Ezra Levant reveals Peter MacKay’s carbon tax proposal—backed by Aaron O’Toole—is worse than Trudeau’s, forcing Canadians into government-controlled "low-carbon savings accounts" tied to fuel purchases, creating a de facto economic social credit system. O’Toole’s plan, despite broken promises, would redirect funds from fuel levies into rebates for approved green products, risking corporate influence and potential data misuse, like storage in China or links to vaccine passports. Meanwhile, Rebel News faces a seven-day YouTube suspension after a video critiqued Big Tech’s censorship of Donald Trump, with 1.45M subscribers but only 1,500 live-stream viewers, while Rumble drew more despite far fewer users. Levant warns of algorithmic bias favoring legacy left-wing media (CTV, Global, CBC) over conservative content, comparing it to pre-election clampdowns in France, Brazil, and Germany, where platforms suppressed dissenting voices under "disinformation" claims. Legal fees exceed $100K/month, and demonetization cut $400K—yet the Fight the Fines project persists, exposing how tech giants and governments may collude to silence independent media ahead of elections. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my rebels, I can't believe it, but the Conservative Party of Canada has proposed a carbon tax as their central platform in the upcoming federal election.
And this next statement, I can't believe either, but I have been thinking about it all day, and I think it's true.
Aaron O'Toole's carbon tax is worse than Justin Trudeau's carbon tax.
I know you're thinking, how can that be?
I'll explain it to you by quoting from Aaron O'Toole's own documents.
It's unbelievable, actually.
So thanks for tuning in today.
Let me just invite you to become a Rebel News Plus subscriber.
That's the video version of this podcast.
In today's show, I'm going to be interviewing Alan Bokari from Breitbart.
He's their tech editor.
In the monologue itself, I'm going to be showing you documents from the Conservative Party's own website and their own platform today.
I just want to prove to you that what I'm reading on this podcast is legit.
I just wish you could see it with your own eyes.
You can do that by joining Rebel News Plus.
That's what we call our TV version of the podcast.
Eight bucks a month, just get it at rebelnews.com.
You get my show, Sheila Gun Reed Show, David Menzies' Show, Andrew Chapato's show.
And the $8 a month goes to keep Rebel News strong.
And we need that more than ever.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, I never thought I'd say it, but Peter McKay was right.
It's April 15th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the 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 shouldn't?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
I don't have a lot of time for Peter McKay, to be honest.
I was particularly unimpressed with his run for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
I thought it was pitiful how he sort of ran away from our reporters.
First, running away from David Menzies.
Preventing me from interviewing.
I just want to ask one question, not even an interview.
It's a question on freedom of speech.
So under Peter McKay, it'll be the same as Andrew Scheer, that the rebel is not allowed to be here?
Here, aren't you?
Excuse me.
But I'm going to ask a question.
Yes.
Hi, Mr. McKay.
How you doing?
Just want to ask you, sir, what do you feel about Ezra Levant being interrogated by the Elections Commissioner?
I don't like being interrogated, including right now.
But this is a very important freedom of speech issue, Mr. McKay.
I don't even know why it hasn't been raised in the House by your Conservative colleagues.
Do you have a comment on that?
Well, you should talk to those Conservative colleagues.
I'm not in the House of Commons, so I don't have an opportunity to raise it.
What is your opinion of the Elections Commissioner going after Ezra Levant simply for writing a book during an election campaign about a prime minister?
Well, I don't have any of the evidence.
I don't have any of the information other than what I've read.
So we'll see.
You haven't heard about this?
I have heard about it, just briefly, but I don't have any of the facts.
Thank you, sir.
Okay, I made sure.
David's so friendly, and that was such a softball question.
Why run away?
If you can't handle Menzies, you're not going to be able to handle the jackals of the CBC.
And then McKay literally ran away from Kian Becksy.
He ran into the bathroom.
That's not a very grown-up thing to do.
See you later.
Thanks, Emily.
Peter, you just did a media event.
Yeah, I didn't get an answer question.
Why'd you take so few questions?
Peter, why'd you take so few questions?
I want to ask if you'll apologize for calling Jason King.
I think there are some questions that were asked.
I'm not sure why you took so few questions compared to everyone else.
They told me I was done.
Peter, sorry.
You must be confused.
The escalator was over there.
Would you be able to tell me, will you apologize to Jason Kenney?
Will you apologize to Jason Kenney for calling him angry and dismissing the concerns of Albertans?
Now, Peter McKay, rather than getting on the elevator, went to go to the potty to hide from little old me.
After he was in the bathroom for about 10 seconds to collect his courage, he went back to the escalator, fleeing again, using his campaign staff to try and distract me from asking questions and having him actually answer them.
Of course, he couldn't.
Peter, you dismissed the anger in Alberta by calling Jason Kenney an angry man.
Will you apologize for that?
Will you apologize for calling Jason Kenney an angry man?
How come you don't attend media available delays?
I was on the phone and they didn't select me.
Oh my god, you were so busy that you couldn't get to the previously scheduled media event.
Peter McKay, you sort of look like a coward right now.
Yeah, I don't think so.
It's called winning.
Excuse me.
Oh, no, We're not going into one elementary race.
Sorry, I can't come off this.
McKay said that's what winners do.
But alas, he didn't win despite having so many endorsements and money and the media momentum behind him.
I wasn't a fan, and I'm still not, but I have to admit, McKay got something right.
Aaron O'Toole's Conservative Levy Plan00:14:48
He knew that Aaron O'Toole was a phony.
He knew that Aaron O'Toole was just pretending to be conservative.
That in fact, O'Toole was to the left of McKay, himself a notorious Red Tory.
Look at this story from last year.
We should have paid more attention to it, I think.
McKay accuses O'Toole of backing a carbon tax in heated French debate.
Let me read a bit.
Conservative leadership candidate Peter McKay accused chief rival Aaron O'Toole of committing a cardinal conservative sin Wednesday, wanting to introduce a carbon tax.
McKay went as far as calling O'Toole Aaron Trudeau, riffing off the last name of the current Liberal Prime Minister who introduced the national carbon tax.
Aaron Trudeau, but it's true, isn't it?
O'Toole accused McKay of lying, but it is true because today, in a scoop leaked by O'Toole to the CBC, O'Toole did announce his own conservative carbon tax plan.
There's no such thing, of course.
You can't be conservative if you support a carbon tax.
Now, it is different from Trudeau's carbon tax.
You see, because O'Toole doesn't call it a carbon tax, he calls it a carbon levy.
Got it.
Just in case you don't know English well, that's the same thing.
Here's Merriam-Webster for the word tax.
A charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.
A sum levied on members of an organization to defray expenses.
They actually use the word levy to help explain what a tax is.
And just to check, here's Merriam-Webster for the word levy.
The imposition or collection of an assessment.
The government imposed a levy on gasoline, an amount levied.
They actually used the example of gasoline in their dictionary definition.
There is no difference.
It is the same thing.
A tax, a levy, a government fee, an assessment.
It is all the same thing.
And here it is, lovingly in the CBC.
Conservatives announced plans to replace liberal carbon tax with a lower levy of their own.
They gave this as a scoop to the CBC, the same CBC state broadcaster that is right now suing the Conservative Party, whose chief parliamentary correspondent sued the Conservative Party.
They filed the lawsuit in the middle of the 2019 election campaign.
They're still actually pursuing it.
And Aaron O'Toole gave this scoop to the CBC, but of course, because as Peter McKay said, he's really Aaron Trudeau.
Proposal would see levy from fuel purchases go into personal savings accounts.
Conservative Party leader Aaron O'Toole unveiled a climate plan today, which will put a price on carbon for consumers.
But instead of the Liberal carbon tax and rebate system, Conservative leader Aaron O'Toole is proposing to charge a levy on fuel purchases and use the money to fund personalized savings accounts, which Canadians can use for environmentally friendly purchases.
Under O'Toole's plan, which CBC News obtained a copy of Wednesday, Canadians would pay a carbon levy, initially amounting to $20 per ton of greenhouse gas emissions every time they buy hydrocarbon-based fuels such as gasoline.
Yeah, so it's a carbon tax.
They're just calling a levy.
They're using some of the language of Trudeau, pricing, pollution, as if carbon dioxide, the stuff of life, the stuff of photosynthesis, plant food, as if that's pollution, as if we humans, a carbon-based life form, or pollution, as if trees, primary element, carbon, are pollution.
That's how a conservative talks now under Aaron O'Toole, not really.
Aaron O'Toole sent out notes to party spokesmen today.
One of those spokesmen sent the notes to me out of disappointment.
It'll be interesting to see which Conservative MPs read their lines the way they've been instructed to by O'Toole.
I have to say, O'Toole supporting the carbon tax is disqualifying for a number of reasons.
First of all, because he promised he wouldn't.
And he received support in return for that promise.
So he's untrustworthy.
He's a liar.
It's disqualifying because a carbon tax is a terrible idea.
It's bad scientifically.
It's bad economically.
But it's bizarre, intricate, invasive scheme to do it.
Obviously just cooked up as some way of showing how he's different from Trudeau.
It's actually, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but I've been thinking a lot about this today.
And I really mean this.
I thought about it.
I thought, should I say this?
Yeah, it's true.
Aaron O'Toole's carbon tax scheme is actually worse than Trudeau's.
I believe that.
And I'll explain in a minute.
Here's how the CBC says it.
Instead of that money going into direct rebates for Canadian households, as is the case currently, the Conservatives would divert revenues to a personal low-carbon savings account.
What?
We're going to set up what?
Oh, yes, here.
Let me read from the official backgrounder sent by O'Toole into the world today, including to his spin doctors.
It's just incredible.
The personal low-carbon savings accounts will work like the loyalty rewards plans offered by retailers, financial institutions, and airlines.
Each time a hydrocarbon-based fuel is purchased, the consumer will be putting money into a tax-free savings account simply by using their personal account card, as you do with loyalty plans at the gas pump or in the store.
The money saved up can then be used to buy a range of goods and services that reduce the carbon they consume.
This could mean buying a transit pass, a bicycle, or saving up to replace your furnace with a heat pump, installing new windows, or even buying an electric vehicle.
This way, the account will provide an incentive to the insumer to invest in things to help them live a greener life.
So it's like a government AirMiles card.
Now you know why AirMouth gives you points for scanning everything you buy, right?
You know what they get out of that, right?
You know why they give you free stuff, right?
Because they track everything you buy, right?
Everything.
They build up a huge database on you and everything you've ever bought.
And they use that information to sell to you, to market to you, right?
It's like what Amazon or Facebook do.
You're the product.
There's a database.
That's what Aaron O'Toole wants to do, except instead of a private invasion of privacy that you can opt into or out of that actually earns you stuff, he wants everyone to disclose what they buy to the government.
And then he's going to choose what you get to spend your loyalty points on.
And this database is held by the trustworthy, neutral, non-partisan, non-invasive, non-corrupt, non-hackable government.
I bet it's actually going to be stored on the cloud in China.
Hey, guys, it's like a loyalty plan.
If you like filing your taxes, you'll love telling the government everything you buy or sell.
I mean, what's the worst that could happen?
They would never link this to your social credit score or your vaccine passport, would they?
And you can see that they're going to be making a list of what you can or can't buy with your loyalty cash.
Imagine the lobbying that's going to go on to get on the good list and to stay off the bad list, right?
They're regulating the entire economy from a carbon point of view.
They're imposing a carbon tax, but then they're setting up an entire system, an entire database and bank account system, kind of economic social credit system for how you can spend your rebate.
Every single product in the country, every single store in the country needs to get on the good list and off the bad list.
Every single company and product has now been turned into a lobbyist.
No conservative could possibly believe in this.
It'll be interesting to see which MPs read from their scripts and which just stay quiet, knowing that O'Toole is about to get smashed in the next election.
I mean, imagine running for prime minister as a conservative and proposing this.
Let me read some.
Create a simple platform for Canadians to access special offers and discounts for climate-aligned products and services while incenting vendors to compete for their business, driving costs down over time.
Are you serious?
You're having like a government group on, like a government coupon service?
You're forcing every citizen to take part in your government marketplace.
You're telling every customer of every product in the country to get in on this government version of Amazon.
Or maybe you're going to actually outsource it to Amazon, right?
Because he's not rich enough off the pandemic.
Who gets your data?
Who would possibly think this is a good idea?
Who would think it's a good idea for a conservative?
Imagine this.
A key feature of this policy will be the design of a purchase menu that is independently validated to ensure that all qualifying purchases will lead to reductions in carbon emissions across the country.
I love that part.
The government's going to set up a purchase menu for what you can spend your money on, and they're going to make the judgment on whether or not it's good for the environment.
But don't worry, there's not going to be any backlog for this for sure.
A billion products being judged.
And don't worry, all the judgments made here will be independent.
No lobbyists will be interested.
No friends of the government will be getting off the bad list and onto the good list.
You know how during this pandemic, Walmart and Costco never had to shut down, but small stores were shut down, right?
You know how casinos and marijuana stores and liquor stores were never closed, but churches were closed.
That's what independent experts do in government, right?
We've seen that.
They're lobbyists.
They're lobbied.
Imagine the power of this government purchase list, this purchase menu.
There's hundreds of billions of dollars at stake getting on that list or keeping your competitors off that list.
Think of the size of government, the scope of regulation.
Think of the power and the money that is now being grabbed by someone who calls himself a conservative.
This plan is worse than Trudeau's.
I'm sorry.
That is the truth of it.
Trudeau himself would never dare to nationalize the economy in this way, to regulate individual spending this way.
But now Trudeau has permission to do so from the conservatives because Aaron O'Toole proposed it first.
You know, I get it.
Aaron O'Toole is a nobody that nobody knows.
He's weeks away from an election call in which he's going to get smoked.
He thinks this stuff will win it for him, or at least stop the CBC from being mean to him.
Spoiler alert, they hate you, Aaron, and this will not change it.
There's so many other things a conservative could be talking out there in opposition.
How about, I don't know, the pandemic, the vaccine fiasco, the civil liberties crisis, the recession level, unemployment, the closed U.S. border, China's hostage-taking and spying on us, cancel culture, any of those, one of those, all of those.
And Aaron O'Toole thinks the way to win the next election is to talk about his carbon tax and how it's better than Trudeau's carbon tax, even though it's actually not.
Aaron O'Toole really is Aaron Trudeau, except that Trudeau knows how to win.
Hey, look at this.
Just 11% of Albertans highly impressed with conservative leader Aaron O'Toole poll.
And look at that, it's true.
In fact, more Albertans like Trudeau than like O'Toole in Alberta.
But hey, as the CBC says helpfully, lack of popularity could cost seats, but that might not be all bad for them.
And he probably thinks that's so right.
Aaron O'Toole is going to lose.
He should lose.
He must lose.
What I'm interested in now is how hard his MPs are willing to lose with him.
How hard they're willing to drink his global warming Kool-Aid and even worse, his total nationalization of the economy Kool-Aid, which is actually worse.
I wonder if the few conservative senators will have anything to say, given that they can't be fired by O'Toole and they'll outlast him no matter what.
I really think this is a basic test for the Conservative Party.
It's an IQ test.
It's a will you survive test?
Are you a conservative test?
It's so many things.
Here's a guy who is for funding the CBC, who's for open borders migration, who's for foreign aid, who is for the carbon tax.
He's for cancel culture.
I'm not even sure what's left.
Is there any difference between him and the liberals?
He's against Derek Sloan.
He demoted Pierre Polyev.
He marginalized Rebel News for that matter.
Is he conservative?
Hey, just one loop back before you go.
I found this on the party's website.
This wasn't even in the version they sent around.
This is their future plans for their centrally planned economy.
This is in a conservative document.
It's on their website.
You can find it right now.
Look at this.
Studying the potential for introducing new taxes on frequent flyers, non-electric luxury vehicles, and second homes to deter activities that hurt the environment.
That is part of Aaron O'Toole's conservative plan.
Did you vote for that?
Will you vote for that?
If you're a conservative MP, it's probably too late to remove this crazy captain of the ship before he steers it right into the iceberg.
But how conservative MPs act in these next few weeks or months will mark their reputation long after O'Toole is a footnote in history.
Well, as you may know, without warning, YouTube suspended us on Monday night.
They said we broke their terms of service, the first time we've done so in six years, and 15,000 videos.
I was very curious what video was the cause of it.
YouTube Suspension Mystery00:15:15
And it was a rather unremarkable video I made back in January, 100 days ago, talking about how big tech was going to censor Donald Trump.
And if they could do that, they could do it to anyone.
And that apparently violated their terms of service.
And the prophecy of that video came true.
They did indeed ban us.
It's a seven-day ban, which means we'll be back up and running in about five days.
But really, we know they're coming to kill us.
They demonetized us for no excuse.
About a month ago, they did not actually cite any particular video in that case.
This is step one.
I do believe they aim to wipe us out completely before the upcoming Canadian federal election because they know we are the largest independent media source in this country and one of the few not on the take from Justin Trudeau's media bailout.
Now, one of the things I find so frustrating is that no one in Canada, or at least in the Canadian established, seems to care.
No one in the establishment of the media.
No words on this from the Canadian Association of Journalists, from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, from Penn Canada, from Reporters Without Borders, from Amnesty International, from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
They don't care.
Nothing from lawyers or law professors, nothing from opposition parties, including those that claim to be conservative.
The entire country is silent.
And I'm not looking for personal support.
I just think it's rather noteworthy that a news channel of 1.45 million subscribers is silenced with a ridiculous excuse, and the rest of the media just shrugs or even cheers.
I'm pleased to say we do have a few journalists who care, who are interested in it, but they are uniformly in the United States.
How strange is that?
And I'm delighted that our, well, demise is too big a word, but our restrictions on our freedom were reported by our friends at Breitbart.com.
Let me show you a story on their website right now.
The headline, YouTube suspends rebel news over, quote, election misinformation.
It's a great story, very factual.
And joining us now via Skype is the author of that story, Alan Bokari, Senior Tech Correspondent for Breitbart.
Alan, great to see you again.
Thanks for joining us.
Hi, Ezra.
Good to be on.
Well, thank you.
I mean, I still regard Rebel News as a sort of startup.
We're six years old, but we still feel young.
We're vulnerable in that we're not affiliated with a large corporate owner.
We don't take any government bailout money, which stabilizes other media in Canada.
We're really independent.
We feel that way.
But still, 1.45 million subscribers, that's not nothing.
And yet YouTube with the flick of a switch can turn off our lights.
I find that terrifying.
It is terrifying.
It just goes to show how much power these tech companies have.
They're now sort of editors-in-chief for the entire world.
They set the rules that news organizations have to follow if they don't want to be cut off from their audience.
And it's incredible to me.
You know, you're pointing out in the intro there that journalists during the Trump administration would complain that when the president was mean to like journalists and reporters or threatened to bar them from the White House newsroom, that was portrayed as an attack on the free press.
When Tucker Carlson goes on his show and criticizes a left-wing journalist like Brandy Zandrozny or Taylor Lorenz, that's portrayed as an attack on the free press.
But a massive Silicon Valley giant shutting down a news organization for seven days, threatening to do so for longer, you just hear, you know, total crickets from the so-called defenders of press freedom.
Yeah.
Now, if we did something truly atrocious, I could understand it.
If we committed some crime, if we incited violence, or I don't even know, we did something utterly obscene.
I could get it, although there are all of those things on YouTube.
But their complaint was a video I made three months ago talking about how Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, of Facebook, was censoring Donald Trump.
And as part of that, I played a one-minute clip of a Trump official video from the White House that was being censored by Facebook.
So I wasn't getting into the meaning of what Trump said.
I was saying, here's the video Zuckerberg just banned, and we showed it.
And it was a broadcast from the White House.
It was an official thing.
You can agree with Trump or disagree with him, but we weren't saying, yes, we share those views and we are here to promote Trump's view.
We're saying, here's what was censored.
We were talking about the video.
And that's what every other news organization in America and around the world did that day, Alan.
And here's the thing, and I mentioned this because I went online and that exact same clip, I assume that's what triggered our suspension.
That exact same very short video from Trump is on YouTube right now on the channels of mainstream media.
CNN has that exact same clip, over a million views.
NBC, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post.
So we haven't got any more details from YouTube, but I think that's what it is.
They claim it's because we promoted misinformation about the 2020 election, but we didn't actually even talk about that in there.
I think that this is just a whimsical political censorship that they're trying to dress up as some terms of service violation.
Because how can it only be a violation for us and not for CNN and every other news agency in the world?
Yeah, well, I mean, here's the way that I think, you know, Silicon Valley terms of service actually work.
The tech companies use these terms of service.
Any excuse they can find to enforce them, no matter how slight, no matter how tenuous, to enforce these terms of service against conservative and alternative and dissident media, they'll take it.
And any way they can find to get out of enforcing those terms of service against the left or the establishment, they'll take that as well.
So that's how the game is played.
These terms of service are enforced completely unevenly.
You can see that on every by the through the fact that on every mainstream platform, whether it's Facebook or Twitter, you can find accounts for like some of the largest and most violent Antifa groups in the country.
Rose City Antifa, for example, the Antifa group in Portland, they have a massive page on Facebook and on Twitter, and that's allowed to stay up, even though they're an organization that explicitly endorses, that seems to explicitly endorse violence and has been involved in violence.
And so, yeah, you can't take the terms of service of these platforms as a kind of law that will be enforced fairly and uniformly, like a law parcel by a Democratic legislator, for example, because they're arbitrary by design and by nature.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny because I was looking at the video that we published back in January.
So it's not that long ago.
And I re-watched it and I thought it wasn't a bad video, but I made the point then that stands now.
They're censoring and banning something that Donald Trump said.
But right now on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, you have actual accounts run by tyrannies, by tyrants themselves.
The Ayatollahs of Iran.
Nicholas Maduro is very busy on social media.
China, which bans Twitter in the country, has dozens of diplomat propagandists with verified accounts just attacking the West all the time.
And I haven't seen them be censored, limited, or have that Twitter correction underneath, which they put on Trump accounts and other right-wing accounts.
I don't understand why those outright dictatorships which ban Twitter in their own countries get to use Twitter in manners that violate terms of service.
Someone might even think that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google have a bit of an anti-American streak.
I think that's a fair comment.
And I think it gets to the culture of these companies and what the priorities of their workforce really are.
You know, every single one of these Silicon Valley companies, their content moderation workforces, for example, are staffed by rabid left-wingers.
And these are people who don't really care much about China or Iran or any of these foreign countries, but they do care a very great deal about the American right and clamping down on them.
So if you think about, if you put yourself in the shoes of those employees, they're always going to be on the lookout for any excuse to punish a conservative or a political dissident in the West.
They're not always going to be on the lookout for violations of the terms of service from either left-wingers or from Chinese accounts or Iranian accounts or any of these other accounts.
It's simply not what they're interested in.
These are people who are still affected by Trump derangement syndrome, even though Trump is out of office now.
You know, I want to, I think you're right on all of that.
We have, of course, our paywalled show, which you're on right now.
We put clips of it out in public.
That is hosted on our own video platform.
So that's not, we work with another company, so that's not effective.
But we like to put videos out for the world to see.
So we've started putting videos up on a site that's actually based in Canada, funny enough.
It's called Rumble, R-U-M-B-L-E dot com.
And it's a site that you can see some American conservatives using.
Dan Bongino uses it.
Dinesh D'Souza, Donald Trump Jr. uses it.
So we switched over to there.
Let me just give you a little anecdote.
We have 1.45 million YouTube subscribers.
That's an awful lot.
But whenever I go on my daily live stream and the notification is supposedly sent to 1.45 million people, I typically only get 1,500 people watching.
And I'm thinking, is it really true that only one in a thousand of our subscribers, I mean, maybe I'm vain and maybe I'm not that interesting, but these are people who subscribed and we go live every day and we only have 1,500 people, like 0.1%.
I did the live stream yesterday on Rumble as our primary live stream video.
First time ever.
We only have like maybe 10,000 subscribers there.
We tweeted it out.
I had more viewers on Rumble than I have on a typical day on YouTube.
And I'm thinking, I wasn't particularly dazzling or more interesting yesterday.
Maybe I just haven't been shadow banned or censored if literally the first time I go on a live stream on this alternative service, I have the same audience that I got on YouTube.
Now, I don't know.
It just strikes me as quite odd.
We have 100 times more subscribers on YouTube than on Rumble, but I immediately had more viewers, as many viewers on Rumble.
I don't know.
I don't have an explanation for that.
It just strikes me as very curious.
It is curious.
And I think there are a number of ways it can be explained.
I've experienced the same thing, by the way.
So I'm active on both Twitter and Gab, which is a platform that's very similar to Twitter, but, you know, actually endorses free speech.
And I'll frequently get more retweets and engagement and comments when I post on Gab than when I post on Twitter, even though my Gab account has, I think, like a third of the followers of my Twitter account.
And I think this really is because of the algorithms and the way they behave.
Also, you know, on Twitter, many conservatives have been banned now, so you don't get as big as an audience there as you might.
But that doesn't really apply to YouTube, where oftentimes people don't log in to view the videos.
YouTube has admitted that they discriminate against certain sources in search results.
We revealed at Breitbart News that they regularly adjust search results on very political topics like abortion, like the Federal Reserve, the names of politicians.
If you search the names of certain politicians and activists on YouTube, they'll have deliberately adjusted those search results by adding them to a file that they call the YouTube Controversial Query Blacklist.
That's the word they use in their file.
They call it a blacklist.
And the way it works is that, you know, reorders search results so that your CNNs and your MSNBCs and your CBCs are at the top of search results and conservative and dissident and independent media are at the bottom.
So this is something they do.
We've revealed it and they've admitted to surfacing what they call authoritative news sources as well.
So we know they're doing this.
We know they're adjusting their algorithms.
Well, we have a representative at YouTube who tries to be a go-between with us.
And she's really just a messenger.
She's not the decider.
And we've asked her about that because sometimes you type in the exact headline of a Rebel News YouTube video, like word for word.
And it even has our journalist name in it.
So you couldn't be more precise.
You type that into a YouTube search engine and it will give viewers something from the CTV, Global News, CBC, these are the media party, as I call them in Canada.
It will give two or three left-wing legacy media videos before even the one that has the exact name of our, even though ours has more views than theirs, especially on topics that they're obviously sensitive about.
Like if you type in, we've done some great work, if I may say so, on Greta Tunberg.
Some of our videos have over a million views on that.
You cut and paste the exact title of those.
You'll get videos from a left-wing perspective with maybe 100,000 views higher up in the search.
Is that not some sort of market tampering?
Is that not some sort of, I don't know, it feels like something that an antitrust lawyer would say, uh-huh, that's illegal.
It just feels that way to me, but I don't know if the law has ever been used that way.
They're certainly picking winners and losers by, you know, they're clearly adjusting their search results and their algorithms.
And I've got to say, that sounds very, very familiar, what you say about typing in the exact title of your video and not having it come up in search results, or at least, you know, not it being the first results.
You've got to remember, YouTube is owned by Google, and Google did this exact same thing to Breitbart News with an algorithm change six months before the election.
Facebook's Pre-Election Shutdowns00:03:37
But in the entire six-month period up to the election, you could often search for the exact headline of Breitbart News articles in Google search, and you wouldn't find a link to the article.
You'd find like imitation sites or sites that had simply like copied, like plagiarized our articles at the top of the results, and you won't find the actual Breitbart link.
So this is something Google does on its main search engine.
It's not surprising that they're doing it on YouTube, which they own as well.
Is there any legal remedy?
I fear that we will be completely snuffed out in the run-up to the Canadian election.
I think this is a Canadian thing, although it was very weird that the U.S. Navy commissioned a military contractor in Arkansas to do a cyber forensic analysis of it.
I don't know why the U.S. Navy is spying on us.
I mean, a wild theory might be the Canadian Armed Forces didn't want to spy on their own citizen for legal reasons, so they got their buddies in the U.S. to do it.
That's sort of how they went after Trump's campaign team.
They had British intelligence do it.
I don't know.
I'm getting into the realm of speculation here.
I know it's a fact that the U.S. Navy spied on us.
I think the goal is to get us off the internet.
You mentioned six months before the U.S. election.
I think that's the tactic here.
Get us off YouTube six months before the Canadian election, which is looming.
I don't know.
How would I know?
It's also opaque.
They're not clear.
They're not honest.
They just make it up.
I have no idea what the actual facts are.
Well, you can see a pattern with this.
And, you know, this is kind of like a pessimistic, gloomy outlook.
But if you look at the run-up to other elections, like the election in France a few years ago, the election in Brazil a few years ago, and Italy as well, these were all always preceded by massive clampdowns on so-called disinformation and so-called misinformation on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook really led the way on this.
Like they suspended, I think, 30,000 pages ahead of the French elections, dozens of pages ahead of the Italian elections, ahead of the German elections.
They shut down Yea Bolsonaro's largest network of digital activists on WhatsApp ahead of the Brazilian elections.
So this is a pattern that Facebook especially has engaged in, shutting down pages and profiles and accounts, often with millions or tens of millions of followers that support populist parties ahead of these elections.
And in Italy, they did it to both the left-wing populists and the right-wing populists.
So it seems like they're laying the groundwork with these accusations of disinformation, these cyber forensics investigations as well.
Yeah.
You know, of course, the robber barons of a century ago, the J.D. Rockefellers and the Andrew Carnegies of the world, they were certainly capitalistic schemers.
They were economic cartels, and they did have a sort of ideology.
But none of them would have dreamed of controlling entire countries, let alone foreign countries, what you were allowed to say, who you were allowed to say it to, what groups you could belong.
I believe that the men and women who run Facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter, and the like have become not only commercial robber barons like the Rockefellers of the world, but have become political tyrants, the likes we have not seen in centuries.
And I believe Mark Zuckerberg and others like him will have more control over the next Canadian election than the leaders of any particular party.
Fight the Fines Battle00:03:30
Last word to you, Ellen.
Well, I agree.
Absolutely.
A handful of hipsters in Silicon Valley have somehow found themselves the ability to put their thumb on the scales of elections, not just in America, but all around the world.
And that's what we're seeing.
And it's really up to citizens to fight back against it because too often I think governments see these companies as potential allies in the task of censoring their citizens rather than a threat to be fought against.
Well, these are dangerous days.
We'll do our best.
Thank you for doing your best.
We like Breitbart and then we're glad you haven't been snuffed out.
I think we're facing the same attacks you are.
Keep up the great work, Alam.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right, there you have it.
Alan Bokari.
Again, his coverage of our story.
You can find it at Breitbart.com.
YouTube suspends Rebel News over election disinformation.
Stay with us, Brad.
Hey, welcome back on Rebel News being suspended from YouTube.
Riley writes, your suspension only earned my subscription.
Thank you, Riley.
You know, I think that we will survive.
In fact, we've had an incredible result.
We did our live stream.
We do it every day at noon.
We did it on a new platform called Rumble.
And we actually had as many viewers on Rumble as we get on a normal day on YouTube.
I think YouTube's really been throttling our viewer count.
I think we actually might grow.
I hope so.
But the real loss right now is those 1.45 million people who we can't reach out to.
Christina writes, thank you, Ezra.
Definitely your team is more important than ever.
Well, thank you.
And I really feel that team feeling after having spent the weekend with 17 of us under siege in Montreal.
I think our team spirit is stronger than ever.
Susanna says, Rebel News has been my lifeline for over four years now.
I have been a loyal subscriber and follower.
I donate whenever I can and buy merchandise from the Rebel store.
And boy, did it pay off.
Just found out last night Rebel's Fight the Fines team is taking on my Wuhan virus.
Take it off.
It's that small world.
So happy and grateful to these amazing people who still believe in justice.
Thank you, Ezra and the whole Rebel team for reporting the other side of the story and for fighting for the rest of us.
You guys are all.
Isn't that great?
You know what?
We have a full-time legal coordinator, Victoria, as you know, who, I mean, it's just too many emails.
At first, I was involved with all of them, but we're over 700 cases now, so I just don't even look at them all.
Isn't that a small world?
I'm so glad we're helping you.
We're going to be coming up on a thousand cases soon.
And you can imagine, even if each case just costs a couple grand to fight, we're in an incredibly expensive battle.
And that's one of the reasons I'm so mad that YouTube demonetized us because that 400 grand they knocked out of us, we've got to make that up just to keep our operation going.
Plus, we've got to, you know, we've got to pay over $100,000 a month in legals because we've got 700 plus cases.
But I do believe we can do it.
Our Fight the Fines project right now, as you know, is supported by a registered Canadian charity, so people can get charitable receipts for that now, which is a big plus.
I don't know.
These are extremely tough times, but I think we have a real duty to keep going.
And thanks for your support.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, you at home.