Donald Trump’s January 15th bans by Twitter (Jack Dorsey), Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), and Silicon Valley oligarchs—backed by 2016 leaks celebrating Hillary Clinton’s victory—expose a global censorship effort mirroring authoritarian tactics from Putin, Maduro, and Iran’s Ayatollahs. Merkel, López Obrador, and Modi condemned it, while Uganda’s ban on tech platforms after Trump’s deplatforming signals shifting power dynamics. Canada risks similar suppression under Trudeau, with Conservative MPs like Roman Baber facing retaliation for questioning lockdowns, despite 99% of poll respondents opposing Rebel News’ censorship. The episode warns that unchecked Silicon Valley dominance endangers free speech everywhere. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my friends, I have an interesting story for you today, a surprising story of countries and politicians around the world who've decided to stand up for freedom, especially freedom of the press.
I never would have thought it, including socialist politicians.
I'll give you their names and I'll tell you what prompted it in a minute.
But first, let me invite you to subscribe to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to rebelnews.com and click on subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks for the whole year in advance.
And not only do you get the video version of my show, you get Sheila Gunread's show, David Menzies' show.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, wouldn't it be strange if Mexico and Germany saved us from the United States?
It's January 15th and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
Why We Left Facebook00:05:52
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 it?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
I love Canada and it's my home.
My great-grandparents came here in 1903 before Alberta was even officially a province.
But being a Canadian doesn't mean we can't admit that the United States is the greatest force for freedom in the world.
In fact, part of the reason it's so great to be Canadian is that we have the U.S. right next to us geographically, physically, commercially, culturally, linguistically, militarily.
Imagine if we were located somewhere far away, surrounded by bad guys, like the little democracy of Taiwan is, or Israel, or even Australia.
Too close to China for comfort, probably.
So we're lucky here, but there has been a sudden and dark shift in America's greatest industry that we use every day all the time.
I'm talking about the American high-tech industry, especially communications, social media, things like that.
I mean, just 10 years ago, the internet was the freest place in the world, probably the freest place in the world's history, the internet.
But now it's the least free place by many measures.
It's certainly the most spied upon place, a place of no privacy.
And now it's a place of the most regulation and censorship.
And in a terrifying way, it's not government regulation and censorship most of the time.
It's corporate censorship by oligarchs.
So you don't even get to know about the censorship.
It's not debated in a legislature.
It's not examined in committee hearings.
It's not a law that's voted on.
It's not prosecuted against you in a court where you can make your case.
You can't appeal it.
It's just done secretly.
And you find out about it afterwards, and there's no appeal.
You might be the most powerful politician in America, but the technology giants are more powerful and they love to let you know it.
And in case you're wondering, it's just getting started.
Here's the boss of Twitter, a kooky leftist billionaire named Jack Dorsey, and he was recorded on a company conference call a few days ago.
Take a look at this.
We do intend to do a full retro, as I said in my note.
It is going to take some time.
And then the other thing, just to close out a little bit, we are focused on one account right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account.
And it's going to go on for much longer than just this day this week, the next few weeks, to make on beyond the inauguration.
We have to expect that.
We have to be ready for that.
So the focus is certainly on this account and how it ties to real world violence.
But also, we need to think much longer term around how these dynamics play out over time.
I don't believe this is going away anytime soon.
Oh, so he's just getting started.
He's against hateful speech, you see, or dangerous speech or violent speech, whatever.
He lets the Ayatollahs of Iran stay on.
Same with Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela and Vladimir Putin, too.
Same with the president of Turkey.
Oh, and he personally donated millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter rioters.
He even went to the riots himself just to be part of the action.
So yeah, that's Twitter.
Trump was just the appetizer.
You're the main course.
Now, it's great if you're a Democrat, because Twitter, like all tech companies, is based in Silicon Valley, which is a nickname for a suburb of San Francisco.
That's the most left-wing city in America.
And so they're all pro-Democrat there, the tech companies.
Remember, this video leaked to Breitbart of the Google staff meeting a few days after the Trump victory in 2016.
Listen to how they talk about Clinton and the Democrats back then, and it's even worse now.
There is no dividing line in their mind.
They say we between the tech companies and the Democrats.
It's the same group.
Take a look.
I want to take you back to 8.30 p.m. on Tuesday night.
I was at home with friends and family watching the election returns.
And as we started to see the direction of the voting, I reached out to someone close to me who was at the Javit Center where the big celebration was supposed to occur in New York City.
Somebody who'd been working on the campaign.
And I just sent them a note and said, you know, are you okay?
It looks like it's going the wrong way.
And I got back a very sad short text that read, people are leaving.
Staff is crying.
We're going to lose.
Here's another one.
Okay, folks.
I know this is probably not the most joyous TGIF we have had.
And, you know, let's face it, most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad for because of the election.
Yeah, so their plans work.
They won.
They stopped Trump, but they're not done yet.
You heard Jack Dorsey.
They're going in for the kill.
All of them.
It's weird.
It's not a coincidence that all in a single day, 12 different tech companies simultaneously banned Donald Trump.
Don't tell me that's a coincidence.
That is a cartel at work.
The Democrats love it because they're the beneficiaries of it.
The Republicans hate it, but they didn't hate it enough to have done anything about it in the past four years when they could have, I guess.
Tech Cartel Ban Trump00:15:55
But what if you're not a Democrat?
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, is literally from San Francisco.
These are her personal friends.
She knows them.
They're probably in her speed dial.
But what if you're from Kampala?
Yeah, I have to look that up too.
It's the capital of Uganda.
Facebook and Twitter started banning politicians there too, just like they had done in America.
So the Ugandan government just banned Twitter and Facebook from Uganda.
And boy, was Twitter angry.
Censorship, that's our gig.
How dare you, Ugandans, try and steal our moves.
But seriously, I don't think anyone in Uganda is friends with Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg or any of the bosses of Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon, or the rest of them.
I just don't think Uganda is that close to Silicon Valley.
And of course, there's 200 or so other countries in the world.
And that's what's so surprising to me.
An unexpected consequence.
You'd think Trump's enemies around the world would be rejoicing his silencing, but they're not.
I mean, other than China.
Not Trump's rival, Angela Merkel of Germany, not the socialist Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
In fact, they're deeply concerned about it.
They oppose it because they know that Trump is gone.
He's almost gone.
It's not about Trump anymore.
It's about freedom, their sovereignty, political interference.
It was about Trump today, but like I say, they're just getting going.
Will it be them tomorrow?
Well, of course it'll be them tomorrow.
And they're not bosom buddies with Zuckerberg or Dorsey or Bezos or Bill Gates or whoever, so it's out of control and all around the world.
Here's a Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny.
He says it's the kind of thing Putin would have done to his opponents, just silence them.
That's quite something if they're comparing you to Putin.
Here's Oberdor Lopez Obrador saying it's a new Inquisition.
Listen to this guy.
It's a more present of this deciding particular sensor.
And no selling to government with the pod of the control of social,
a poder mediático, mundial.
Hamás un tergundal de sensura como la santa inquisición, pero para el manejo de la opión pública.
Es gravísimo.
More countries than you think.
Brazil's Yair Bolsonaro, I haven't heard from him on this yet, but remember Facebook, which owns WhatsApp and Instagram, shut down thousands of pro-Bolsonaro campaign chat groups in his last election.
They tried to stop him.
They want to treat foreign countries like little playthings, things you buy at a curity antique store or something.
Oh, I got to get me some of that country.
I can control that country.
Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, they think they're gods.
They think national boundaries are nothing to them.
They're globalists by ideology.
Their companies act around the world.
Commercially, borders mean nothing to them.
Why would they respect the sovereignty of a foreign country any more than they respect the sovereignty of a U.S. state?
It's all just places on a map for them to conquer in a game of risk where they get all the money.
But it's so interesting to me that in their vendetta against Trump, perhaps they've gone too far and have caused the rest of the world to want to withdraw from the American internet.
What a shame that would be.
The internet was a gift from America to the world, the gift of freedom and communication and connection.
But it was taken over by these socialist globalists who've wrecked it.
But wouldn't it be something if every country around the world reclaimed their social media and other parts of the internet and took it back from the American oligarchs?
Would you have local censorship instead of Silicon Valley censorship?
Well, probably.
Would Uganda be any better than Silicon Valley when it comes to freedom?
I don't know.
In some cases, no.
But frankly, I'd rather have 200 little tyrants in every country in the world than one colossus in Silicon Valley controlling the world.
I'd rather break up the cartel into 200 smaller parts, each country having its own rules, than to give all that power to these messiah-complex madmen in Silicon Valley.
Maybe some places would be truly free.
Maybe there would be a country known for its internet freedom.
Countries are known for things.
Maybe a country would make its promise to the world internet freedom, just like for your Swiss banks were known for their discretion and privacy, right?
That was part of the Swiss thing.
Maybe another country would become known for its privacy and freedom for the internet.
Right now, the tech giants aren't allowing that, are they?
But maybe this time they went too far.
Stay with us for more on this with Alan Bacardi.
Well, if you want to talk about the big tech titans, the masters of the universe censoring political thought with which they disagree, there's only one guy to talk to.
You know who I mean.
He's the author of the book called Deleted Big Tech's Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.
He's been warning us for months.
And alas, his warnings came true.
I'm talking about our friend Alan Bokari, senior tech editor at Breitbart, and he joins us now, Vice Cray.
Alam, it's no fun being the guy who said, I told you so.
I'm sure you wished that your prophecies were wrong.
Yes, and this is a topic we've been covering since 2015 at Breitbart News.
We saw back then that the sheer hostility of the left towards freedom of speech, quite a recent development, was going to collide with the open internet, which of course was the greatest, was the greatest free speech platform that ever existed.
That's now been completely destroyed.
And this is really the culmination of a four-year process to undermine President Trump's chances of re-election, destroy his movement, and now ultimately to censor the president himself, the first world leader in history to be permanently banned from Twitter and Facebook.
Yeah, what's so interesting about developments since that ban is I wouldn't have seen this coming.
I wouldn't have predicted this, Alam, that people who have criticized the ban include many world leaders, including those who have been opposed to Trump on ideological matters.
Angela Merkel of Germany, a globalist, I certainly wouldn't call her a right-winger.
The president of Mexico, pretty socialist guy, I think.
But I never thought of it from their point of view.
I mean, having Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey censor Republicans might be cool if you're a Democrat.
But if you are a president of a foreign country who doesn't have Zuckerberg on your speed dial, you're terrified that you might just be some plaything.
You might be the next guy censored in a kind of color revolution concocted out of Silicon Valley.
I never thought that people terrified of Silicon Valley would be in other countries, but that's pretty obvious now that I think of it.
That's absolutely true.
I mean, why would if you're a foreign country, if you're a sovereign nation, why would you want to have the risk of a bunch of companies in Silicon Valley, a bunch of American companies coming and interfering in your election and picking your elected leaders?
If they seem comfortable doing that in America, why wouldn't they do that in Germany or in the UK or in Mexico or in Uganda?
I mean, Uganda is run by a dictator, but just before their recent election, they banned Facebook and Twitter.
So I guess from the Ugandan government's perspective, only the dictators are allowed to meddle in their elections.
They don't want a bunch of Silicon Valley hipsters doing it.
So no matter what kind of country you are, you probably see these tech giants as a huge threat to your sovereignty right now.
That's so interesting to me.
The Uganda case, I don't know much about Uganda.
I know it's never really been a free country.
But when Twitter posted some outraged tweet, how dare you Ugandans censor people?
I can't believe the irony there.
They had just finished banning Donald Trump and now they're acting shocked, shocked that there's gambling in this establishment.
You know, they're shocked about censorship in Uganda.
I don't know enough about Uganda to say if I like the president there or not, but you got to hand it to him for points for style, censoring Twitter after it censored Trump.
There was something poetic about that.
And, you know, I'm sure that there was bad things being done by the dictator of Uganda, but smacking away an American company that itself doesn't believe in free speech.
I got to say, I was on Team Uganda for that one, Alam.
I was too.
And this is the thing.
Silicon Valley has really undermined America's moral authority.
You had a Chinese state media outlet saying, well, the U.S. is a threat to digital sovereignty now.
So, I mean, how can America claim to be, you know, the worldwide example for freedom and democracy when right now it seems to be sliding into oligarchy with unaccountable corporate elites appearing to have more power than the elected president?
Yeah, you know, the word oligarchs, it's such a strange word.
It's like a small group of very rich.
I mean, it's not the same as Plutocrack, but it's similar.
It's like a small group of princes that run a place.
I had really only heard that for Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
A few oligarchs rose who managed to accumulate billions in shady ways.
And they were sort of an umbrella around Yeltsin or Putin or whoever.
To have that as a defining characteristic of America's key industry is quite something, but I think it's accurate.
But I got to thinking about India, Alam, because India, there's a lot of tech going on in India, a lot of software and hardware successes, a lot of engineers in that country.
Many of them come to America, but it's getting its own domestic tech industry.
And they've recently been going through a battle with China in which they banned over 50 Chinese apps, including TikTok.
So you, by the way, I'm sorry, I didn't mention this.
You've got a great new article on Breitbart.com called France, Germany, Mexico, Australia join international outcry over censorship of Donald Trump.
And you list a bunch of countries, but I want to focus on India just for a second, because it really is a tech powerhouse.
I'd say it's America, UK, Israel, probably in second, and then India.
I would say India is a tech powerhouse.
I don't know what your view on that is.
But if they managed to rip out all the TikTok in their country and replace it with domestic substitutes, why wouldn't or why couldn't Narendra Modi, who's probably offside with these leftists in Silicon Valley, why wouldn't he ban Twitter, Facebook, and just have domestic versions that couldn't censor people in India?
What a great way for India to have its own market.
And I'm not normally one for censorship or for barriers, but you just can't trust Twitter or Facebook if you're an American, and you sure can't trust them if you're an Indian.
Yep, and you can't trust the Chinese technology companies either.
I think this is a general global trend we're seeing now, which is that if you're allowing these foreign tech companies into your country, you have to worry, are they going to be a tool? for that country to influence you, for that country's government to influence you, or for the just the CEOs of the company to try and meddle in your politics.
And one of the examples I list in my article is Hungary is developing, it's not the government, but there's a domestic social network, an alternative to Facebook being built there.
And some have accused the government of being involved in it.
Well, if I was the Hungarian government, I'd be openly involved because it's kind of in your national interest now to have your own domestic social networks and not rely on these increasingly authoritarian, politically biased tech companies in Silicon Valley.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know what to make of it up here in Canada.
We are so closely integrated with the United States.
Obviously, same time zones just across the border.
Culturally, linguistically, we're so integrated.
So I think that Canada is almost like a part of the United States for the purposes of this discussion.
And I think that the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau is actually quite close to these tech leaders.
And I think he's going to try and get a personal favored position with the tech companies the same way the Democrats do.
I think that Silicon Valley probably regards Justin Trudeau as a Democratic Party guy just in a different country.
I'm worried that the same censorship you see in America will absolutely be done in Canada, but to Justin Trudeau's enemies, not to Trudeau.
I'm a little bit worried now that Trump is going, that Silicon Valley is going to be Justin Trudeau's attack dog up here.
I don't know, maybe I'm being too paranoid, but these days, I don't think you can be paranoid enough when it comes to censorship.
No, I think you probably will see that.
And I think you'll see the government of Canada trying to work with these tech giants to censor their opposition.
They're probably going to follow the example of the Democrats in that sense, because you have the Democrats comparing conservatives to domestic terrorists, to extremists, which is, of course, a coded message to Silicon Valley.
You have to censor all of these people.
They're dangerous.
They're inciting violence, et cetera, et cetera.
Meanwhile, of course, during the summer, they were openly making excuses for violence, including through the mainstream media in articles that went viral across Twitter and other platforms.
But the general trend, I think, is tech companies as the muscle of neoliberal left-wing parties in the US, in Canada, and basically anywhere else where they might have influence.
We're in very strange times.
I'm a little bit worried about our own safety.
I don't mean that physically.
I mean that in terms of our freedom.
I'm not looking for you to give away any inside information, but does Breitbart, do you and your friends at Breitbart feel that you are safe and secure from censorship?
Conservatives and Censorship00:05:16
Or do you worry that you will be de-platformed next?
Well, I don't think, I can't speak for Breitbart, but I don't think anyone feels safe right now.
I think we're entering a period of unprecedented draconianism with tech companies that have more power over our communications that know more about us than any other entity in history.
And I think that combination of state tyranny and corporate tyranny is not going to be like anything we've seen before.
There's no historical comparison for it, really.
Yeah.
Well, we'll keep in touch with you until one of us is unpersoned and deplatformed first.
And I congratulate you on your excellent work.
If only more people had listened to your book.
But maybe this is a problem that had to become clearer and more stark.
As the Leninists say, the worse the better.
I don't really believe in that because I think that we don't want things to get worse, but people are seeing how bad it is.
And maybe now, only now, that they'll act.
Great to see you again, Alan.
Look forward to talking to you more in the future.
Thanks, Ed.
All right, there you have it.
Alan Bokari, one of the good guys who's been warning about tech censorship for members.
Stay with us.
Hey, welcome back on my show last night.
Bruce writes, on the contrary, why aren't we Rebel News viewers bombarding the federal conservatives with letters asking why the party is boycotting the only true conservative network?
It's easy enough to get the address of Aaron O'Toole and other MPs.
And since my MP is a Conservative Party member, I'll write to her directly and hope for an answer.
Well, thank you very much for that.
We did send an email out to some folks, I don't know if you got it, with the phone number of the Conservative Party headquarters in Ottawa.
So I know a number of people called because I got some copies of some emails and some reports back.
We also had a poll, as you know, at banrebelnews.com, which sort of tilted it towards the ban us side.
But last I checked, I'm not even kidding, 99% of people voted not to ban us.
Maybe I should have expected that, but I don't know.
I already see that just today, a conservative MP did an interview with our Kian Bexte in Calgary.
So I'm not sure if all the Conservative MPs and senators are going along with this ban on rebel news.
It was a really dumb idea when Andrew Scheer did it.
I think the party really missed out on a lot of opportunities to talk to the Conservative Party of this country.
Plus, it also showed conservative voters that maybe Andrew Scheer wasn't that strong-willed.
I hope Aaron O'Toole doesn't make that mistake again.
He did make the mistake, but hopefully he can get out of it.
Look, we're going to keep doing what we do.
I think we covered the federal election really well last time.
I think we had reporters going around the whole country, and now we have like three more reporters than we had last year.
So we're going to cover the election, I think, really well.
We've got great people.
And what the Conservatives do, they'll do.
And if they don't want to talk to us, I think that's really weird.
It would be like if the Liberal Party said, we're not talking to the Toronto Star anymore.
Why?
It's your hometown paper for Liberal Toronto.
Well, we're mad at them.
Okay, whatever.
Cut off your nose to spite your face, as they say.
Gilly writes, at this point, the CPC should just walk across the floor en masse and join the Liberals, seeing how they are so eager to please them.
They just seem bound and determined to lose the next election.
Listen, I mean, they've got their job to do, but come on, if you're really going to allow your opponents and your rivals to tell you who you can and can't talk to, you're never going to win.
I mean, can we not agree, just as a common sense principle, that the advice your enemies give you is probably wrong.
It's probably a trick, or it's probably designed to weaken you.
So if the liberals say to the conservatives, don't talk to rebel news, there's a tiny chance that's bad faith advice.
Michael writes, the latest stunt on emergency alert twice is a perfect example of making sure that we use fear and know better than you to ensure obedience.
The conditioning is incredible.
You're talking about your cell phone, where Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, sent a message to everyone in the province saying, stay at home, stay at home, it's the law.
When in fact, there are plenty of reasons you're allowed to leave your house.
But you're right, it all goes to the fear and paranoia.
And today, an MP named Roman Baber, excuse me, Baber.
I'm sorry, I got his name wrong.
He wrote a letter to Premier Doug Ford and said, look, lockdowns aren't working.
Here's the stats.
Lockdowns are making it worse.
Plus, the problem is not as acute as you say it is.
He was fired immediately, not just from the party offices he held.
He was banned from the party altogether.
So, yeah, I think Doug Ford is, as his position gets weaker and weaker, he's getting more and more brutal in his lockdown.