
I'm in my monologue yesterday about Twitter censoring President Trump.
Dan writes, Twitter needs to go back to being a platform and not a publisher.
Yeah, but they're having too much fun.
I think what happens is if you become a billionaire, there's a chance I might not find out what that's like.
Once you have all the money in the world and once you can buy all the things you want, you know, there's only so many houses you can buy.
You can only live in one at a time.
There's only so many jets or yachts you can buy.
You can only be in one at a time.
Once you've got all the stuff you want, then you start to think, well, how can I change the world?
What's my legacy?
And you get a bit of a messiah complex.
I think Bloomberg has that.
I think Mark Zuckerberg has that.
I'm for sure.
Jack Dorsey of Twitter has it.
And they want to transform people.
They start to look at people as little ants in an ant colony.
I'm certain that's how Bill Gates looks at people.
I think that they don't want to just be a platform.
They want to mold minds.
Leslie writes, this reminds me of the 1900s, communist rule.
The true news is whatever Stalinists say it is.
Stalinists, but of course, Stalin, I think, knew that he was brutal.
These people probably wouldn't think of themselves that way.
They'd say, well, we're just your more enlightened superiors, and we've done the hard thinking for you, and we want to gently nudge you in this right direction.
I don't think they think of themselves as evil, but the fact that they take away your autonomy and personal sovereignty means that they are.
Jim writes, don't be surprised that the coward in the cottage will have Twitter censor the conservatives.
Yeah, well, he certainly, I don't know if Twitter answers to Justin Trudeau.
Maybe, maybe not.
I think that they look at Canada as a rounding error in both cases.
But we know that Trudeau himself tries to censor us, as you probably saw in Trudeau ejecting Kian Bexty from the press conference this week.
Joel Pollock's Take00:00:44
On my interview with Joel Pollock on his new book, Red November, Paul writes, I'll have to get Joel's book, Interesting Times Coming Up This Year.
Yeah, you know what I like about Joel?
He's smart, obviously, he's very well informed.
I think he actually ran for Congress a few years back.
But he's fair.
He's fair to the left.
He covers them without a sneer and he doesn't twist the knife.
And so I think he's one of the most interesting reporters on the state of the left.
I don't want to read leftists covering the left because it's just slobbering kisses.
I don't want to read leftists covering the right because it's just smearing.
But I would read Joel Pollock covering the left because he would treat them seriously and report it like he saw it.