Kyle Kemper, Justin Trudeau’s half-brother and Bitcoin/blockchain advocate since 2013, warns in his YouTube videos that COVID-19 policies are weaponizing digitization—centralizing money, identity, and data via banks and tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. His platform, SwissKey, pushes self-custody of digital keys as a countermeasure, while critics question his vaccine skepticism and QAnon-aligned claims. Rumble’s rise as a free-speech alternative, fueled by Peter Thiel’s investment, contrasts Silicon Valley’s censorship, though legal risks in Canada may force relocation. Florida’s tech law falls short compared to Texas’s stricter "common carrier" model, but both signal progress against corporate control—highlighting the need for grassroots advocacy until systemic change arrives. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my friends, I have a very special show for you today.
I've discovered a, I'm not going to call him a political guru, but I might use that word guru.
I had never really heard of him before.
I'd never seen him before.
He was poked fun at by the mainstream media, so I checked him out.
And I have to say, I watched his videos today and I just kept finding myself agreeing and agreeing and agreeing.
You're not going to believe who it was.
So stay tuned and I'll take you through it.
Before I do, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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You get all that by subscribing to Rebel News Plus.
It's $8 a month, so you get my daily video plus the weekly videos from my three colleagues.
This is a lot of stuff for $8 a month, half the price of Netflix.
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Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, I came across the most unusual Canadian YouTube video that I want to share with you.
It's May 26th, 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 publish them?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
I love YouTube.
They hate me.
They hate Rebel News.
They probably hate you.
They're treating us unfairly.
They've taken away our ability to sell ads or get YouTube super chat donations.
They've throttled our viewership.
They've treated us like pariahs.
But I still love the concept of YouTube where anyone can just make a video.
That was landmark when it happened.
YouTube used to be a very free place.
Now it's a very woke place.
They have huge and intricate lists of things you can't say.
They literally spell out dozens and dozens of things you can't talk about on YouTube.
It's like wearing a Donald Trump MAGA hat in a women's studies course at Ryerson University or something like that.
It's just absolutely awful for anyone who isn't an insane person on the left.
I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube just kills us this summer, just to get us out of the way before Justin Trudeau calls an election.
The you in YouTube is what made it special.
It used to mean you can say whatever you want.
It's your channel, your ideas.
From Free to Fenced00:04:48
It was a simple and powerful name.
It was the place for people to talk back.
Well, that's a little bit too chaotic for authoritarians these days, isn't it?
So now the U in YouTube stands for you will obey.
It's sad, but I still like finding interesting things on it.
There's a reason it's the second largest search engine in the world after Google, which, by the way, owns YouTube.
And I came across a video channel today, Canadian.
I actually read about it in a newspaper article that I'll mention in a moment, but I clicked and I saw this video.
I'll just show part of the first one, and I'll show all the second one.
This first video, it's a fellow and I think his wife, and it's from just over a year ago, March 26th, 2020.
So less than two weeks into the pandemic lockdown, the lockdowns were really, really new.
People were still thinking of them as a sort of short mandatory vacation, almost an adventure that the whole country was having together, like a moment of national solidarity.
I do think it felt that way for a brief moment.
The excitement of a crisis without the real danger, without the side effects of the lockdown immediately apparent.
So, watch a bit of that video.
Here's two minutes.
Hello from day 13.
Wow, lucky number 13.
Just all kind of blending together.
You still have a braid in your beard.
I know.
He was braiding his beard earlier.
This is what happened earlier.
When you were spending a lot of time together, chit-chatting.
Working on a braid.
Keep the braid, ditch the braid.
Thumbs up, thumbs down the video.
Let us know.
Oh, we were just talking about how it's actually quite nice to have less distractions and to not be traveling all the time, especially with our lives having lives between two countries-the east coast of Canada and the west coast of the States.
It's been a lot of travel, so it's nice to have these two weeks.
It's like, ah, we're not going anywhere.
We get to be doing the home.
Yeah, it feels like it feels like you know what a normal life should be like.
This really isn't normal.
Yeah, but it's like what's ruined the average family experience: like they live in the same house together and their kids are there, and they're not leaving every week.
Yeah, go across the country.
Yeah, anyways, um, so Bowen did his first virtual karate class today, and it was awesome.
Like, we didn't have to get in the car and drive, you know, 15 minutes away.
We've got to do it from the comfort of our own home.
It was sweet.
Karate school is doing a good job.
Yeah, Levi was really into it.
He was really into it.
Yeah, I was impressed because he didn't really want to do it.
But we got him dressed up, we cleared space, I made him clean up, and yeah, he was super into it.
Yeah, and I had to help out at some point, which was fun.
We did a lot of homeschooling today, played a lot of games, found board games, yeah, studied some French.
Feels very homemade, very personal, maybe a bit too personal, frankly, like a diary.
And it was less than two weeks in.
He said 13 days.
And I think they're actually enjoying a break from their normal lives.
It sounds like they did a lot of traveling, different paths, and we're apart a lot.
You can see some goofiness creeping in already, the beard braiding part, but that was just for fun.
That's just 13 days into a lockdown, trying to have fun.
And then it moves a bit contemplative just for a second about how our lives will be more controlled, more digital in the lockdown.
And recognize this changing environment that we're in and trying to find some clarity and find an effective strategy to understand this new world that we're living in and building it out of technology that I think is really geared for this new world.
In a digital world, we're going to need a place to have digital credentials and digital keys and digital money.
So that's what we're up to with Swiss Key.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dumplings for dinner.
Yeah, but we missed our yoga.
This is the first day we haven't done yoga.
Anyways, I won't show you the whole thing.
This video was recorded 13 days into the lockdown on March 26th.
But then the same fellow did an update just a few weeks later, April 15th.
Now it wasn't just talking about how much fun it was to have a forced staycation for two weeks to flatten the curve, as they say, because now it was well over a month.
And it's dawning on this guy that they're not just, this was just a blip.
Tipping Point for Digital Identity00:09:45
This is the new thing.
And his tone is very different.
No more chatting about how cool online karate is.
He's wearing a jacket now.
No more PJs.
You can tell he's a little bit worried.
Here, watch about a minute.
This is an urgent message to all humans everywhere.
Based on my experience, connections, and the information that I'm reviewing, I need to issue an urgent call for action.
The stakes have never been higher.
The global atmosphere of fear is making people vulnerable to manipulation.
History has shown us that in times of crisis, we see our human rights stripped from us in the name of our protection.
I'm seeing sensible, intelligent people, my friends, my family, our elected representatives, willing to sacrifice their basic human rights in response to this COVID crisis.
Now is not the time to sit and wait on the sidelines as our way of life gets steamrolled.
It's more important than ever that we fight for the life that we want for ourselves, for our children, for our grandchildren.
At the end of the day, we need to think critically about our situation and act with honor and integrity.
We need to think about the long-term results of our actions today and how we can best respond to this global crisis.
Holy moly, he's right, and he's right very early.
April 2020, a lot of folks are starting to wake up to that now, more than a year in, now that many other countries are out, but we're still deep in.
That BBC story the other day should have been a wake-up call.
We're the worst in the world here in Toronto, with most of Canada not much better.
I think Nova Scotia may actually be worse than Toronto.
Quebec has a nighttime curfew for crying out loud.
It's a province treating its people like children.
Three pastors in Alberta have now been jailed, including those arrested in SWAT police-style raids.
But this guy saw that very early, a year ago.
Here's another half minute.
The way I see it, we are at a tipping point.
All this technology before us can allow us to usher in a digital golden age that allows for humanity to rise together and empower people to have control in their physical and digital lives.
Or it can be turned against us in a top-down dystopic system of total control.
A society where our every move is tracked, where our ability to travel is a privilege and not a right, where our data is used and sold without our knowledge and then weaponized.
Now he's talking about data and privacy, and he's right.
And I noticed that he's standing in front of a flag that mentions a digital wallet or a digital golden age or something.
So maybe he's been thinking about this stuff for a while anyways.
And it sort of clicks for him that everything we do through the lockdown now is through our computer.
Everything.
School work.
School, work, movies, dating, everything.
Our entire lives are through the internet now.
It's terrifying and it's all tracked.
Like I say, you can tell that he works in this stuff.
It's not just a revelation, but COVID-19, or more to the point, the weaponization of COVID-19, the opportunism around it, that's made him wake up a bit from the happy family banter of playing board games with the family in that first video.
Here, I'm going to play two more minutes straight from his next video.
Weaponized against us to influence our behavior, our beliefs, and our purchasing decisions.
If we give away control of our money, identity, and data as a reaction to COVID-19, I'm concerned that we will never get them back.
My mission is to see that people understand the immense value of personal privacy and to empower people with technology that unlocks this value.
As humans, we all have the right to personal privacy.
Take for example the contents of our physical wallets.
We control our wallets.
We protect it.
It's under our physical control.
The cash we have in our wallets, we control.
The cards we have in our wallet, we control.
The receipts we have in our wallet, we control.
When it comes to our digital life and our personal data, we have no control.
Mega corporations like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon hold, sell, and profit from our personal data.
Our money is held in banks, which means it's the bank's money, and we hold a promise.
Our stocks, our investments in other companies' success are stored on centralized ledgers by third parties.
Our medical data is stored with our doctors and our governments in disconnected, centralized databases and filing cabinets.
Our ID cards, passports, voting rights, real estate titles, car registration, and more are mostly physical documents that reference centralized databases.
Centralized databases that can be manipulated, hacked, and exploited.
He's right, of course.
I think some of the info we have stored on us is safe.
Some of it's safe.
Some of it's sort of safe.
Incredible as it may sound, I think the stuff that, for example, the tax department has on us, some of the stuff the hospitals have on us, I think that's actually probably more safe, more private than the data that the tech giants have on us because the tech companies explicitly make their money buying and selling that info about us, whereas politicians, they use that information too, more and more.
I mean, Justin Trudeau's cell phone app that he promised would not spy on you.
Now we learn the government wants to use the data on it, given freely to them by more than 6 million Canadians that want to use that data for other purposes.
But like I say, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Amazon, etc., they would have used everything from the very beginning without notice to you.
I mean, if you ever read a terms of service for these companies on Instagram, they have a license to use your photos.
Did you know they can use it for free?
The government has the benefit of being slow and dumb, so they don't quite abuse you as much as the companies do.
Here, watch a little more.
We have been on a trajectory of digitizing our currency, identity information, and data for a long time.
Adoption has been increasing rapidly, but with the arrival of this black swan that is COVID-19, we can expect global adoption of digital identity and digital currencies in the coming two years.
Billions of people will begin storing digital keys for their money, identity, and data.
Where will it be stored?
Who will have access to it?
How will you access and interface with these keys?
These are the important questions we are asking right now and developing solutions for.
To usher in this golden age, we need universal access to a secure, open source, self-custody wallet where we each hold and control our keys.
Within these wallets, we can store and access all types of digital currency, identity, and data.
By doing this, we unlock this golden age that enables us seamless experiences in our digital lives and privacy in our personal lives.
Having been in the Bitcoin and blockchain industry since 2013, I want to assure you that we have all the technology ready to go to make this happen, either way.
I have faith in the ecosystem, its ethos, its principles, its values.
But in responding to this crisis, the industry may be deceived into bringing to market solutions that further the agenda of the few at the expense of the many.
Okay, now I get it.
He's in the digital wallet business.
So he thinks this can actually be a golden age for us.
Tech can liberate us, can empower us, can protect us, can connect us.
I remember when the internet was spoken of that way in general.
It's not spoken of that way a lot now.
A free place.
But he mentioned the blockchain.
Did you hear that?
That's the technology for encryption that allows things like cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
It's a world of hope and a world of dissent and a world of a bit of flim flam too.
You can see a little bit of that here.
But I think he's awake to the problems in our society, isn't he?
And again, this was in April 2020, more than a year ago.
Kudos to him for seeing the dystopia we were heading into.
Now I'm almost done.
Here's just one more minute.
A binding agreement on behalf of governments, corporations, industry, media, intelligence, academia, and more to uphold and protect every man, woman, and child's right to digital identity, data, and currency.
At SwissKey, we are building out a super wallet, a solution that puts you in full control.
Most of the pieces are in place, and we are doing our best with all resources in hand to move as quickly as possible.
We need your help.
If you want to be involved, subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on social channels, and reach out.
If you can't help with your time, you can help with your money.
Kyle Kemper's Critique00:06:22
You can invest in the project, you can buy NFC wallets, or you can make an anonymous donation with crypto.
If nothing else, please share this message.
Think critically about your actions and always do your best.
Okay, so he goes into sales pitch mode for his company.
No problem.
He's trying to make a living.
I respect the hustle.
Swiss Key sounds like the name of his company.
He wants to make a living out of this COVID mess too, but a living by protecting our privacy and identity.
I'd say he's one of the good guys, though he's got a bit of a guru vibe to him that's a little bit much for me.
But do you know who this guy is?
Do you recognize him?
Let me play the last few seconds of this video and he'll say his name.
With unconditional love and gratitude, I'm Kyle Kemper.
Thank you for your attention and bless you.
Do you know any other man who talks that way?
I only know of one.
Justin Trudeau.
And those around Justin Trudeau, like the disgraced, law-breaking former finance minister Bill Mourneau.
So who is Kyle Kemper?
Why, it's Justin Trudeau's half-brother.
When Margaret Trudeau divorced Pierre Trudeau, she married Fried Kemper.
And Kyle was her son from that marriage.
That's the guy we've been watching.
He looks a bit like Margaret Trudeau, doesn't he?
He's got that Trudeau, Justin Trudeau, cringe guru thing with the namaste prayer and the heart thing.
But I think, to be really candid, putting aside the particular sales pitch, I think he's largely right, don't you?
And I can't believe I'm saying that about Justin Trudeau's half-brother.
Of course, what I like about him is exactly what the media party hates about him.
I mentioned, I discovered him through a newspaper article.
Here's that article.
They mention some of his videos.
It's in the National Post.
It's by John Iverson.
His headline is, Trudeau's half-brother is an anti-vaxxer, Bitcoin entrepreneur, and affectionate critic of the PM.
I'm seeing sensible, intelligent people, my family, are elected representatives willing to sacrifice their basic human rights in response to this COVID crisis, Kyle Kemper says.
I read the quotes of Kyle Kemper in this post story, and they're all torqued.
He actually comes across very reasonably, just like a thoughtful skeptic.
Kyle Kemper believes a global corporateocracy has taken advantage of the COVID crisis to diminish democracy and heighten control over people's lives.
Yeah, well, Jeff Bezos and Amazon doubled their wealth during the pandemic.
So it's not untrue, is it?
Kemper agrees with Carolina Panther's offensive tackle and fellow Bitcoin believer Russell Okung.
The real battle is not simply left or right, it is authoritarianism versus libertarianism.
Well, of course that's right.
Is there a reason that's not right?
He has retweeted conspiracy theories about election fraud in the U.S. and promoted ideas that Trudeau's liberals found so reprehensible they called for a conservative MP holding them to be kicked out of the opposition caucus.
Are you trying to make me like him on social media?
Kemper urged people to sign petition E2961, which was sponsored in the House of Commons by conservative Derek Sloan.
It calls COVID vaccination, quote, human experimentation, and suggests there could be serious adverse effects to taking it.
On his Facebook page, Kemper blasts the great reset and people who think 100% of the planet needs to be vaccinated with an experimental concoction to prevent a disease with a 99% recovery rate.
This is sheer madness.
I dissent.
Again, where's the error?
The vaccine companies themselves all say these things.
I don't know if it's for legal reasons, if anything, nothing else.
Their vaccines are not yet approved.
They have not finished the experimentation.
They're all still experimental drugs.
They're only authorized for emergency use because politicians say the pandemic is so bad, you got to use unapproved, untested drugs.
They're partly tested, but they're not done yet.
The pandemic is not so bad for most people.
Where's the error?
Here's some more.
Kemper said there remains a gigantic divide in the scientific community over the COVID response.
Vaccine manufacturers are exempt from liability.
That scares me.
There are so many ways we can improve our immune systems that count a coronavirus.
The sun gives us vitamin D and it's great for the immune system.
But Justin and the public health officials don't tell people to get outside and get vitamin D, he said.
Again, this is put forward like it's embarrassing, but of course it's the opposite.
It's true.
There's no rebuttal in this piece.
It's just sort of written with a knowing tone.
Of course this guy's a coog, right?
And then this bizarre smear.
Some of Kemper's views hove close to QAnon, the discredited conspiracy theory that alleges Satan-worshipping pedophiles are running a child trafficking ring and plotted against Donald Trump.
Yeah, here's Bill Gates, the billionaire, and Jeffrey Epstein, the child trafficker.
We now learn that Melinda Gates contacted a divorce lawyer after she discovered her husband's relationship with Epstein, the child trafficker.
And then there's, of course, the Hollywood child trafficker, Harvey Weinstein.
Which part exactly is the National Post saying is the conspiracy theory?
Haven't those all been proved in conspiracy facts now?
Is there any doubt that Jeffrey Epstein was a child trafficker and that Bill Gates visited him endlessly?
I tell you, I never thought I would see the day.
Kyle Kemper isn't my first choice.
Any guy who does that heart-shaped thing is probably disqualified from leading a country.
Rumble And Thiel's Vision00:15:26
But still, if I'm forced to choose, I think the wrong son of Margaret Trudeau became prime minister.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, we were talking earlier about YouTube.
There's so many things I love about YouTube, but they're overshadowed by the fact that YouTube is like being in a very woke college.
So if you're willing to talk about things that have no political flavor at all, you'll be fine.
If you're willing to engage in very woke politics, you'll be fine.
But if you dare to be conservative in any way or a critical or a skeptic in any way, you'll find yourself thrown out.
It's increasingly inhospitable to folks like, well, us here at Rebel News.
As you know, earlier this year, we were suspended for a week.
We were demonetized completely.
And we live in fear of being shut down imminently.
It literally could happen as soon as next week when YouTube says they're going to shut down an enormous number of accounts and they won't say who is.
It's a little bit terrifying.
But one of the things that it's done to be under YouTube's woke rule is made us look around at other alternatives.
As you may know, every day at noon, we do a live stream and then we have that live stream now on four platforms.
YouTube, a Canadian startup called SuperU.net, an American crypto-based channel called Odyssey, and the surprise hit, at least for me, is a Toronto-based company called Rumble.com.
And what's so much fun about Rumble, fun's the wrong word, what's so refreshing and so hopeful, is we've only been putting our videos on Rumble for about a month or two.
And we already have more people on any given live stream watching us on Rumble than on YouTube, where we have almost 1.5 million subscribers.
How can it be that Rumble, which we just joined this year, has more people watching us than on YouTube?
I think the only answer is that YouTube suppresses us, like I say, because we're conservative.
Well, I'm enjoying being on Rumble.
It may be the only place we're allowed to be soon.
And we have exciting news, which is that Peter Thiel, one of the few liberty-minded folks left in big tech, he and others have decided that Rumble could well be the video future.
And joining us now via Skype from Washington, D.C. is Breitbart.com's senior tech editor, Alan Bokari, with the news.
Alam, great to see you again.
Peter Thiel has decided that Rumble is the competitor, the YouTube slayer.
Am I right?
That seems to be the case.
Yeah.
And actually, Peter Thiel's making a lot of political donations at the moment.
In addition to this donation to an alternative tech platform, which is fighting censorship, he's also donating to Blake Masters, his deputy, who's rumored to be considering a Senate run in Arizona to J.D. Bance, the author, who's probably running for the Senate in Ohio.
So Thiel seems to be taking more of an active role in fighting against the woke culture that's taking over America and that took over Silicon Valley.
Well, that's, I mean, I know he was one of the few in the tech industry who were not only willing to meet with Donald Trump, but actually to be sort of on his side of things.
He was turned into a bit of a pariah over it.
I think it's one of the reasons he left Silicon Valley itself and relocated to LA.
I think he was a little bit sick of the group think.
He was ahead of the curve on that, that's for sure.
You're talking about political donations, and that's always interesting.
I think a billionaire gives a donation for ideological reasons or for reasons of influence or connection or make sure his phone calls get returned.
But investing in rumble.com, and I should disclose that I have a very small sliver of rumble.com as well.
That's a statement I think that Peter Thiel believes in the platform.
I mean, it's different than a donation, which you never expect to get anything back from a politician.
I think Thiel, not only through his money and through his connections in Silicon Valley, is saying we actually need something else besides YouTube and Google, don't we?
Yeah, and there is a huge and growing market for this stuff.
I can't remember, but Parla, the alternative to Twitter, had a huge valuation before it got shut down by Amazon.
And it just shows you that people are getting sick of the mainstream platforms.
The fact you were saying earlier in the intro that you get more views on Rumble now than on YouTube is huge.
And it shows you how YouTube has really sacrificed a big chunk of its audience by caving into the mainstream media's demands for censorship on so many occasions.
Yeah, and I never would have guessed that.
I mean, I thought, okay, so maybe people aren't that interested in what I have to say.
I mean, it wasn't a false modesty.
I thought, oh, okay, so only a few thousand people want to watch our live streams.
That doesn't really make sense if we had 1.45 million people who positively said, no, no, no, we want to hear what you have to say.
And only one-tenth of 1% ever watched.
We go on Rumble and almost our first day, we have more people watching on that platform.
I mean, I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but I'm certain that's YouTube's explicit policy of boosting woke content and corporate content and de-boosting alternative content.
I mean, I don't know what any other explanation could be if we're getting less than one-tenth of 1% of our subscribers tuning in on YouTube and we're overwhelmed on Rumble the first day.
I don't know.
Maybe there's another explanation for that.
What do you think, Alan?
No, I think you're right.
And we've actually proven that YouTube manipulates its search results for political topics.
We covered that over at Breitbart a few years ago.
We released part of their YouTube search blacklist.
And some of the terms they were deliberately reordering results on were very political terms like abortion and Federal Reserve and even terms related to a referendum in Ireland.
So we know they manipulate their search results on YouTube.
We know they manipulate their search results on their main search engine as well.
If you search the name of the editor-in-chief of Breitbart, Alex Marlowe, on Google, a Breitbart link does not come up until the fifth page, which most people do not get to.
So Breitbart's actual editor-in-chief, his Breitbart link doesn't show up until you're five pages down.
So we're suppressed on Google, we're suppressed on and conservatives on YouTube as well.
So it's something we absolutely know that they do.
They don't even, I don't think Google is even that worried about hiding it anymore.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, with Joe Biden in the White House, I don't think they have much to worry about as they might have had Donald Trump being re-elected.
Now, one of the interesting things in your article and the headline is Peter Thiel, JD Vance, invest in YouTube competitor Rumble.
I'm familiar with Peter Thiel a little bit.
I was not as familiar with JD Vance.
Let me quote a line from your article.
According to Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovsky, part of the funding will be invested in cloud infrastructure.
This will allow Rumble to compete with and avoid dependence on traditional cloud hosting providers like Amazon Web Services.
The decision of Amazon Web Services to blacklist Parlor earlier this year led to the free speech friendly platform being knocked offline at the height of its user growth.
So I think that's good thinking, because there's always it's.
It's like the image of a little fish about to be eaten by a bigger fish, about to be eaten by a bigger fish, and so on.
There's always a bigger fish.
In internet infrastructure, there's always someone you're dependent on.
So if you have your own website well, who hosts your website and who provides cloud service to them?
And Amazon is so dominant.
That's what, I think, killed Parlor.
So you've got to go deeper and deeper and deeper.
Frankly, you need your own bank but um, I think it's really smart that that Rumble is thinking ahead to well, how did they go for Parlor?
How did they kick them off?
How can we do our best to be self-sufficient, like like a compound in the country or like an island of their own, because it will come to that one day?
Yeah, this is something that uh, a growing number of these uh free speech focused tech startups have run into.
Uh, GAB and Parlor both face this problem where, as you said, a lot of the infrastructure services they depend on.
Often uh, under facing media pressure, quickly cave in and refuse to do business with them.
We saw this with uh, with uh, Google and Apple kicking GAB and then parla off their app stores.
We saw this with uh ddos protection services.
Those are services that protect um uh websites from being subject to denial of surface attacks where they get deliberately overloaded with traffic.
We saw them cut off GAB.
We saw dns providers, which provide uh website addresses, cut off GAB.
Uh, so all of these third-party services that websites depend on to stay online, they've, uh they've been deliberately going after and targeting these free speech apps over the next uh, over the last uh few years.
So uh, the fact that that uh Rumble is investing in cloud hosting, which is one of the crucial, one of the crucial uh things that all websites and all apps need, that's what hosts your, your data and your um and uh essentially yeah, essentially all of your data on the on the internet.
Uh, and and they're not relying on a centralized service like Amazon or Google or one of the other established players, and that's uh that shows a lot of foresight about what they'll be probably be facing in the future.
Yeah well, I mean, that's a huge thing.
Think about every single video on Youtube, the number of megabytes or gigabytes it's stored somewhere.
Who is big enough to store all that?
Who's big enough to stream all that live like that is staggering when you think of how big Rumble's needs will be, especially if they maintain this growth.
So that's it.
The easy way would be to go to Amazon and say, hey guys uh, because Amazon can handle it, Amazon can handle Amazon or, who knows, maybe even Google itself, or they could probably find some Chinese vendor willing to do it for even less.
But the only way that they can be safe is if they host it themselves.
I'm glad they're thinking that way.
I find it interesting.
I we, I. I've had the opportunity to speak to the president of uh Rumble.
He's a, he's a fellow Torontonian, he's not too far down the road.
I find it unusual that they're based here in Canada, which is not a free speech jurisdiction, it's not a first amendment jurisdiction um, and I I sure hope That they're protected on the Canadian side, too.
I don't know how long they'll be able to stay here in Canada because it's not like we're known as some island of free speech.
I mean, I know in some ways Iceland has that reputation.
Cyprus has that reputation.
Those are places people go if they want to avoid the Cayman Islands, if they want to avoid some regulation.
But Toronto, Canada, anyway, I wish the guys at Rumble very, very well.
Like I said, I have a very small interest in them.
But I don't know, they have so many battles.
But if Peter Deal is going to be involved with them, I think he'll be able to give them advice that's even more valuable than his money.
What I would like to see these alternative tech companies do, and I don't know if Rumble does this, maybe they do, but I think the standard should be, and maybe this should be written into the corporate charter of some of these companies, that they will allow the maximum amount of free speech within any jurisdiction that they operate in.
So, you know, different countries have different speech laws, right?
And, you know, every company has to operate within the bounds of those laws.
But the media tends to pressure companies to go beyond the bounds of those laws and censor even more than what the law requires.
That's certainly the case in the U.S. where that has a First Amendment.
The media sets the standards for Silicon Valley, which constantly expand and constantly grow to cover new material where you get to the point where Silicon Valley companies arguably censor even more than European hate or Canadian hate speech laws would require.
So I would like to see these free speech companies sort of write into their corporate charters that they're only going to remove content as the law requires in each jurisdiction.
I take your point.
I mean, for example, Alex Jones or Parlor, they were not shut down because they did something criminal.
They were, as far as I know, never charged with any crime.
You're absolutely right.
It was some woke CEO or some activist junior bureaucrat who made the decision.
And that was far below the protection level of the First Amendment.
Let me ask you: in recent weeks, my favorite for the 2024 Republican nomination, I'm a foreigner, so I don't really get much of a say, but I love Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
I didn't really know much about him.
I think he was a real star of the recovery from the lockdowns.
He got out of the lockdowns the fastest, the smartest.
I love watching him spar with the media.
In many ways, I think he's got the best of Trumpism, the best ideas, and he's not a pushover, but he lacks some of the flaws that I think cause damage to Trump.
I really like the guy.
And one of the things he's so interesting right now for is he is bringing in little pieces of legislation to chip away the power of big tech.
For example, bringing in rules banning social media companies from deplatforming candidates during a campaign.
It's a baby step.
It's a tiny little bite, but it's more than zero.
What do you think of how Ron DeSantis is handling himself on the tech issue?
So I've actually been a little bit critical of this Florida tech law.
And, you know, maybe it's DeSantis' fault, maybe it's the fault of Florida legislatures, but it's actually, it's a lot weaker than the Texas law.
Texas also brought in a law to rein in tech censorship.
And what Texas did is they basically said, well, these companies are like common carriers and they should be subject to similar restrictions as common carriers.
And that follows what Clarence Thomas recommended in his legal opinion on tech censorship as well.
Florida's law did not do that.
It didn't say anything about common carriers.
It didn't say anything about regulating them as places of public accommodation, which is another category of business in the United States.
It's quite restricted in who it can or cannot deny service to.
Instead, what the law says is that social media companies are banned from prohibited from banning political candidates.
Now, there are two political candidates, two major ones anyway, who are banned in Florida, who are residents of Florida.
That's Donald Trump and Laura Luma.
And we're going to see the law tested if one of them brings a lawsuit against these companies based on the Florida law to reinstate them.
Florida's Social Media Law00:03:02
So, you know, I think the jury's out on whether that law is going to be effective or not.
I think it would have been more effective if they just straightforwardly said, well, these companies are going to be regulated as common carriers in the state of Florida.
But, you know, we'll see.
It's certainly a step in the right direction that they brought in this law.
And I think we're going to see over the next few months how effective it really is.
Yeah, well, that's a very good point.
And thank you for bringing a little bit of nuance.
I mean, I love Ron DeSantis anyways, but you're right.
Hearing the difference between the Florida law and the Texas law makes me more sympathetic to the Texas one.
I'm glad these laws are happening at all.
You and I talked about this many times over the past.
I felt like Trump did not do enough during his tenure, and it may have been a factor in his defeat.
I think it certainly was a factor.
Question is how big it was.
And now with Republicans out of the White House and seemingly aimless on Capitol Hill, perhaps it goes to the more ambitious and creative governors to hold the fort at least for the next few years.
Alan, it's great to see you.
In fact, I just had the pleasure of interviewing Alex Marlow of your shop the other day for his new book.
So it's very much in the theme of free speech and fighting against the dominant media and their cancel culture.
Great to see you keep up the fight down there.
And thanks for joining us today.
Thanks, Ezra.
Good to be on.
All right, there you have it.
Alan Bokari, senior tech correspondent for Breitbart.com.
Stay with us more ahead.
Hey, welcome back on my show last night.
Kevin writes, Justin buying off the media again with our money.
Oh, yeah, again, but now Facebook's getting into it.
I mean, it's like these journalists should, you know, Formula One drivers have all the patches on their uniform of all their different sponsors.
I think journalists should have to wear patches.
This one gets the money from Trudeau.
This gets the money from Trudeau and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.
I'd like to see that a little bit more honesty, a little bit more truth in advertising.
Mia writes, the mainstream media and Facebook are losing individuals, so they have to direct people to each other to make money and to force more censorship.
Just delete your freaking Facebook accounts.
I don't use Facebook much personally, but it is a place where more than 2 billion people have accounts.
So it is a river of traffic until conservatives build up their own alternative social media giants that's just going to remain the same.
Lone Wolf writes, Canada is doomed.
Well, we're all going to die, if that's what you mean.
Canada itself, I don't know.
Where there's life, there's hope.
I think we can keep on fighting.
Isn't that our motto?
I mean, for six years, I've been saying the same thing after every show.
Keep fighting for freedom.
As long as you do that, you're keeping hope alive.