Did you know that Facebook has a Supreme Court? On June 7, Nick Clegg—a British ex-Brexit-opposing politician—extended Donald Trump’s ban, while Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, linked to an ISIS amulet deal, censored Nigeria’s president, sparking global backlash. Mexico and Germany criticized Silicon Valley’s tech tyranny; India fought spying accusations against Chinese apps. El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, defying U.S./Chinese currency control, while Toronto’s mask mandates clashed with Miami’s unmasked Bitcoin optimism. Antifa removed Egerton Ryerson’s statue without police action, mirroring Maoist historical erasure, as conservatives debate cancel culture’s hypocrisy—even figures like Macdonald or Douglas, tied to eugenics and residential schools, face selective revisionism. Trudeau’s D-Day statement ignored WWII, focusing instead on gender and COVID, revealing how modern politics prioritizes ideology over memory. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my friends, I'm going to try and make an arc of a conversation that loops in India, Nigeria, El Salvador, Canada, United States, Germany, Mexico.
Oh, you'll have to tell me if I'm successful.
But I point out how big tech and big government are merging, and sometimes smaller countries are caught in the crossfire of some big battles.
Listen, I'll tell you, I'll explain myself in a minute, but before I do, let me invite you. to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, did you know that Facebook has a Supreme Court?
It's June 7th, and this is the Azra 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 to the government will watch publisher is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Well, the Supreme Court has ruled Donald Trump is not allowed back on Facebook for two more years.
Now, it's not the Supreme Court of the United States.
I don't think they would issue such a ruling, first of all.
That would violate the First Amendment.
Americans have free speech more than we do up here.
Second of all, Donald Trump would have been able to be heard in court.
He would have had lawyers.
He would have had evidence and arguments, and we would know who the judges are, and they would have to explain themselves with their reasoning in a published statement called a judgment.
None of that happened.
You see, Facebook has their own internal Supreme Court.
The thing is, you're not allowed to know who's on it, what their rules are, when they meet, who's in the meeting.
You're not allowed to know anything about it other than what they finally decide.
And here's the crazy thing.
This decision to ban Donald Trump to extend his ban that was put on him in January was made not by an American, but by a Brit named Nick Clegg, who used to run a left of center, remain political party in the UK.
That is, it didn't want to separate in the Brexit.
So you have a career politician, left of center, who hates the Brexiteers, including Donald Trump's best friend, Nigel Farage.
So again, this is something you wouldn't see in a real court, that kind of a bias.
So a foreign politician working for Facebook's Supreme Court has banned the American president of the time, now former president, from being on Facebook for two years.
And this is just normal.
It's just accepted.
It's not the only bit of international judicial punishment being meted out by Silicon Valley oligarchs.
I don't know if you've been following, but Twitter's at war with different countries in Africa.
It was at war with Uganda.
And over the weekend, last week, the last few days, it's had a big fight with Nigeria, one of the largest and most important countries in Africa.
Twitter banned the president of Nigeria from being on their platform, just like they had done with Donald Trump.
I mean, if you can ban the president of the United States from being on your platform, you know, you can ban anyone.
Although, for some weird reason, Twitter has not banned Chinese dictators and diplomats or the Ayatollahs of Iran.
I find that odd.
But they banned Trump and they got away with it, so they banned the Nigerian president.
Well, he didn't take that as nicely and gently as Donald Trump did, so he banned them back.
Nigeria banned the entire app from their country.
Now, of course, there's people who can work around it.
There's something in tech called a VPN, which sort of hides where your geography is.
So it allows you to connect to websites, even if they're banned in your country.
But still, it was the moral blow to it.
If you're going to ban me, I'm going to ban you.
And here's the icing on the cake.
Twitter, which had banned the president of Nigeria, which had banned the president of the United States, issued this tweet where they were outraged about freedom of expression.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
You just banned him.
And that was fine with your freedom of expression.
In this case, the Supreme Court of Twitter wasn't the boss.
I want to tell you who the Supreme Court of Twitter is.
They don't have Nick Clegg in this whole secret court like they do at Facebook.
It's just this kook, Jack Dorsey, and I call him a kook.
He's got that resputant beard.
And here he is when he made a deal with a rapper to take some body parts of his and make an amulet to ward off ISIS.
It's like he was in voodoo or something.
So this kooky messiah with the resputant beard who's getting amulets made to ward off ISIS, he's the one who's deciding which world leaders can or can't speak on Twitter, which means who you or I can't hear or see on Twitter.
How are you liking this new world order?
Hold your answer there until I tell you how some others are liking it.
This is from our friend Alan Bokari at breitbart.com.
As you know, when Trump was originally banned by all the tech companies, the media in America and Canada cheered and the Democrats cheered, but other countries were less thrilled about it, including countries that are led by left of center leaders, because they quickly realized this is not a rule of law, and it's certainly not an international order or treaties or things like that.
This is a few people in Silicon Valley who think they're on Mount Olympus just hurling down thunderbolts at whoever down below.
And whereas they're connected to the Democratic Party, they have no real connection to people in Nigeria or Germany or Mexico or wherever.
And so you saw here, the president of Mexico, who is very much left of center, said he was very concerned about Twitter and other social media companies issuing rulings.
Here's Angela Merkel, certainly no friend of Donald Trump, but the same thing.
These world leaders quickly realized that the American deep state was much more than just the U.S. government.
It's the merger of big government with big tech.
And so we saw in India a similar battle.
India wasn't fighting so much with Twitter, although it's been doing that.
India's issued arrests and other search warrants against Twitter for similar shenanigans in their country.
India is battling Twitter from America, but it's also battling Chinese apps, Chinese apps that spy on India.
As you know, India's been fighting with China.
It's sort of a slow-motion ward war high up in the mountains has been for some time.
What have we here?
We have a realization that every country in the world soon has to make a decision.
Do they be part of the U.S. tech stack or the Chinese or Russian tech stack?
Or do they try and go it alone?
If you're an independent country, do you really want America's Silicon Valley ruling the discourse in your country?
Or would you rather ban Twitter and have your own homemade variety?
Or will you swap it out for the Russian tech platform VK?
That's their form of Facebook.
China has TikTok, which the West bizarrely allows to propagate amongst us.
Well, I think one of the answers may be what El Salvador announced this weekend at a Bitcoin conference in Miami.
Let me just show you a brief moment of what that conference looked like.
And I say that from Toronto, the most locked down city in the world.
In Toronto, people wear masks when they're alone in their car.
In Toronto, people wear masks when they're jogging.
People wear masks when they're bicycling.
People scold each other, snitch on each other for masks.
In Toronto, it was just announced that schools will not meet again anywhere in Ontario with children until at least September, maybe later.
That's the mindset in Ontario and in Toronto in particular, the scoldiest, snitchiest city in the world.
Contrast that to Miami.
Here's the mayor of Miami, a Republican, Mayor Suarez, who was addressing that Bitcoin conference, and you won't see a mask inside.
Now, it's a bit of a self-serving speech.
We just listen to it for a moment.
I only wish I could wait for the thousands of people who are standing out there to come inside to hear my speech, because I want everybody to hear this.
For me, this journey of trying to create the Bitcoin, blockchain, and mining capital of the world happened long before I uttered the tweet heard around the world, how can I help?
And while 2.7 million people saw that tweet, they didn't know that many years prior, I was on the Florida Blockchain Foundation, was named to the Florida Blockchain Task Force by the CFO of Florida, and of course we opened our very own Miami Bitcoin Center.
And what I didn't know was that the portal of positivity that I stumbled upon in Twitter, yes, there does exist a portal of positivity in Twitter, on December 4th would take me on a journey to discover the transformational importance for my city of leaning into Bitcoin to make Miami a technological leader in the world.
You have a convention packed with people.
No one's wearing the mask.
Everyone's optimistic talking about business and the future.
How opposite from Canada.
But one of the things they were talking about in particular was Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency.
And over the weekend, it was announced that the country of El Salvador is introducing legislation to make Bitcoin legal tender in that country.
Other countries choose the American dollar.
That's pretty widely accepted.
In places like Panama, it's even been the official currency.
Other places in the world increasingly use the Chinese yuan.
But El Salvador is saying none of the above.
Both of those are too easily manipulated.
They're going with Bitcoin.
And so you have a story of two countries, Nigeria and El Salvador, both of them resisting manipulation by big tech, but both of them in doing so resisting the American sphere of influence.
It's a bit crazy that when America starts to violate its own First Amendment, it's other countries that react more negatively, even more so than their own citizens.
And us here in Canada, well, we're happy to go along with all the censorship in the world, aren't we?
Stay with us for more.
What was that?
Tearing Down History00:15:02
Was that the Taliban dynamiting statues that they found religiously odious?
What was that?
Well, that was in the streets of Toronto where Antifa activists pulled down the statue of Egerton or Egerton Ryerson, after whom Ryerson University is named.
Obviously, no police interference at all.
In fact, as far as I know, days have passed and no arrests have been made because certain political crimes are exempt from law enforcement.
Joining with us now to talk about this via Skype from Winnipeg is Spencer Fernando.
He's got a new column on the subject entitled, Why Are We Letting Mobs Decide Which Statues Get to Stand?
Spencer, great to see you.
What's your take on this whole thing?
It's a little bit unsettling to know that just anyone can tear down a statue just because.
Yeah, you know, I think it's the whole idea of just anyone being able to take down a statue is really independent from the broader moral debate on historical figures and what should be done about statues and plaques and everything.
There's certainly a discussion and a debate to be had, but this is not the way to do it, right?
I mean, because you're really, you're not giving anyone else a chance to have their opinion, to have their discussion, to really have a democratic debate or consensus around anything.
It's just simply a group of people saying, hey, we don't like this.
We're going to tear it down.
And of course, the question is, if every political group in the country started acting like this, how do you think things would turn out?
Well, that's a good point.
I mean, there's statues in this country I don't like.
There's a statue of Norman Bethune.
That's the Canadian doctor who was such a communist.
He went to communist China and was a doctor with the Maoist revolution.
There's statues for Tommy Douglas.
There's some good things you can say about Tommy Douglas, but he was in favor of eugenics.
And by that, I mean sterilizing people who were mentally retarded, sterilizing people who he thought were low class.
He was also actually tremendously against gay rights.
Then again, almost everyone until a quarter century ago was.
Spencer, I guess my point is, it's never dawned on me to tear down a statue of Norman Bethune or Tommy Douglas.
I just don't think conservatives really do that, even for statues they hate.
Why does the left get a pass on it to tear down things they don't like?
Well, I think one advantage the left has, especially recently, is how they speak with a lot of moral force.
And what I mean by that is they speak in such a way that they don't really even consider the fact that someone could disagree with them respectfully, right?
It's simply, look, we're on the right side of history.
You're on the wrong side of history.
So get out of the way or you're evil.
And I think that scares a lot of politicians and it scares a lot of conservatives as well who don't really put the same kind of moral force behind their statements behind their defense of history or defense of the country.
And the problem is, if you're just going to tear down these statues, nobody is going to hold up well as history goes on, right?
If that's the standard, none of us are going to hold up well.
Even the most progressive politicians, as you say, Tommy Douglas, considered it extremely progressive at the time, but not so progressive anymore, right?
I mean, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, very progressive at the time, but now, you know, not so progressive in the light of history in the eyes of many people.
So if we're just going to pretend the past didn't happen, then that gets very dangerous because you don't learn anything.
It would make much more sense to start putting up, I'd say, you know, put up plaques on some of these statues, go into the good that historical figures did and the bad, you know.
Don't whitewash history, don't pretend it didn't happen, but to just erase all of it and say, yeah, we're just going to tear the statue down if we don't like somebody.
It's a very dangerous precedent to be said.
Yeah, and I think it's getting more and more extreme.
I mean, when they first took John A. MacDonald off the $10 bill, I thought, oh, well, they're saying it's to be more inclusive with new faces.
No, it was just to tear him down.
And when Victoria removed the statue, I thought, well, that's just kooky Victoria.
But now Charlottetown, where the fathers of Confederation met, they're embarrassed by him.
But you know what?
I should tell you, Charlottetown was named after Charlotte, the wife of King George III.
And Victoria, BC is named after Queen Victoria.
BC itself, British Columbia, named after Columbus.
We're going to have to tear down everything.
It's going to be like sports teams where the only things you can name your sports team after are like animals or colors, you know, the Edmonton Elks or whatever.
I'm worried that we're going to destroy.
And that's a very Maoist thing to do, to destroy everything before you, to lose all memory, to start as if it's year zero right now.
I think that this is out of hand.
And I'm frustrated that the police and politicians are generally silent about it.
Yeah, I think the one thing, and I think this is more for people who have studied the history of communism, which unfortunately not enough people have.
You know, our society, rightfully so, is very wary of fascism because a lot of people study that and we're taught a lot about it.
And so we're very wary of anything that seems similar to it.
But we don't have that same wariness when it comes to communism, which is quite disturbing because communism, of course, killed far more people even than fascism.
And if people are trying to replace historical memory or trying to get rid of historical memory, you have to realize that they're trying to replace that with something, right?
There's certainly a new kind of ideology that they want in place.
So the question is, what is that?
And it's obviously not anything conservative or anything historical.
It's obviously going to be a very far-left kind of ideology.
And that's, again, we've seen throughout history, that leads to very dangerous places, right?
Because when you disconnect people from history, you disconnect them from values, the traditional values that built a country.
You see that economically, right, all of a sudden, the values of prudence and fiscal responsibility.
Oh, no, modern monetary theory, a totally new idea.
We'll try that out.
We don't need to be careful with money.
It just, we can make it up.
And so you see a lot of this happening all at once.
And I think people need to really study history and say, look, you know, this doesn't lead to anything good.
Canada is not a perfect country, but certainly compared to most countries, we've done quite well.
And I think there needs to be an understanding that as imperfect as our historical leaders were, they built a country that is actually able to grapple with the past, to look at our mistakes openly, not to try to hide from it, to acknowledge what was done wrong, and to try to fix it.
And I think that that speaks well to them as well, because they built a country that could grow and change over time.
So to just throw all of that away is going to throw away kind of the exact values and the exact things that made us the country we are today.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things that come to my mind.
I mean, I'm almost 50, so I look back in my life, and there's certain things that I'm so proud of and other moments that, frankly, I'm not.
I think every one of us has made thousands, maybe I guess millions of little decisions in our lives.
Some were good, some were not.
We had some finer moments than others.
You're not going to cancel yourself because you said something dumb 30 years ago when you were a kid.
And I think that's how it's related to cancel culture.
I mean, you see early and earlier, people in their teens, they said something in a dumb joke, and now they're grown up and they're being canceled for it.
I think there's an analogy there.
Was John A. McDonald flawed?
Yeah, every human was.
But to throw out the entire history, the entire legacy, because of something that in the light of 2021 looks bad, that would be like throwing out yourself because you're embarrassed of what you did when you were a teen.
It's just, it doesn't work that way.
And I think there's one more thing too in Spencer, which is it implies that there's some utopia out there.
It implies that the critics are actually better than what they're tearing down.
And I put it to you, there isn't a place better than Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia.
Show me a place that didn't have slavery in the world.
Other than Antarctica, every continent had it.
Show me a place that didn't have some immorality.
I just think that it's the combination of cancel culture plus thugs who never have to say what their better utopia is.
I don't know.
I find it very disheartening.
Yeah, a lot of it relies on historical ignorance.
You know, I think the example of the states is a good one.
You see people all the time saying, oh, America, it's just, it's a slave nation.
It's all slavery, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, they fought a gigantic war between one part of the country that wanted to continue it and one part of the country that wanted to end it.
And if you look at proportionally the amount of people who died, one of the most brutal wars in human history.
And the side that was opposing slavery ended up winning and the country became a country that didn't have it.
So the idea that people kind of, they forget that, or they just ignore it.
Like, oh, no, the states is just, it's all still slavery.
I mean, they fought a war about it, right?
So that's one important thing.
And then the Canadian example is, I think a lot of what's happening is this is a tool to control people, right?
You talk about, you know, people you can't just cancel yourself.
I think that's what a lot of people on the far left are really trying to do is they're trying to scare regular people so much and say, look, you must have said something or had some thought back sometime in the past that was terrible.
And we could reveal that and we could ruin your ability to make money or to have a career.
So you just better be quiet and go along with everything we say.
And it's unfortunately working on a lot of people.
One way you can tell is that when people feel that they're not online or they're not being watched or they're around people they can trust, they often talk a fair bit differently than they do in public.
People are not quite as politically correct behind the scenes as they are in public.
And so I think what you're seeing is a lot of people really being controlled by fear.
And that never leads to a good place.
If you're trying to use fear to control people, then that means you have an agenda in mind that's not really good for them.
Yeah.
I mean, I know that under the Soviet bloc and any authoritarian regime, you would have a conversation just with your tightest, most intimate friends and family.
When you would have real talk, you'd be extremely careful.
And then you would have your public face with everyone else.
And you had to be careful.
And that's why the Soviets really tried to impress on children that it was patriotic to turn in your own family.
In fact, the Soviet version of Boy Scouts, the young pioneers, they made their hero Pavel Morozov, informant number one, this young children of Ukrainian farmer peasants who, according to the mythology, turned in his own family for criticizing Stalin.
Every single Soviet Boy Scout for 60 years, 50 years, wore a little pin of this guy on their chest.
The government was trying. to break up the secrecy and privacy of even families.
There's a terrible precedent here.
Let me ask you, I'm just so sorry to see it come alive again.
Can you name for me a leader, a politician, maybe with the exception of Jordan Peterson?
Can you name maybe an elected politician anywhere in North America who's speaking out against cancel culture in a way that is making a difference?
Well, I'd say the closest.
And again, you know, we've been very critical of him, you know, conservatives, people across the spectrum have been critical of him, a lot of other issues.
But Jason Kenney, I think, he's done a little more than anybody recently, far, certainly far more than Aaron O'Toole, I would say, to push back on that.
And the reason, you know, we focus on conservatives is we don't even expect anything like that from Justin Trudeau or Jagmeet Singh, right?
No one expects them to push back on that.
They're pushing the other way.
So you kind of, you almost criticize the people who you at least have some hope would push back.
And Jason Kenney has done that somewhat.
And he received a lot of blowback for it.
His problem is that, you know, conservatives are so angry at him for many other things with lockdowns and restrictions that he's not really getting too much backup.
But on that, he has pushed back.
But overall, this is a big problem is the conservatives, they keep kind of giving in to the left-wing narrative.
And they keep, it's like, you know, Lucy with the football.
You know, this time it'll be enough.
This time we'll go far left enough and they'll finally, they'll accept us and the media will like us and the left-wing groups will say that you guys are okay.
And of course, it just gets moved, right?
It's never going to be enough.
And so I think they need to realize that and start pushing back.
And the other thing is, you know, I think a lot of injustice is being done to the Indigenous community as well.
And it's the idea that people seem to act as if one group speaks for all Indigenous people, right?
I mean, there's a lot of varied Indigenous groups in the country, a lot of people with very different perspectives, different views on, you know, tradition, different views on the future.
And that doesn't really get expressed that much, right?
You see with energy sector projects.
When a group supports development or the oil industry, they just get attacked.
Oh, you're just tools of the oil companies, right?
But when a group says, oh, yeah, we're against all development.
Oh, the media is all over it.
Political parties are all over it.
So I think that's unfortunate as well.
We're really kind of stereotyping Indigenous people by letting just some people speak for all of them.
Yeah.
Well, very thoughtful comments.
Spencer, it's great to talk to you.
Thanks for taking the time today.
Your column again is called, why are we letting mobs decide which statues get to stand?
And let me close, let me say thank you to you, Spencer, but let me close by playing a clip of Jason Kenney standing up for these statues, including of John A. McDonald.
I have been very critical of Jason Kenney over the lockdown, but I accept your point, Spencer, that Jason Kenney has stood up against these iconoclasts, these statue smashers.
So let me end this segment by throwing to a clip of Jason Kenney saying that.
I'll say goodbye to you now, Spencer, but here's a clip of Jason Kenney.
I think Canada is worth celebrating.
I think Canada is a great historical achievement.
It is a country that people all around the world seek to join as new Canadians.
It is an imperfect country, but it is still a great country, just as John McDonald was an imperfect man, but was still a great leader.
If we want to get into canceling every figure in our history who took positions on issues at the time that we now judge harshly and rightly in historical retrospective.
But if that's the new standard, then I think almost the entire founding leadership of our country gets canceled.
Tommy Douglas, who recommended the use of eugenics to sterilize the weak, as he said.
If we talk about members of the famous five heroes of Canadian feminism and the fight for equality for women, some of them were advocates of eugenics that we would now regard as deplorable.
Canceling Our History00:02:45
So if we go full force into cancel culture, then we're canceling most, if not all, of our history.
Instead, I think we should learn from our history.
We should learn from our achievements, but also our failures.
Canada is doing that, just as we, as Prime Minister Harper, made the official apology for the terrible injustice of the Indian residential school system, just as the government of Canada provided over $3.5 billion in compensation to residential school survivors as a symbol of restitution,
and just as Canada has addressed other historic injustices, which we seek to reflect in the draft K-6, pardon me, social studies curriculum, in far more profound ways than ever before.
So I think it's much better that we learn from our history, including those periods of great injustice, without seeking to cancel our history.
think we need to know more about it.
Hey, welcome back on my show on Friday.
Akira writes, of course, China laughs at all decent humanity.
Well, of course, you're talking about them laughing at any commemoration of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
They're laughing because they want to trivialize it.
They're laughing because they want to profane it.
They want to turn it into a joke.
Osinader says, tank man will live forever, never forget.
Well, I think we have forgotten, as I noted on my noontime show today, Justin Trudeau made a D-Day statement yesterday, except for he didn't mention D-Day.
He didn't mention World War II.
He didn't mention the invasion of Normandy.
The word gender appeared.
The word pandemic and COVID-19 appeared.
And he talked about sexual misconduct about five times.
That was his message on D-Day.
He never actually said D-Day.
And my point is, if we can forget such an important day in our history, of course we're going to forget that important day in China's history too.
John writes, they ban and close certain churches in China, just like in Canada.
Yeah, literally today, Pastor James Coates lost his charter challenge to have his freedom of religion, and it was stamped by the authority of the state.
A judge said, no, we can violate your rights.
I'm sure there's judges in China that rubber stamp it too.
I think the differences between us and China are getting harder to enumerate every day.