Erin O’Toole’s abrupt dismissal of Pierre Poilievre as finance critic—despite his 785,000 Facebook interactions (vs. O’Toole’s 242,000)—hints at rivalry, not policy. Poilievre exposed Liberal controversies like Bill Morneau’s $41,000 expense and Chrystia Freeland’s "Great Reset" ties, while O’Toole prioritizes internal party conflicts over substantive opposition. Meanwhile, Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Ken Paxton push back against tech censorship with fines and lawsuits, mirroring Biden’s federal funding tactics but exposing a broader trend: foreign nations like Uganda and India demand "digital sovereignty" to counter U.S. tech influence, echoing past corporate meddling—now more insidious through speech control. O’Toole’s move may reflect fear of Poilievre’s rising star, while global resistance signals tech’s unchecked power reshaping politics without accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I try and make sense of Aaron O'Toole firing Pierre Polyev as finance critic and it is a tough one.
There is no sense to it.
He was the star performer.
There's only one way it makes sense and I'm sorry.
I just think this is Occam's razor.
The simplest answer is probably the right one.
Or deduction when you remove all other possibilities, what's left, however implausible, must be the one.
And that is this.
Aaron O'Toole does not like Pierre Polyev being a rival.
He doesn't like being outshone by him.
I'll make my case to you in the podcast ahead, go into some detail.
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Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Aaron O'Toole fires Pierre Polyevis' finance critic.
What possible reason could there be besides jealousy?
It's February 10th, 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.
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
I've done this quiz with you before, you, who are probably in the top 1% of Canadians in terms of news consumption, especially of conservative news consumption.
I've asked you to name the Conservative Party's critics in charge of the most important portfolios over the past year.
So I haven't asked you about amateur sport.
I've asked you about the pandemic.
Who's the conservative critic for vaccines, lockdowns?
That would be the health critic, right?
Who's the foreign affairs critic?
Mainly China, the two Michaels, but also America, Iran, whatever.
Who's the foreign critic?
I think free speech stuff is important these days.
So the heritage minister who gives out the media bailout money and who's now in charge of censorship.
Can you name them?
I literally haven't found a single person who can name them all without Googling it.
Mistake in Expenses00:03:27
And maybe you can't even, even though I've told you the answers before.
Because they either aren't allowed to say anything, or they have nothing to say, or they say it, but they say it to media who hate them.
So it goes nowhere.
I have a friend, I think I told you, who lives in downtown Calgary, and he did not know that his own MP was the energy critic.
You'd think you know that given the carbon tax, the Keystone XL crisis, and you know, Calgary, but no.
Except for Pierre Polyev.
Everyone knows him, and it's easy to know why.
The guy can talk.
The guy can think he has something to say.
It's conservative.
He knows his file inside and out.
Even the really technical stuff, which is, I'm not going to say I'm surprised by it, but I'm impressed with it.
He can go toe-to-toe with expert economists, bank experts, tax experts.
He knows his stuff.
That's hard to do.
And when it comes to partisan fights, well, he's a winner.
Look at this battle with Bill Morineau a few months ago.
Believe that it is a mere coincidence that you repaid over $40,000 of expenses associated with your travel. on a we charity trip, that you just repaid it today on the same day you were expected to testify under oath about it.
Is that just a coincidence, Minister?
Mr. Minister.
Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
I think what I want to make sure that I communicate is this was a mistake on my behalf.
I'm responsible for any expenses that I incur on trips being paid for.
This was an expense that I was unaware of, that I did not know had not been paid.
And when I found that out, $41,000 expense, you didn't know about a $41,000 expense.
How is that even possible?
Mr. Minister.
Again, Mr. Chair, I just have to say that in review of our records, I understood that there was no charge for these travel at the Wii facilities.
And once I found that out, I endeavored to repay that.
And of course, it was a mistake on my part, which I take full responsibility for.
The average Canadian living in Red Deer or Halifax that goes on a trip would notice if there was a, say, a $400 expense that they didn't pay.
Maybe a hotel room for a couple of nights that never got charged them, and they paid immediately.
But you're telling me that on this obviously very luxurious trip, that $41,000 of expenses happened right under your nose, and you didn't know about it until it suddenly, through an epiphany, came to your attention the very day you were to testify in a parliamentary committee about it.
Obviously, there were a lot of forces bearing down on Bill Mourneau with that we charity, including media interest and a track record of bad behavior by Morneau.
But I think it is a fact that Pierre Polyev was the most effective at actually putting tough questions directly to the man in committee.
Why Trudeau Faces Criticism00:15:23
He did it.
And you tell me, when was the last time that a conservative critic saw a liberal cabinet minister thrown out of cabinet and even thrown out of parliament in disgrace like Morneau?
That is not common.
And I think a share of the credit goes to Pierre Polyev.
He's young.
He's smart.
I think he speaks French.
He has a lovely young family.
He hasn't screwed up anything publicly.
In fact, he was seriously considering running for leader last time.
He started to tour the country a little bit until he abruptly canceled all that.
And I was quite disappointed to see that.
And I imagine that some scandal was brought to his attention privately.
And he was told, don't you run?
And he probably thought, you know, I don't need that dirt thrown at me and my young family.
I'll pass.
That's just speculation on my part.
I have no basis for it.
But boy, he slammed on the brakes fast after stomping on the gas fast.
And I regret that.
And I look at how lackluster Aaron O'Toole has been since becoming leader.
And I regret Pierre's decision not to run even more.
And I suspect a lot of Conservative Party members do too, especially when they see Pierre out there just killing it every time in parliament and on social media and taking on issues that Conservatives care about.
He doesn't stray outside his bailiwick of finance, but he does interesting things in that portfolio.
I love how he showed that the great reset is a real thing cooked up by the World Economic Forum, of which, by the way, Christia Freeland is actually a director.
How's that even possible?
And Pierre just nailed it.
I sometimes wonder if the government's not just covering up the Wii scandal here with this endless filibuster, but they also don't want any scrutiny of this grand reset the prime minister is now talking about.
This idea that he's going to renovate Canadian society to fit his Trudopian ambitions.
This is not a time to re-engineer society to his liking or to his socialist ideology.
This is a time to get people safely and securely back to work to protect their lives and their livelihoods, not a time for government to take advantage of the crisis in order to massively expand its powers at the expense of Canadians' freedom.
That's what we should be talking about here in the finance committee.
We should just be standing up against government power grabs like this grand reset the prime minister is discussing.
I'm beginning to wonder if this filibuster is about more than just covering up the we scandal, but also about covering up the government's grand schemes for social and economic engineering to cover up the power grab that he has lusted over since the beginning of this crisis.
So, frankly, we've lost patience.
We want an answer.
We want to get on with the job.
So yeah, he's great on his file.
He's great at fighting for the base.
And so I think I know why Aaron O'Toole just sacked him, fired him.
The best critic in caucus, really the only critic in caucus, the only household name, certainly, the only conservative capable of forcing the media to cover him on his own terms.
They do so maybe grudgingly.
But when Pierre Polyam takes a run at things, the media knows to listen because it's probably going to be politically interesting.
It's probably going to be factually accurate.
And it's going to be well communicated.
And it works.
You know, the media grumble that he's a conservative, but they give him coverage.
They have some respect for him, unlike those other critics you can't name that I keep quizzing you about.
And thus you see Aaron O'Toole's position.
I think he's jealous.
Jealous that Pierre has success where O'Toole himself does not.
For heaven's sakes, he's the leader.
He got what he wanted.
He's the boss in the big chair.
But you can't buy a personality.
You can't win a personality in an election.
You can't win courage in an election.
And I got to say, no one really cares what O'Toole says, possibly because he says so little of interest.
I mean, the one thing I will note that he has said is that he quarrels with Trudeau's bungled vaccine procurement, by which I mean O'Toole says he would have done it better.
Can you tell me anything substantive about which O'Toole and Trudeau have actually fundamentally clashed?
Doing something better, I don't think, is a fundamental clash.
In fact, O'Toole told Pierre to cork it on that great reset stuff.
O'Toole is an empty space.
I think he believes that's a path to victory.
Just let Trudeau implode and catch power as it falls into your hands.
I don't think it works that way.
I think that was sort of Andrew Scheer's strategy too.
It didn't work.
I don't think that works anywhere, especially in a country like Canada where Trudeau has a natural base of about 30% in the polls to begin with, no matter what.
And the media party's good for another 5% or 10%.
I mean, they saved him last time when the whole blackface fiasco blew up.
I don't think there's a second blackface fiasco about to blow up.
And O'Toole is doing his best to antagonize his own base, including turfing Derek Sloan, a leadership rival on trumped-up charges.
Remember that?
A racist named Paul Fromm donated money to Sloan's campaign, but he was tricky about it.
He used a different name than he's known by.
He went by Frederick P. Fromm instead of Paul Fromm.
And of course, it was a donation to the Conservative Party, too.
And of course, nobody knew who Frederick P. Fromm was.
But O'Toole actually accused Sloan of unforgivable racism and poor judgment.
Even though Sloan is not a racist, he actually married a woman of color and his kids are children of color, if that's the word.
He's no racist.
And remember, O'Toole's Conservative Party headquarters issued the membership.
They took a portion of the donation, too.
O'Toole said only Sloane was to blame for the same trick they fell prey to, and it was a small donation.
There was no moral turpitude in cashing the check.
O'Toole smeared Sloane as a racist.
And as Sloane told me, O'Toole never even so much as picked up the phone to call him, to talk to him in advance.
I mean, that's not a leader.
Do you remember this clip?
That you weren't actually ever called by Aaron O'Toole before he announced he was going to seek your termination.
Is that true?
Yeah, not before and not after.
Aaron O'Toole has still not contacted you other than his general remarks on the Zoom call today.
That's correct.
You know, firing people is an unfortunate job that every boss has to do.
And I think it's a sign of someone's character to at least call someone, if not look at them in the eyes when you fire them.
Has he sent you an email or a text?
I've had no communication with him at all before this event or through or after.
I am very disappointed in that answer.
If you're firing a man for good reasons or for bad, you look him in the eye and you tell him.
So yeah, yeah, Aaron O'Toole, who ran during the leadership campaign against canceled culture.
Actually, he specifically said he was an ally of Sloan's.
I mean, not an ally, but he would defend Sloan's right to be in the party.
He broke those promises.
My point being, that's all O'Toole has really done since becoming leader.
I mean, you tell me what he's done.
You tell me what he stands for.
What a difference has he made?
What fight has he fought?
I think Aaron O'Toole has put more energy and effort into fighting people within his own party than finding Trudeau on the liberals.
And I'd include in that O'Toole's bizarre decision to do an email interview with me, which he did and which we published and which I thought he looked pretty good in the interview.
But when the mean girls of the media party recoiled in horror, he immediately disowned us and his own interview that he had done with us.
Huh?
That's cancel culture plus cowardice, plus not being a conservative, plus showing how easily pushed around you are.
And I say again, what a contrast to Pierre Polyev.
So O'Toole fired him.
Now they say, oh, well, he's on the jobs file.
No, mate, he was on the jobs file.
That's finance critic.
I think this is what they call tall poppy syndrome.
You ever heard of that?
Oh, I can't have someone who looks better than me.
If O'Toole can't be popular and can't be loved, well, then no one can be.
Fire him.
Fire Polyev.
I mean, I bet O'Toole would probably kick Pierre Polyev out of caucus if he could, like he did to Derek Sloan.
Now, look at this.
Look at this.
This is an indicator of engagement with the party base on Facebook.
But I think that's a surrogate for a lot of things because we all get our news so much from Facebook.
A lot of Conservative Party members are on Facebook.
So this is an analytics page.
It shows how many people in the last seven days follow each of these Facebook pages.
How many people engage with posts on Facebook?
So follows them or likes them or comments them.
It's an indication of public support.
So Justin Trudeau, as you can see, has 7.8 million Facebook likes.
And in the last week, 851,000 interactions with the public.
Fair enough.
I mean, he's the prime minister.
He has a massive public profile, massive budget and staff, and he makes the news.
So that's to be expected.
Now, the Conservative Party itself has 461,000 followers, and 432,000 people engaged with their tweets last week.
That's pretty good.
I mean, that's half as much engagement as Trudeau, but like I just showed you, Trudeau has 15 times more followers.
So in fact, the Conservative Party itself isn't doing bad at engagement compared to Trudeau.
Now, we at Rebel News are next on the chart.
We have just under 200,000 followers, and our engagement is almost the same as the Conservative Party, 422,000 people.
Now, I should tell you, we have another quarter million followers on our other two Facebook pages and my own personal page.
So we're actually bigger, but let's just compare that one main page.
But look at Pierre Polyev.
144,800 followers, pretty good.
And he's just killing it with engagement.
785,000 people are liking, commenting, following, almost as much as Justin Trudeau himself.
Michelle Rempel's on there at 345,000 engagements.
And engagement is when you interact with people.
It's a sign of people caring about you.
And then in last place on this chart is Aaron O'Toole, the party leader with 242,000 engagements.
And I don't know if you noticed that other column there, number of Facebook posts this past week, that's how much stuff different people are publishing.
We have the most on this chart.
We published 132 items this past week.
Makes sense.
We're a publisher.
Pierre Polyev did just 12, and he had massive reach.
Michelle Rempel, give her credit.
She did just two posts, had huge reactions just to two posts.
Aaron O'Toole, I mean, he's trying to do what he does 46 times, and no one cares.
They just don't care.
I think maybe he knows it.
Did you see his new weird ad?
Just take a look at the first part.
I'm Aaron O'Toole.
If you don't know me, I'm the leader of Canada's Conservatives.
Yeah, weird.
If you're doing that after having been in politics for years and years, and you're maybe just weeks away from an election call, if you're still trying to introduce yourself, you're not doing so well, are you, buddy?
You know, it's hard being the leader when your followers are stronger than you, have more charisma than you, more personality than you, but get over yourself.
That's the job of the leader, to weld together a team.
Stephen Harper wasn't the most dynamic personality in the room, though he could be funny and charming when he wanted to be.
But generally, he was sort of the boring accountant dad guy.
And it worked.
And he could tolerate people being more peppy or media-centric than him, including Pierre Polyev, by the way, who was a Harper minister.
Harper managed to work not just with peppier people, including Jason Kenney, but also his own personal rivals.
Jim Prentice, Peter McKay, former leader Stockwell Day, even Belinda Stronick for a while.
Harper put these people on the front bench, even though they were rivals with each other and with him, because he was the boss.
He didn't need to be shy of them.
And by the way, I remember this because I was involved in those early days some 20-plus years ago.
Stephen Harper started out his leadership of the Conservative Party.
It wasn't even called the Conservative Party back then.
He first fused together the Canadian Alliance Party.
Remember that?
Well, there was a splitist group, if you remember, Deborah Gray, Monty Solberg, Jay Hill.
They had all sulked away in something called the Democratic Representative Caucus for a bit when they rebelled against Stockwell Day.
So when Stephen Harper became the new leader of the Canadian Alliance, he rebuilt the coalition.
He didn't just tolerate rivals.
He reached out to them and rebuilt things.
He said to the Democratic representative caucus, you guys come on back.
And then he said to Peter McKay, let's join forces.
He built a big coalition and he won.
What has O'Toole done?
Well, he hasn't done anything conservative.
He attacked Eric Sloan on false pretenses.
You'll recall he also attacked rival Jim Karajalios during the leadership race.
He's attacked us.
I'm not sure why.
And now he's sacking his best MP.
If only Aaron O'Toole was so brutal towards his enemies as he is towards his friends, if only Aaron O'Toole spent as much effort criticizing Trudeau and the liberals as he does going after conservatives.
Hey, maybe it'll work.
Maybe the conservative base will be motivated enough to still show up to the polls.
And maybe some liberals will really like the cut of O'Toole's jib, really like his style.
And maybe they'll, you know, maybe O'Toole will defeat the media party by, I don't know, really liking them and really being nice to Rosemary Barton and showing those mean girls what he really thinks of independent media like us.
I don't know.
I guess it's possible, isn't it?
I mean, there's no evidence of it working so far, at least on Facebook.
Republican States vs Big Tech00:14:50
And here's the CBC's aggregation of polls.
There's no evidence of it working so far in public opinion polls.
But, hey, I guess anything's possible, right?
They change the rules constantly based on whatever they deem to be politically correct at any given point in time.
These rules and standards are often changed without the knowledge of their users, moving the goalposts on Floridians and others who use these open forums for discourse and as a source for information.
When a social media company applies these standards unequally on users, this is discrimination, pure and simple.
Can you imagine tolerating this kind of behavior in banking or in healthcare or in other industries?
Well, that's a statement by Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, a man who has been getting well-deserved kudos from Republicans for his handling of the lockdown.
I like him the way he handles the media.
And now he wants to handle the big tech companies.
And in particular, as you heard there, their political censorship.
But how can he, given that the governing law over those affairs is the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 to be particular, that has basically provided a waiver for big tech companies for anything they publish that has made them immune to lawsuits over content or how they handle content.
Donald Trump talked about Section 230 during his term as president.
Alas, he did not take meaningful steps during that term.
But now the governor steps forward, joining us now to talk about Ron DeSantis' proposal and whether or not it will make a difference.
This is our friend Alan Bokhari, chief tech correspondent for Breitbart.com.
Alan, great to see you again.
Hi, Ezra.
Good to be on.
You know, I love Ron DeSantis more every day.
In many ways, he has Trump's fighting spirit and his understanding that the media is not his friend, but he seems blessedly free of some of Trump's flaws.
Every person has strengths and flaws, but I think Ron DeSantis carries the best of Trumpism with him.
I'm very excited about him as a governor.
What do you think of the man before we get to the Section 230 issue?
I think I agree with that assessment.
I mean, he's, as you say, he knows how to handle the media.
And he's leading the way on perhaps the biggest issue to the populist right, which is big tech.
And I think, you know, these proposals, he's come out with them, without, he's come out with a massive raft of proposals, probably the most aggressive set of regulations that he plans to propose in big tech that we've seen from any Republican governor.
You know, he might have some difficulty in the courts, especially with Section 230 still on the books.
But this kind of might be a model, I think, for Republican regulation of big tech going forward.
Well, and that's the thing.
I'm not as familiar with American jurisdiction.
I mean, in Canada, we have a clear distinction between what the feds can do and what the provinces can do.
And this would squarely be a matter for the federal government in Canada.
But the United States tilts more towards the states, and individual states can have quite a bit of power, as California shows in its regulatory regime.
Can you tell me some of the things that Ron DeSantis proposes to do at the state level?
First, tell me what they are, and then if you want to tell me, if you think that they have sticking power.
So he's proposing several things.
He's proposing a $100,000 a day fine on any tech platform that censors a political candidate or an elected official.
And, you know, that doesn't sound like a lot if you're a tech company, but it adds up, you know, over 30 days of $3 million.
He's also proposing a private right of action for Floridian citizens who are censored by big tech platforms unfairly.
He's planning to impose even more fines on tech companies that censor, that use their algorithms to favor certain candidates or certain political causes ahead of elections.
That's very important.
And he's also going to empower the Attorney General of Florida to bring suits against the tech companies based on the Florida, Florida's Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
So a whole lot of proposals there that would present a significant problem for the tech companies if they aren't shot down by the federal courts.
And that's probably the issue he's going to deal with.
But it's good to make a start, good to start the fight.
And we'll just have to see how that develops whether Section 230 ends up superseding it.
I'm not really a legal expert, so I can't say with any confidence how that'll turn out, but it's good that the fight has started.
Now, of course, I suggested that DeSantis is in the mold of Trump in his worldview, in his style.
Are there any other governors who seem to be sympathetic to this approach who might copy it?
I can imagine if you had a few states, Texas, Florida, some big Republican states, and of course, the Republicans have the majority of states numerically.
They control state houses.
Do you think this might spread?
And do you think any Democrats might get behind it?
Well, oh, I doubt any Democrats will get behind it if the focus is on censorship.
They are doing some interesting things on competition, but they want to, increasingly, they're trying to tie their enforcement actions that they're proposing these big tech to conditions on cracking down on misinformation or on hate speech.
So censoring even more.
As far as the other Republican states go, the other man to watch at the moment is the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton.
He's leading multi-state lawsuits against Google and the other tech giants, targeting their monopoly power.
And he also really understands the censorship issue as well.
So that's another one to watch.
I will say, if Republican, you're absolutely right, if Republican states got together and acted as a unit on this issue, they could do some real damage on the tech companies.
One interesting proposal I've recently been thinking about is the amount of state government agencies that rely on these tech platforms to put out their messages to alert the public about what's going on.
And also public Wi-Fi.
So airports and schools, these are controlled by state governments in many cases.
So if all of these state governments got together and say, well, look, if tech companies discriminate on the basis of viewpoint and they censor political candidates, if they censor the president, then we're not going to allow them on public Wi-Fi until they change their policies.
Or we're not going to allow our agencies to use these platforms to put out their announcements.
They're going to have to use different platforms.
And that wouldn't be a crippling load for tech companies, but it would do real damage to them, impose consequences on them.
And it would create an incentive for new companies to create a market for new companies to cater to those Republican agencies that would be looking, those Republican-controlled agencies that will be looking to put out their announcements on platforms that aren't Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.
You know, that's a great point.
I mean, I often wonder why in our city, we're based here in Toronto and why the media is so submissive towards the mayor.
And I think one of the most obvious answers is because the city hall is one of the largest advertisers in Toronto.
So if you tick off the mayor, he might cancel a million dollars worth of ads to your newspaper chain.
And he'll also give scoops and leaks to your competitor.
But I think that the power of the purse is important.
It makes me think of that new executive order that Joe Biden signed to push transgenderism into sport and other places.
Using, I think it's called Title IX.
Basically, he's saying if you're a school, a college, an Olympics team that gets any funding from the feds, you got to go full trans or you're going to be cut off.
I think it's not so much that he has the legal jurisdiction.
He's just saying, if you want my money, you got to do it.
I think if you cut off all advertising, all access to state buildings and assets and infrastructure and Wi-Fi, you could block Facebook, YouTube, Google in an enormous number of places, not a private home, but in a lot of other places, just through the power of the purse.
I never thought of that.
That's absolutely right.
And, you know, the Biden administration is showing Republicans how to really use executive power.
So many executive orders just in the first month of the Biden administration.
So Republican governors need to start doing what Republicans are really used to doing, which is weaponizing executive government.
And I mean, if you had all of these, like I said, if you had all these federal agencies on alternative platforms, that would have knock-on effects.
All the journalists, whether they're left-wing or right-wing, would have to go to these alternative platforms as well to get the latest news.
So it could cause a nice chain reaction on that.
Yeah, and you get the big Republican states, I mean, Texas and Florida being the obvious examples.
That's a lot of people.
That's tens of millions of people.
And there's a lot of media in those two states too.
Let me shift gears a little bit.
I asked you what other states would be interested in, and you, I think, correctly said it would be Republicans.
But I see in your article, and I'd say I learned so much from your Breitbart stories.
Let me just read the headline of a new one.
Senate antitrust reform bill targets big tech's monopoly power.
And when I read that, I thought, well, hang on, the Republicans don't control the U.S. Senate anymore, which I find terrifying.
But this is a bill that Democrats support.
Am I right?
That's right.
It has real bipartisan support.
And it doesn't really address the censorship issue because it's, you know, the Democrats are on board with it.
But it doesn't, you know, as far as I can tell, it doesn't tell the tech companies, well, they have to censor misinformation.
They have to censor hate speech as well.
So that makes it a little bit better than some of the other Democrat proposals we've seen, like the one from the New York Attorney General and some of the stuff that Biden's been talking about.
What it does do, which is interesting, is target big tech's exclusionary practices, anti-competitive practices.
So this is the way in which companies like Google and Apple and Facebook cut deals to crowd out competitors.
So one good example of this is how Google paid Apple over a billion dollars, I think, to make Google search the default search on Apple smartphones.
And obviously competitors to Google, smaller search engines, don't have that kind of money, which allows Google to really dominate the marketplace because obviously Google and Apple, they control 99% or more of smartphone operating systems worldwide.
So that's the entire smartphone market.
So by targeting practices like that, this bill could make it, well, it doesn't target political bias directly.
It could make things easier for competing search engines that aren't as politically co-opted as Google to start gaining some market share.
I mean, that's a small example.
I mean, listen, a billion dollars or whatever is not small, but in the scope of things, it is small.
Let me ask you, I mean, the last big populist president, and I don't know my American history that well, but I would say it's Teddy Roosevelt.
And he was a trust buster.
He went against the top-hatted Rockefellers and the big robber barons, as they were called, railway, steel, coal, that kind of thing.
And they were almost caricatures.
I mean, to look at old man Rockefeller with his top hat and whatnot, they were easy to hate, is what I'm saying.
Maybe that's just how history portrays it.
But where's the populist fury against the tech companies now?
Is it there?
And I know Tulsi Gabbard, who ran for the Democrat presidential primary briefly, she's part of that populist spirit.
I'm not sure if the Sanders people love tech companies, but I see that the left has merged with the tech companies, people who used to be for the little guy, people who would used to rail against the rich, the billionaires, the oligarchs, the plutocrats, the people who should be hating this generation's John D. Rockefellers.
They love Zuckerberg and Bezos.
If not personally, they just love the cash and the power.
Well, I think the people in charge of the Democrat Party right now, Pelosi Biden, all these people, they're clearly neoliberals.
They're not really left-wingers in any traditional understanding of the world.
They're corporatists.
And their very clear agenda right now is merging federal government with the power of these tech companies leaning on them to censor their political opposition.
So a very sort of authoritarian corporatist style of government.
And quite similar to China, as I've said in the past, China uses public-private partnerships to control what private companies do and control their own people.
As far as the populist left goes, I don't think they have a great deal of love for the tech companies either.
We've even seen a few far-left communities getting censored.
For example, Reddit banned a really big left-wing subreddit last summer, the Chapo Trap House subreddit was a subreddit for a very popular podcast.
And a lot of Jeff Bezos recently stepped down from Amazon.
He's really been a hate figure for like grassroots populist left-wingers.
If you look at the sort of things they say on social media.
But those guys don't really control.
One, they don't control the Democratic Party.
And two, even though a few of their people have been censored, I would say they still support things like crackdowns on hate speech for the most part, enforcing gender pronouns on people.
The populist left believes in that too.
So unless they get really suffering from censorship in the same way that the right has been suffering from censorship, I don't think that'll be a priority.
It's more a bash of the rich kind of thing.
Silicon Valley's Global Challenges00:04:34
Well, let me just ask one last question, Chief, because you made me think of something.
I know that Facebook's been fighting with Australia over different things, over money, really.
And Facebook's threatened to sort of leave Australia and ban Australia if I and I know I'm oversimplifying, but it reminds me of when Twitter was getting into fights with other countries.
When Twitter started censoring Donald Trump, other countries said, whoa, if they can censor Trump, they can censor us.
I know Uganda, Twitter was messing around in their elections.
I think it was Uganda.
And they just said, all right, Twitter, you're banned from Uganda.
And Twitter said, what?
Free speech.
This was moments after censoring Trump.
I know Angela Merkel.
I know Mexico's president also expressed concern with it.
And I see even in the last 48 hours, Twitter getting involved in the farmers protests in India have earned the ire of the Indian government.
And I wonder if some of the changes to tech's monopoly status will come not from any American political spirit, but from other countries saying we don't want to be dominated by Americans, left-wing or right-wing.
India should have its own Twitter app.
Let's ban Twitter because they're meddlers.
Uganda, maybe you're not going to have a Uganda version of Twitter, but maybe you'll have an Indian version of Twitter that catches on.
They're a tech powerhouse.
I guess what I'm saying is, if America isn't quite as freedom-loving and trust-busting as it ought to be, maybe America might be saved in part by other countries that have a sense of national pride like India.
Yeah, I think this is going to be one of the big trends we're going to see in the coming years.
This idea of digital sovereignty, I think, will really gain momentum.
Do you want these American, if you're a foreign country, whether you're a European democracy or a Tinpole dictatorship in Africa, you don't want a bunch of American companies coming to interfere in your politics.
And I think the State Department and various arms of the U.S. foreign policy establishment are going to be very concerned by this because for the longest time, they've seen Silicon Valley and these tech platforms as a means of extending their influence even further abroad.
So if all these companies are going to start pushing back against Silicon Valley, kicking them out of the country or regulating them, it's going to really lessen that influence.
That's certainly something to watch, especially the European governments, I think, because I think that especially took Silicon Valley and the U.S. foreign policy staff by surprise that Europe is so determined to not be influenced by Silicon Valley.
You know, years ago, I had a quarrel with Chiquita Banana.
Don't ask, Alam.
It's a long story.
But I studied a little bit about the history of that company.
Of course, it was called the United Fruit Company, and it had its own CIA nickname, Unifruit, like it was like code name.
It was such a political force in, and that's where the phrase Banana Republic came from, where this fruit company was so powerful and it had a corrupting influence on politics, on police, on commerce.
And the phrase Banana Republic was based on how abusive and corrupting this American-controlled CIA asset company.
I know this sounds like crazy James Bond stuff, but it actually is the history of that company.
And to this day, they still get involved in strange deals with terrorists in South America and elsewhere.
And you can see where that animosity would come from, whether you're left-wing or right-wing, if you're in Costa Rica or whatever, whatever the country would be, or Ecuador, you would hate the fact that some foreign company is making the rules for you.
I mean, that would get anyone united with their fellow countrymen.
And now I think the banana republicization of politics isn't done through fruit companies and guns.
It's through throttling speech and imposing Silicon Valley's tastes on countries a gazillion miles away.
I think that the new United Fruit Companies of the world are these meddlesome blowhards in Silicon Valley.
And I don't think they even know it yet.
Last word to you, Alam.
Well, yes, I mean, we need to stop thinking of companies as being potentially more powerful than governments.
We're in that kind of historical era.
Banana Republics of Silicon Valley00:02:43
And it has happened before.
Just look at British and Canadian history.
Canadian history had the Hudson's Bay Company, probably integral in creating the nation of Canada, even more so than the British government.
And obviously, the British East India Company conquered an entire subcontinent.
So, and these companies, these tech companies, as you say, they're not fruit companies.
They control a product that is far more insidious and has far more potential to silently influence the politics of a country than any banana company, not to mention their enormous wealth and political connections.
Alam, I love talking with you.
Another day we'll talk about Chiquita Banana.
But for today, thank you for this.
I would recommend, as I always do, that not only you follow Alam at Breitbart.com, his tech stories, but that you follow him on Twitter also.
And we'll put his Twitter handle on the screen for folks to watch.
Alan, great to see you.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks, Ezra.
Great to be on, as always.
Right on.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back on my show last night.
Graz writes, can I still get one of those shirts?
Well, Gras, it wasn't a rebel shirt.
It was a shirt made or attempted to be made by some staff at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing.
Sounds like the shirt never actually got made, but the Chinese spies who track everything they do caught it and made a fuss about it.
So I don't think you could get them originally.
It was just an internal thing.
I don't think they were actually ever made, but I suppose you could make one for yourself, as long as it's not made in China, right?
Some guy writes, I apologize to Canada, apologized to China for such a stupid thing.
Yeah, I don't know why we're apologizing to literal kidnappers.
It was against all of our legal norms and international norms to seize two Canadian citizens really as hostages.
And we're apologizing to them.
I think it's 793 days now that the two Michaels have been in prison.
Illegal kidnapping, really.
Phil writes, how about an apology from the Chinese communists for holding two Canadians in jail for over two years?
Yeah, it's really since December 2018, if you can imagine.
So it is over two years.
I'm very frustrated Biden, as I showed you.
It seems to be getting worse.
And with Joe Biden jumping on the Chinese Communist Party train, I think it's going to get worse.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel Headquarters to you at home.