Ezra Levant’s Rebel News channel was suspended by YouTube for a week in April 2021—just before Canada’s election—citing a January video on Big Tech censorship of Donald Trump, despite its 98-99% like ratio and 1.45M subscribers. Coinciding with a U.S.-Canada spy operation targeting Rebel News and a Montreal police raid, Levant warns of government-backed censorship via Trudeau’s mandate letter forcing platforms to remove "illegal" content within 24 hours or face penalties. Andrew Lawton agrees, calling state-directed moderation more perilous than private bans, while Levant pivots to alternative platforms like Rumble and BitChute, vowing defiance despite initial shock. The move underscores how independent media faces systemic suppression when challenging entrenched power. [Automatically generated summary]
YouTube sent us a letter last night saying they're suspending our entire channel for a week.
I'm worried that's not the last of it.
I think they're going to try and absolutely delete our page, even though we have 1.45 million subscribers.
I actually think they want to get us out of the way before the Canadian election.
I'll show you the letter they sent me.
I'll show you the video they claim was the problem.
I'll explain why that really obviously isn't the real problem.
And I'll give you some ideas about what we're going to do about it.
That's next.
But before I get to that, let me invite you to become a Rebel News Plus subscriber.
That's what we call the video version of this podcast.
It's a way of supporting us, too.
We get eight bucks a month from you, which is less than most other streaming services.
That's about half the price of Netflix.
But of course, we use it to stay independent and strong.
It's especially important now that YouTube's coming for us.
Anyways, you can do all that at rebelnews.com and just click subscribe.
Here's today's podcast.
Thanks.
Tonight, just weeks before a Canadian election, YouTube suspends our Rebel News channel.
It's April 14th, 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.
But why?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Last night, I received an email from YouTube.
They're suspending our entire channel for a week.
But frankly, it's clear that they plan to kill us altogether.
Just a few weeks ago, they announced they were demonetizing us, killing off $400,000 a year in revenues from ads and viewer donations called super chats.
That was step one.
This is step two.
I fear we'll be gone completely within a few weeks, just deleted like we never existed.
That makes me sad.
We've spent six years building up our YouTube channel.
1.45 million people like us enough to have subscribed to us.
Our videos typically get a 98% or 99% likes to dislikes ratio.
But because we have the wrong political point of view, we're being deleted.
And the reason YouTube gave for suspending us is a video I made back in January, which is weird, isn't it?
It's called, If Big Tech Can Silence Trump, They Can Silence Anyone.
I'm not even kidding.
That was the video they decided to suspend us for.
Apparently, that video was fine these past hundred days, but now it's suddenly their excuse for suspending our whole channel.
You know, it's funny.
Just days after we revealed that the Canadian Armed Forces and the U.S. Navy had hired a defense contractor to spy on us, just after that is when YouTube demonetized us.
And now just days after the Montreal police attempted to raid our Airbnb hotel rooms without a search warrant, we suddenly get suspended.
I'm sure that's a coincidence.
I mean, big tech and big government, they'd never work together to marginalize a political opponent, would they?
I mean, that's just conspiracy theory stuff.
But you really have to see this video that got us suspended.
It's about six minutes long.
I'm going to play it for you now.
You might remember it.
It was excerpted from my longer monologue way back in January.
Here it is, the full six-minute clip that YouTube claims is, I don't know, illegal.
Look at this post by Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook.
The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.
Now, that is an opinion, and it could even be an honest or a reasonable opinion.
Maybe it's even the majority opinion, but it's not what Donald Trump or his spokesman have actually said.
They've specifically said that Trump will, in fact, accept the final result and assist in the peaceful transition of power.
I mean, you don't have to believe him, but that's what Trump says.
So Zuckerberg is entitled to his opinions about the future or entitled to his speculation about what's going on in Trump's mind, but those are just speculations.
I mean, it's his opinion.
But then Zuckerberg said this.
His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the U.S. and around the world.
We removed these statements yesterday because we judged that their effect and likely their intent would be to provoke further violence.
But he didn't do that.
I mean, that's what he said as a matter of record.
I mean, I saw the video.
I think we showed it last night.
Here's what he said.
It's only a minute long.
Take a look.
I know you're pain.
I know you're hurt.
We had an election that was stolen from us.
It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.
But you have to go home now.
We have to have peace.
We have to have law and order.
We have to respect our great people in law and order.
We don't want anybody hurt.
It's a very tough period of time.
There's never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country.
This was a fraudulent election, but we can't play into the hands of these people.
We have to have peace.
So go home.
We love you.
You're very special.
You've seen what happens.
You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil.
I know how you feel.
But go home and go home in peace.
The thing is, you can't see that video anymore.
You can't see what Trump actually said now.
You have to take Zuckerberg's word for it, his interpretation of it, because he doesn't actually quote Trump, does he?
You can't watch that for yourself on Twitter, where it was also deleted.
And Instagram is owned by Zuckerberg, so it's deleted there too.
I mean, it's only an inch away from Google banning searches for the White House website itself.
These are your new rulers, by the way.
It's not Joe Biden.
It's these guys.
If they can rule Trump, they can rule you too.
You know, you can still see what Nicolas Maduro, the tyrant of Venezuela, has to say on Twitter.
Same thing with the Ayatollahs of Iran or China's countless government propagandists on Twitter.
By the way, you can't even access Twitter in those countries, but Twitter lets those tyrants use their forum to attack America and the West.
If mighty Donald Trump, who is still president, who is a billionaire, who received close to 70, 80 million votes, if he can be silenced by some nerdy twerp in Silicon Valley, everyone can be.
I should tell you that today we received a warning letter from YouTube that our entire channel is in jeopardy.
We could be deleted if we dare to claim that there's widespread fraud in the election.
It's just an opinion you can no longer hold.
You just can't.
They won't let you.
The masters of the universe say so.
You cannot question their point of view.
You cannot claim the moon.
You can claim the moon is made of cheese.
You can say that.
You can claim the earth is flat.
They won't shut your channel down for being wrong on that.
But you cannot have a political opinion that contradicts your new masters on the stuff they care about.
Oh, and the Democrats are not looking for harmony or reconciliation.
They are looking for vengeance and blood.
They are even talking about impeaching Trump again in his final days just because they can.
They love what happened at the Capitol.
No, no one was killed yesterday other than a protester who was shot at point-blank range by someone we don't know who.
Three others apparently had health emergencies and died as well.
But there was no torching, no arson.
It wasn't like the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots that destroyed entire neighborhoods and killed dozens.
The only guns that were used yesterday were by police.
Oh boy, the pictures were spectacular though.
This bizarre guy dressed like a Viking or something.
Here he is claiming to be a shaman at a global warming protest a while back.
That's unusual for a Trump supporter, I think.
And here is his actor for hire page.
It looks like that Viking Chewbacca character is one of the things he specializes in playing for hire.
He's an actor named Jake Angeli.
I wonder if he was paid to play a role at the riot yesterday.
I don't know.
An alternative might be he is an actor who happens to actually be a genuine Trump supporter who dresses like a Chibaca Viking for real.
I don't know.
It's hard to say anymore.
I wonder if YouTube or Facebook would even let us tell you if we found out that he was a plant or a fake.
I think that video holds up pretty well, don't you think?
I mean, it's only three months old.
Now, YouTube claims that video violates their election-related misinformation policy.
Let me read that policy to you in full.
Don't post content on YouTube if it fits any of the descriptions noted below.
Presidential election integrity.
Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of any past U.S. presidential election.
As you just saw, our video didn't do that.
It wasn't about election fraud at all.
It was about big tech banning Trump from social media.
The closest that video comes is showing a short video from Trump telling his protester supporters on Capitol Hill to go home.
But showing that video can't be the problem.
That exact Trump video is currently on dozens of other YouTube news channels, including CNN, just for example.
Every news station showed that video.
They all still have it up on their YouTube pages.
Of course, it's part of the history.
It's news.
Why is that only a suspension for us?
By the way, I don't believe that there was massive voter fraud in the U.S. election.
That suggests crime.
I believe there were obviously particular cases of voter fraud and crimes.
But as to mass fraud, I take Joel Pollock's point of view.
The election was indeed unfair, but it was legal.
as in many states changed the voting rules in the middle of the campaign, just a few months before Election Day, using the pandemic as an excuse, changing the rules to allow the massive use of mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, the reduction in stringency for signature matching, all that stuff.
But that was not illegal.
The rule changes were made within the law, often written by courts, in fact.
It was wrong.
It was unfair.
It was tilted to one side.
Yes, yes, yes.
But it wasn't widespread fraud.
It was done legally, as Joel's book is titled, Neither Free Nor Fair, but Legal, Not Fraud.
So why was that video published in January deleted last night and used as the pretense to suspend our entire channel?
It surely can't be because we showed a quick clip of Donald Trump, can it?
I mean, if every other news channel is showing it too, right?
We weren't agreeing or disagreeing with Trump's statements.
We were discussing them, or more accurately, discussing how they were being banned.
And so we were banned for talking about how Trump was banned.
That's pretty ironic, since that was what the clip was about.
Cbc's Anti-Censorship Push00:09:12
YouTube is owned by Google, as you may know.
It's hard to believe that Google's motto used to be, don't be evil.
It's hard to believe that Google was founded by a refugee from the Soviet Union, Sergey Brin.
What on earth happened to internet freedom?
Remember those days?
We have to assume that we're going to be killed off completely by YouTube.
And we knew this was coming, so we have a plan B.
The main part is to get as many of those 1.45 million YouTube subscribers to let us know where we can find them and how they can find us once we're deleted from YouTube.
See, YouTube doesn't tell us who our customers are.
We've spent six years and frankly millions of dollars in journalism building up a customer base for YouTube, giving YouTube content, bringing people to YouTube, against which YouTube sells ads.
But YouTube's just going to vaporize us and keep the customers.
That's big tech for you.
It's an oligopoly, just like John D. Rockefeller and the other robber barons, but that's more powerful.
So we want as many people as possible to go to our website, rebelnews.com, and just take one minute to give us their name and email address or mobile phone number.
That's it.
It just takes about 30 seconds to do, just so that when we're deleted on YouTube, we can still reach out to them.
If you're watching this video, we probably already know how to contact you since you signed up for Rebel News Plus, our paywall premium shows.
We're working with other video platforms, though.
We use a Canadian video server called Rumble.
We've been working with them for weeks, and actually we have a meeting with their CEO tomorrow.
We're on other sites like BitChute and Odyssey.
And there's a powerful new rival to YouTube that's going to be launched later this month.
And we'll be one of their founder creators.
I'm very excited about it.
They're being built with an anti-censorship architecture.
So they'll hopefully be more immune to cancel culture.
YouTube wants us to die.
And it's true they can injure us by cutting us off from our 1.45 million customers.
But we had an emergency staff meeting this morning and we came up with a more detailed plan to survive and grow.
You're going to see some changes to our website in the weeks ahead, some changes even to our videos, as we move to make our site easier to use and more focused on capturing the kind of casual viewers that YouTube used to bring to us.
YouTube says their suspension of us will be lifted next week, but we're pretty sure they'll come up with an excuse to hit us again and again.
I genuinely think they plan to exterminate us before the Canadian election.
They're going to move fast.
I mentioned that U.S. defense contractor that was hired by the Canadian Armed Forces to do a cyber forensic analysis of us.
Let me say that again.
Justin Trudeau took taxpayers' dollars from the defense budget and hired a military contractor in Arkansas to spy on us.
I know that sounds too wild to be true.
I didn't believe it until I got the access to information documents from the university.
Trudeau prepared a smear campaign with these defense contractors, claiming that Rebel News were foreign meddlers in Canada's elections and that we had to be stopped.
They had lots of bizarre claims in there designed to discredit us.
I'm pretty sure this is just YouTube working with Trudeau to get us shut down before the election.
This crazy defense contractor report on us is the kind of thing that YouTube would probably use as an excuse.
After all, this same military contractor from Arkansas says we were literally the most important YouTube channel in Canada during the last election.
YouTube paid this defense contractor to attack us.
Are you surprised that YouTube is complying?
I mean, we've all seen the storm of headlines lately about the coming wave of internet censorship.
Trudeau and his cabinet have clearly called for social media companies to censor what they describe as hurtful political content.
And remember, it's literally the second priority Stephen Gilbeau's mandate letter has as heritage minister to censor us.
It's hard to believe.
Here's a copy of his mandate letter, create new regulations for social media platforms, starting with a requirement that all platforms remove illegal content, including hate speech, within 24 hours or face significant penalties.
This should include other online harms, such as radicalization, incitement of violence, exploitation of children, or creation or distribution of terrorist propaganda.
They're going to use that against us, I'll tell you right now.
But they'd much rather have YouTube do their dirty work than to be seen to do it themselves.
But as God is my witness, we will live on.
The fact that YouTube and Trudeau want to silence us just proves to me how important our voice is at Rebel News.
I know it feels like I'm always asking for help, but I think that's because Rebel News and all of our passionate, principled reporters, they're always on the front lines fighting for you.
It's going to take a lot more than YouTube to shut us up.
Thanks for being there for us, by the way.
Stay with us for more.
Well, it is lonely being an independent journalist in Canada.
I mean, in terms of the sheer number of reporters who are on the government dole, well, the CBC is larger than the rest of the news media combined, and they are fully rented, bought and paid for, in fact, by the Trudeau government.
And then in the last few years, the newspaper bailout has put the vast majority of the private sector journalists in this country on the government payroll.
I tell you, you can count on one hand's fingers the number of independent journalists.
Most of us are in the independent press gallery that's run by our friend Candice Malcolm of True North.
And of course, one of our favorite guests, also from True North, is our next guest today.
He's Andrew Lawton, and he joins us via Skype.
Andrew, great to see you again.
Hey, likewise.
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's my pleasure.
And you're one of the few guys who knows what it's like to be censored and marginalized in Canada because everyone else is on the inside of the tent, just drinking champagne paid for by taxpayers.
And I know that's sort of a goofy metaphor, but it feels really true.
You, along with a couple of our reporters, were kept out of the leaders' debate in 2019.
You, along with us, had to go to court to get in.
You are, by very definition, an outsider.
You're one of the guys they want to silence too, I think.
Yeah, and you know, when you were doing your preamble there, something jumped out at me, Ezra, which is that CBC may have this monumental size compared to private media, but that doesn't translate to audience share.
And if you look at the audience, CBC can't even compete with the Canadian media or foreign media, which Canadians prefer.
And this is, I think, the fundamental divide here: on one hand, the official voices that we're told we have to look to and get our news from are not the ones that Canadians are by and large gravitating to.
And I think that's why independent media is so important.
But it also makes the marginalization by the elites of independent media so significant a problem.
You know, that's a great point because if you add up the CBC and then everyone on the newspaper payout, and then all the other TV companies that get sort of regulatory favors from the CRTC, that really is more than 99% of journalists.
It just is.
And the independent press gallery is where really the last remaining independent journalists are.
But the voices in that independent press gallery are much larger than 1% market share.
And I think that's what drives not only Trudeau crazy, but the inside clique of media party types crazy.
They've got the big budgets.
They've got all the quote respect.
They get the front row seats work on the outside.
And yet, especially on the issues of the day, civil liberties, pandemic, things like that, people don't trust the inside baseball guys.
They trust the outsiders, the independents like True North and Rebel.
I think that's what really irritates the insiders.
They have all the privileges, the perks, and the free money, but people still don't trust them.
And that's not just my opinion.
That big Edelman study that came out about a month ago: 52% of Canadians say that journalists aren't just biased, but that they actively lie.
Yeah, and whether or not that is true, that that perception exists is a problem that the mainstream media has.
And unless the mainstream media is prepared to deal with the trust deficit, and oftentimes they do this by maligning the people that don't trust them.
They say, oh, you know, that's the Trump effect, or that's populism, or that's the war on truth, and the war on facts, and all of that.
But the reality is they have to build that.
It's a two-way street.
They have to extend a hand out to the audience they're trying to regain if they want to get that trust back.
Private Censorship Pushes Margins00:05:03
And we're not seeing that now.
Instead, we're seeing kind of what we talked about earlier, which is pushing people further and further to the margins of society and a civilized discourse.
But eventually the margins get overloaded compared to the people that are doing the marginalizing.
And I think that when you look at the numbers from that poll, that's the point we're at now.
The people that are not on their team are greater in number than those who are.
You know, I haven't actually even talked about the news of the day, which is last night we get an email from YouTube saying, guess what, guys?
Your entire site is suspended for a week.
You can't upload videos.
You can't live stream.
They had demonetized us the month before.
And I was worried.
I thought, well, what have we done?
And they point to a video that we put up three months ago, me talking about how big tech censors-I mean, literally the headline was- Well, they proved you wrong.
Yeah.
And like, it just seems such a stretch.
And I read the policy they claim we violated.
We didn't even, the policy is against claiming widespread, widespread fraud in the U.S. election.
It wasn't even about fraud.
It was about censorship.
And I have no idea how they just picked that out of the air.
And that video apparently was fine on YouTube for the last hundred days.
I just find it hard to believe on face value that that's really why they suspended us.
It was one of my calmer videos.
I was actually feeling sort of slow and thoughtful and reflective.
Like I wasn't, there was no ranting and raving.
I was just saying, isn't that funny?
They can censor Trump.
They can censor you.
You know, we live in a world where you don't even have the right to get primary information.
Like I was sort of sad in the video.
It's the last video I would have thought they would have claimed as the pretext to silence me.
So that makes me think maybe there's something else here.
I mean, Andrew, the one thing I've really been worried about is not even government censorship, because that at least you can fight in court or whatever.
I'm worried that the social media companies being pressured by Trudeau or Stephen Gilbo to get rid of enemies like us or True North.
And we'll never know who complained.
We'll never know what the real issue was.
If it was Trudeau who was coming for me, I could fight him in court like you and I did on the leaders debate.
I think that maybe they want to get us off the internet before the next federal election.
Well, you raise, I think, a couple of very important points there, Ezra.
And listen, I believe that private platforms have the right to decide who should be on them or who should not be.
That doesn't mean I think that using this power is a good thing.
And certainly it's not that I think having that power so concentrated is a good thing because it isn't.
And YouTube's decisions are showing that.
And we've had it at True North.
I've had it on my own page as well.
And in some cases, it's the old, oh, well, it was an accident and we'll restore it.
And in other cases, it seems more deliberate and targeted, as you're understanding firsthand here.
And what I would point out to people is that private censorship is a different animal than government.
And government censorship is the worst form of censorship.
But private censorship at the hand of government or at the direction of government is worse than that, even so.
And an example of this is that the federal government is mulling this legislation it wants to put forward on online hate, a supercharged version of the bill or the section 13 that you fought against for years and years of your life and career a while ago.
And the problem with this is that it would now force companies like YouTube, like Facebook, to be deputized by government to lay down the hatchet, to push the big censor button, and you lose that recourse.
You can't go to federal court.
You can't fight it in court.
You eliminate the transparency.
And now that we have private companies that are going to be censoring as agents of the state, things like this are going to become more common.
And did you violate YouTube's policies or did you violate the government of Canada's policies?
You would have no idea.
Yeah.
And more and more, the size and the scope and scale of these companies is literally larger than countries.
I mean, if these companies were countries, Facebook would have a population of 2 billion.
It's sort of like the company town in the olden day where a mining company would literally own the streets, own the houses, own all the shops.
There's a real problem when the entire public square is owned by one gazillionaire.
And in that way, he's more powerful than Trudeau.
Like Trudeau, if he shook his fist and said, you rebels, we're shutting you down.
I'd say see you in court, buddy.
But if Mark Zuckerberg or the president of YouTube said, push the button to shut us down, we wouldn't even know what happened.
We would have no recourse.
I think that these tech companies are more powerful than any John Rockefeller of the past, any of the robber barons, as they used to be called in the past, and more powerful than just about any federal politician.
The Threat to Public Square00:03:36
I got one last question for you.
It's been about, I don't know, five hours since we've announced we've been knocked off the internet.
I've had a lot of interest from U.S. media who are really concerned about it.
I don't believe a single Canadian journalist or journalistic group like Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Canadian Association of Journalists, any of them, will speak up for us.
In fact, I think the only thing we'll hear from other journalists is celebration.
What do you think?
You know, I remember, and you and I talked about this briefly on my show this week, The Andrew Lawton Show.
I remember when I was in London for the Global Conference for Media Freedom, and I did an impromptu interview with the representative of Reporters Without Borders or Reporters Saint-Frontier, I believe they're called officially.
And, you know, I was saying, you know, what are the issues you think are important?
And we had a very pleasant chat.
And then I said, you know, about, you know, three or four miles from here, Tommy Robinson is right now on trial for reporting.
And she instantly went from pleasant and civil to just very stone-faced and said, well, he's not a journalist.
And this is the problem is that when you talk about press freedom, the media is more interested in defining the press part than they are in upholding the freedom part.
Isn't that interesting?
Well, listen, Andrew, thank you for letting me commiserate with you.
You're one of the few guys who believes in freedom of the press anymore.
Thank you for that and True North.
And I love your show, The Andrew Lawton Show.
Thanks for having me on it this week.
I hope that YouTube will back down, but I really don't think they will.
I think that they're going to try and sweep us off the net before the election.
I hope they don't target you guys, because if we're gone, I think you guys become the last biggest force on the internet.
I mean, we're bigger than you, just we've been around longer.
We got more staff, but you guys do very, very important work.
And I'm worried that you're on their target list too.
I don't think you're target number one, but you may be target number two or target number three.
So I hope that you and I will still be fighting the good fight for many years to come.
So good luck to you and thanks for joining me today.
Likewise, thanks very much.
All right, there you have it, Andrew Lawton of the Andrew Lawton Show on TrueNorth, DNC.news.
Stay with us.
You know, when I got the news last night, I was actually driving home from the office and it hit me like a baseball bat.
I was deflated.
I thought, we're done.
I mean, that's our great asset, our 1.45 million subscribers.
It's wonderful.
I was really down in the dumps about it.
But this morning, we had a wonderful staff meeting, the whole team.
We spent an hour going through things just practically the steps we had already taken, steps we can do better, ways we can change our website and our videos.
The whole team was with it.
And I talked to some key supporters, got people reaching out to us out of the blue to support us.
And I just thought, not only are we going to be okay, I think this is going to push us forward to the next level, the next thing, a stronger platform than YouTube.
Maybe even one where we get to know who our customers are.
I'm pretty excited about it.
So thanks for your support.
All right, that's the show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.