Ezra Levant’s China Virus faced Amazon bans in late April, July 10th (citing "contradicts official sources"), and was restored July 14th after legal pressure. Levant blames Trudeau’s hostility toward Rebel News, UN/WHO influence, or Amazon’s CCP appeasement—Jeff Bezos’ $200B net worth and 90% Canadian e-book dominance suggest compliance. Breitbart’s Alan Bokari reveals Twitter’s "search blacklist" and hacking vulnerabilities, like verified accounts locked but Trump Jr.’s banned longer, hinting at foreign interference risks. Amazon’s vague "error" response may reflect fear of Republican backlash. Levant weighs Amazon’s reach vs. shifting to chinavirusbook.com, while protesting CCP detentions by avoiding Chinese products—a call for systemic resistance against censorship. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I'm going to talk about a funny story that involves the Rebel.
In particular, it involves my book, China Virus.
Why was it banned by Amazon?
Why was it unbanned?
Why was it re-banned?
Why was it re-unbanned or un-re-banned?
I don't know the word.
We'll talk about that and then we'll talk to a tech reporter about what happened to Twitter.
Oh my God, there's so many things.
Stay with us for that.
But before you do, can I invite you to become a Rebel News Plus subscriber?
That's basically our paywall shows.
It's the video version of this podcast.
Plus, Sheila Gun Reid is a weekly show and our friend David Menzies too.
You can get all that for just eight bucks a month.
Pretty good deal, I might say.
That's, if my math is right, that's two bucks a week.
And if that math is right, that's 30 cents a day.
Just go to RebelNews.com.
Okay, here's today's show.
So what's the deal with Amazon censoring Rebel News?
It's July 17th, 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.
The only thing I have to say is government about why I publish them.
is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Why was my book about China banned from the Amazon website?
And then why was it unbanned two months later?
And then why was it banned again a week later?
And then why was it unbanned four days after that?
That's the status right now at this moment.
For all I know, it might be banned again later tonight.
I don't know.
Amazon won't even talk to me about it.
But I can guess.
See, the full title of my book is China Virus, How Justin Trudeau's Pro-Communist Ideology is Putting Canadians in Danger.
So sure, it's partly about the pandemic, yeah.
But it's actually mainly about how Trudeau's love for communist China has corrupted Canadian politics.
We first tried to publish the book in late April.
They refused it, saying it contradicted official sources.
They didn't say what that meant.
So we sent them a lawyer's letter.
They ignored it.
And then without explanation, they simply let us upload the book to Amazon in June.
And the book became an instant bestseller.
Thank you, Canada.
And then bizarrely, Amazon deleted the book from their pages last Friday afternoon.
Boom, gone.
And they gave us the same weird excuse as the first time, word for word.
The book contradicted official sources.
Of course, the book doesn't give medical advice.
It's not like a healthcare book of home remedies or something.
It's a political book.
I don't know.
Is that what they meant by official sources?
We contradicted some official politician.
Is that the official they're talking about?
Which one?
Our lawyers sent Amazon another letter.
We still haven't heard back.
So last weekend, when we were shut down the second time, we set up an emergency solution.
We published the book on our own special website, chinavirusbook.com.
We had a local publisher agree to print the paperbacks and mail them for us.
And on that website, we gave away the e-book for any tiny donation at all.
And thousands of people bought the book over the weekend last weekend.
And then a few days later, Amazon changed their mind again.
And now the book is back up for sale on Amazon for now.
For now.
You know, fool me once, shame on me.
Fool me twice, shame on you.
What does it fool me three times?
What's going on here?
Are they going to ban us a third time?
We don't know.
They've never actually explained to us what we did wrong.
They haven't even given us the courtesy of replying to our lawyers' letters.
I think that's rude.
Should we even continue to sell our books on Amazon?
They make a lot of money off it.
What if they ban us again?
Should we just continue to sell the books on our own website to be safe?
There's some good reasons to do that.
If we print and ship the books to people ourselves, we don't have to pay Amazon's huge commissions.
We would know the names and the email addresses of all our book buyers, so we could contact them in the future when we publish new books.
That would be useful.
See, Amazon keeps its list of people buying our books or any other product a secret.
So there would be a few benefits to being censored by Amazon, not for being censored, but our solution would have some benefits Amazon doesn't even give us.
But there's a downside too.
For one thing, Amazon is by far the biggest bookseller in the world, not even close.
In fact, they now have about 90% of the e-book market.
Can you believe it?
And they're slowly killing off bricks and mortar bookstores.
I mean, good night.
It's sad, but it's true.
They're almost a total monopoly.
For better or worse, it's where book buyers go.
So if we're not on that book buying website, it's much harder for people to find us and buy us in any currency, for example.
Being on Amazon means customers might get our book as a suggestion when they buy another book.
Amazon's algorithm suggests our book.
It does advertising for us to people who buy similar books.
That's a bonus.
And finally, our books almost always go to the top of Amazon's Canadian bestseller list.
That's important validation.
It's proof to you, and it's proof to the media party that our little company, Rebel News, actually runs circles around the boring, liberal, predictable books that the left-wing authors write.
I love the fact that my last book, The Lobranos, outsold the 23 other books about Justin Trudeau combined.
I only know that because of Amazon.
So we've decided to let Amazon sell our book again, even though there are awful, awful people who have censored us twice and may well do so a third time.
We've made this decision because we want the maximum number of people to buy and read our books, especially China Virus.
It's a business decision, but it's also an editorial decision.
We simply want people to read the book.
You can buy the book on Amazon now.
And I just recorded an audio book version of it, so you'll soon be able to download that on Amazon too.
And if we're banned again, we'll sell this all on our own website, chinavirusbook.com.
We still don't know why we were banned.
I have three theories.
The first is that Justin Trudeau did it.
He hates us.
He bans our reporters from covering debates and press conferences.
We're suing him over that, by the way.
And when I published my last book about Trudeau, he had Elections Canada, send two former RCMP officers after me, interrogating me for an hour about why I dared to write a book criticizing Trudeau during election.
Yeah, because I'm a free man.
So we know that Trudeau is obsessed with us and tries to censor us.
We have that on the record.
My second theory, though, is that maybe the United Nations or the China-controlled World Health Organization are to blame.
As much as I criticize Trudeau in my book, I criticize the World Health Organization.
They're the ones who helped China cover up the pandemic for months.
Canada's feckless public health officer, Dr. Teresa Tam, is in a terrible conflict of interest.
She actually works as a WHO employee while working as Canada's health officer.
Well, to which master is she loyal?
I mean, you can't ride two horses.
My book is very critical of her.
Wouldn't surprise me if she and the World Health Organization were the official sources who want my book banned.
But my third guess is Amazon itself.
It's now the world's third largest company, worth $1.5 trillion on the stock exchange.
If they stay on this pace, they will be the world's largest company by the end of the year.
Their CEO, Jeff Bezos, is closing in on $200 billion personally, even after paying tens of billions to his wife in a divorce.
I think he might be the world's first trillionaire.
Amazon has nearly doubled their value since the pandemic began because regular stores have been ordered closed by the governments, so people have been forced to shop online and they're flocking to Amazon.
The government built Amazon in that way, didn't they?
But Amazon and Bezos want more, more, more, more.
He's a frustrated trillionaire.
And the only way to keep that staggering rate of growth going is cracking the massive Chinese market.
Bezos is greedy and ambitious.
Now, China Virus is a bestseller, but it is not even a tiny, teeny rounding error compared to the value of breaking into the Chinese market.
And to do that, Bezos and Amazon have to bow down to the Chinese Communist Party.
That's the virus part of China virus in my book.
Would Jeff Bezos censor a book to please China?
He's got a trillion reasons to do so.
So that's the state of things right now.
We despise Amazon.
It's just another left-wing globalist censorship-prone tech company run by an oligarch with a God complex.
But that's the world we live in.
And we do want a maximum number of people to read the book.
So we have to hold our nose and work with Amazon.
If they ban us again, we'll sell it on our own website.
But in the meantime, we will sell the book through them.
I hope you agree with my thinking here.
And more importantly, I hope you read the book itself.
That's my purpose.
I want you to learn how the Chinese Communist Party has its tentacles deep within Trudeau's government.
If you haven't got the book yet, just go to ChinavirusBook.com.
If you did order the book on that website, we will ship it to you.
Let me close on one note.
I don't know if you saw it.
But this week we put up a huge billboard for the book on a major highway.
It looks gorgeous to me.
Our friend Sheila Gunreed was there as the billboard went up at, I don't know, 5 a.m. or something.
It cost us over $2,000 for that billboard, but it will get millions of eyeballs over the course of the months.
If you want to help us for that, you can do so at ChinavirusBook.com.
Finally, we are going to continue with our book launch events.
My first one is on Tuesday night, just outside Edmonton in Sherwood Park.
I'm sorry, it's sold out, so if you don't have your ticket, there's no room, I'm afraid.
We're following the pandemic rules about where we can meet and where we can gather, so we had to cap the attendance.
But we will do more book events across Canada as places gradually open up.
I hope they do gradually open up.
You'll be able to find those events at ChinavirusBook.com.
So this is sort of a business update, but it's also an editorial update, and it's a question.
Why did Amazon shut us down?
For now, I'm afraid.
It's a mystery.
But stay with us.
Tech Censorship Scandals00:15:15
Coming up next, a tech reporter answers more curious questions about censorship and other Silicon Valley shenanigans.
Our friend Alan Bocari is next.
Hey, welcome back.
Well, there's someone who knows more than almost anyone about tech companies censoring, banning, and coming up with strange excuses for glitches.
I've heard that word before, that only seemed to happen to conservative-leaning sites.
And you know who I'm talking about.
It's our friend Alan Bokari, chief tech writer at Breitbart.com.
Alan, great to see you again.
Good to see you, Ezra.
Well, I appreciate you coming on.
I see your story.
It's just incredible.
Donald Trump Jr. and spokesman Andy Sarabian remain locked out of Twitter.
Now, this was true for a day or so.
It finally, the ban was lifted.
If Twitter can lock down Donald Trump Jr. and his spokesman for, what was it, 24, 36 hours?
It's quite a long time, yeah.
Well, everyone, I mean, there was a Twitter problem, there was a hacking, but it was over within an hour.
But funny enough, Donald Trump Jr. stays banned for more than a day.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to call that a coincidence.
Are you?
It does seem strange that he was one of the only accounts that was locked out for such an extended period of time.
Big tech has censored his account before.
He's had some problems on Instagram previously.
And we know from the past few months that Twitter is not above even censoring President Trump himself.
They've hidden his tweets.
They've attached fact-checking warning labels to perfectly accurate tweets.
So this does seem to be escalating.
This did happen in the wake of a hack, as you said, and actually all verified accounts were locked down for a while on the previous day because a number of high-profile accounts got hacked.
And we should talk some more about that, actually, because there was an interesting leak from the hackers who gained access to an internal Twitter console that they use to regulate accounts.
And we saw from the screenshots of that internal console that the hackers used that Twitter has something called a search blacklist and a trends blacklist.
Now, Twitter hasn't answered my questions about what those things are, but they certainly suggest that they're covertly suppressing trends, covertly manipulating search, something that we've suspected they've been doing for a while, but it's only coming out now because of this hack.
Yeah, there's so many layers to this.
I mean, first of all, I saw Elon Musk, very famous entrepreneur, the boss of Tesla, and Bill Gates.
They both said, send me $1,000 by Bitcoin, and I'll send you $2,000.
Hurry only lasts for half an hour.
Like, quite an obvious scam if it were to come from anyone else, but from a gazillionaire like them, some people believed it.
And obviously, that Bitcoin address was going to the hackers.
And it looks like they made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars who thought they were going to get double their money from some billionaire giveaway, but actually they gave it to the hackers.
That was an interesting wrinkle.
But it looks like that might have actually just been a cover, a distraction for other shenanigans they got up to.
If you're saying that they got access to these control panels, who knows?
Maybe they even got access to private direct messages that influential people are sending each other.
That's a sort of a private form of communication through Twitter.
Who knows what else they did when they were in there?
Yeah, it's interesting because the Bitcoin scam that they employed was not the most valuable or lucrative thing they could have done with those accounts.
They could have shorted stocks using tweets to help them make profits off the stock market to potentially make a lot more money than that.
And as you said, having access to the private messages of these prominent accounts is also potentially a lot more valuable.
But what struck me as the most interesting part of the story was the way this hack went down, the way they got access to these accounts.
They didn't hack the accounts directly themselves.
What they did was they were able to gain access to an account owned by a Twitter employee.
And this Twitter employee apparently had access to all of these accounts.
He could go in and change their passwords, change their email addresses, go in and read their DMs, put them on a search blacklist or a trends blacklist, whatever that is.
So it really revealed something about the extent of control and surveillance that Twitter employees have over all of our accounts.
Yeah, I was thinking about that.
I mean, when you say, if Bill Gates were to say, I'm giving away free money, it looks iffy and weird and cheap, but nothing terrible is going to happen.
But, you know, if someone were to, you know, if someone say, this is Elon Musk's family, I saw one Twitter critic said, what happens if they would have said instead, this is Elon Musk's family, were so sad to announce his untimely death.
Well, you can imagine Tesla stock would have plummeted, so someone could have gone short.
Or God forbid, imagine if they would have hacked Donald Trump's account and declared war or made an economic announcement or a political announcement, something to provoke China or Putin or North Korea.
So, you know, what they did was actually not, it was in some ways the least harmful scam they could think of.
Yeah, and it really raises national security questions now because as you say, with access to the accounts of world leaders, they could do anything.
We know from 2017 that regular Twitter employees have enough access that they're able to delete President Trump's account.
That's what one employee did in 2017.
The account was quickly restored, but he did have the power to do that.
And in the case of this hack, according to the reports, what happened was a Twitter employee was bribed around $2,000 to give up access to their account.
So that's a huge, huge security vulnerability when we consider the fact that every world leader has a Twitter account.
And we really need to know more about the amount of power that regular Twitter employees have over the accounts of world leaders.
Can they read their DMs?
Can they go in and change passwords and make tweets on their behalf?
It would seem in this hack that they absolutely can.
So we need, at the very minimum, more transparency and oversight.
Yeah.
When I checked about half an hour into this scam, the Bitcoin thieves had made off with $200,000.
So if they spent $2,000 to bribe someone, that's a 100-fold return on investment for this crime.
And they surely did much more than that.
But imagine that.
Imagine if you're China, North Korea, any foreign spy agency bribing $2,000.
And maybe you don't do anything.
Like this was a public spectacle hacking account.
What if you hacked an account and no one ever knew?
What if you hacked an account and read all the private messages and that was your, I mean, don't you think China would like to read all the private messages by every U.S. senator, every U.S. congressman, every U.S. diplomat?
I mean, we hear talk in the U.S. about banning TikTok because it's a Chinese company.
But seriously, if all it takes is $2,000 to bribe a Twitter worker, it's almost impossible to think it hasn't been done already.
That a Chinese spy, or maybe Russian, maybe Israeli, I don't know, wouldn't pay $2,000 and not basically ring the fire alarm on himself, but just quietly copy everything and quietly leave.
Yeah, and I have heard some rumors from within Twitter about exactly exactly such occurrences.
Also, we know for a fact that they allowed that the Saudi spy operated within Twitter for a very long time.
And another thing I'll point out about this hack is we don't know how long the hackers had access to this account and to the accounts of all these world leaders.
They could have been active for a very long time.
So they could very well have made logs of everyone's private messages before they went public with this Bitcoin scam.
So we absolutely don't know how insecure this platform is.
And I would strongly recommend against conveying any sensitive information through Twitter DMs.
It's probably one of the best secure messaging systems that big tech operates, I think.
Yeah, for sure.
I want to shift gears to our own story just for a minute because it's very strange.
I wrote my book, China Virus.
I was 99% finished by late April.
So we uploaded the cover.
And you know, you can put a book on pre-order while you're just correcting typos and you can say, all right, it's going to be on sale one week from now.
So we did that in late April.
And they almost immediately rejected it.
We tried again and they said, no, it contradicts, quote, official sources.
We had a lawyer write to Amazon.
They ignored us.
That was back in April.
In June, suddenly they relented.
We were able to upload it.
The book went to number one on Kindle in Canada, very successful.
And then a week later, they deleted the whole thing for the exact same excuse they used the very first time, Alam.
I couldn't believe it.
And our lawyers wrote them a letter.
They haven't answered our lawyer's letter yet.
But would you tell our viewers about your contact with them and what happened after that?
Yeah, so you sent me this story and then I emailed them, you know, requesting common explanation in case we did our own story on it.
And shortly after that, they restored the book.
And this is actually the second time something has happened.
Alex Berenson, who's sort of seems a COVID skeptic.
I'm not sure if he had called himself that, also did his own short book about the virus that was also blocked by Amazon.
But then again, they relented after media pressure.
So it seems like censorship is the default option for Amazon at the moment when it comes to books about the pandemic.
But they do relent under media pressure.
So it makes you wonder how many other books and pamphlets and e-books have been uploaded to Amazon about the virus that have just been vanished without a trace.
Did they give you any words?
Did they give you any explanation at all?
Because I should tell you, we've written to them again and they have not given us the courtesy of even a single one-line email in reply.
They just let it back up.
I think they're talking more to you than to me, the author, or our lawyers.
Did they tell you anything?
They did say it was an error, yes.
An error.
Okay, one of those.
You know, I hear that a lot.
It's a glitch.
It's an error.
But they didn't even have the courtesy to tell us that, Alam.
I want to let you know, you have had more communication with Amazon about our book than we have.
And I'm really grateful because I believe that were it not for your intervention, we'd still be banned.
I think they probably thought, oh, Breitbart.com is going to do a story that'll probably be read by some Republican senators who are on our case for censorship and collusion with China.
Okay, it's not worth the hassle.
I think it's precisely because they know important political leaders read Breitbart.com, especially on the China censorship issue.
I think you actually saved my book.
So thank you.
Well, hopefully that's the case.
It's impossible to know with these companies, but certainly happy to help.
Well, listen, it's great to talk with you.
I say again that you are the leading journalist when it comes to issues of tech bias and tech censorship.
I understand that you may, I don't know if I'm letting the cat out of the bag, but that you may have a book coming out in the months ahead yourself on these things.
I hope I haven't blown your cover on that.
But go ahead.
No big announcement yet, but yes, there is a book on the way, and there'll be some announcements about that shortly.
Well, I'm very excited when that happens.
Hopefully, we can schedule a longer, in-depth interview about your book, and I'd love to put the whole thing on YouTube and email it to all our viewers, because anyone who is concerned about tech censorship, you and I have talked a little bit informally about the kind of things in your book.
I know that our Rebel viewers will be extremely interested in it.
And I bet we could get that thing to be a bestseller in Canada too, you know, because you're in the States and you're with Breitbart, but in Canada, I think we have some of those problems even worse than you do.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And we'll see if Amazon bans it when it comes up.
Yeah, I sure hope they don't, but we'll do our best to promote it.
Good luck.
Thanks for your time today, Alam.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right, there we have Alam Bokari, the senior tech writer for Breitbart.com.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue of our plan to help the two Michaels.
Pierre writes, great idea.
I'm also pledging to actively avoid buying anything made in China until the Two Michaels are home again.
It is extremely hard not to buy something made in China.
I might suggest it's almost impossible unless you were going to not buy anything manufactured.
Not buy anything high-tech, no clothing, no gadgets, nothing made of plastic.
It's all made in China.
I saw a video out of India that said, look, if you try and de-Chinaify your life, you'll go nuts.
You can't do it.
But maybe take baby steps.
Once a month, change one thing.
Buy a phone that's not made in China.
Buy a TV that's not made.
Buy something made in Korea.
Buy something made in Taiwan.
Buy something made in America or Canada.
If you try and take China out of your life, you're not going to succeed.
It's like dieting.
I'm sort of an expert in what doesn't work.
If you just say, I'm going to lose all the weight, it's not going to happen.
But maybe baby steps.
All right, take my dieting approach to China.
Susannah writes, I can't imagine how the two Michaels must feel knowing we have a PM who admires the basic Chinese dictatorship and won't lift a finger for them.
Good on you, Rebel, for doing something about it when our traitor-in-chief won't.
People call him a traitor.
I don't think I would use that word because I think it overplays it by a few percent.
I think he's corrupt, obviously.
It's not my opinion.
The ethics commissioner has made that ruling several times.
I think he is compromised.
I think he ideologically sympathizes with our enemies.
But I don't want to use the word traitor.
I want to wait and use that.
I want to keep that word sharp like a knife that's rarely used.
I don't want to dull it by overuse because when we need to call someone a traitor, we need that word.
On my interview with Philip Slayton, Laura writes, leftists don't want to debate anything.
They just want to silence anyone who disagrees with them.
Leftists and Liberals Explained00:00:53
That's the thing.
I think there's an important distinction between a liberal and a leftist.
I think, maybe I'm making things up.
Our friend Joel Pollack made this point too.
A liberal is someone who just, I want a little more taxes.
I want a little more government.
I think the state needs to be even bigger.
I'm worried about certain things.
I want to be soft on crime.
But it's someone who's on the spectrum and will debate with you.
But a leftist says, no, no, no.
You shut up.
Shut up, he explained.
That's a leftist.
And Barry Weiss found out that leftists will come for liberals too.
Well, that's our show for the day.
We have, we're doing more TV than ever.
We're doing more stuff than ever.
We've got more teammates than ever.
Well, not than ever, but we're growing.
Drea Humphrey has joined our team.
We've got other talent on TV.
We're going full guns.
I'm so very excited, and I'm grateful to you for being part of it.
Until next time, on behalf of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.