Ezra Levant examines Elon Musk’s $2.89B Twitter stake (April 4) and its potential to counter censorship, questioning whether the platform’s shift from free speech—highlighted by Jack Dorsey’s 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story suspension—can be reversed amid woke corporate culture. Musk’s passive move and parallels like Justin Trudeau’s proposed Canadian "blocking orders" raise doubts about tech’s ability to resist politicized moderation, while Levant’s case of security guard Daniel Jones—targeted by raids and gun license suspensions after online backlash—underscores systemic weaponization of law enforcement against free speech defenders. The episode suggests Musk’s influence may not be enough to dismantle entrenched censorship without broader resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't say those words very often, but the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter, which is actually making him the largest shareholder of that company.
And this is after a series of tweets talking about freedom of speech.
Is Elon Musk going to bring freedom of speech to Twitter?
It looks that way.
I'll take you through the good news, and we'll talk about it with our friend Alan Bakari of Breitbart.com, who follows these tech stories very closely.
That's ahead, but first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, is the world's richest man going to save the internet from censorship?
It's April 4th, 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 don'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.
Boy, this was exciting news to wake up to this morning.
Here it is reported on Bloomberg.
Elon Musk takes 9.2% stake in Twitter after hinting at shake-up.
Tesla, CEO, has regularly questioned Silicon Valley Giants.
Twitter shares post biggest intraday surge since IPO in 2013.
Let me read a little bit from the story because I think it's a happy story.
What do you think?
Elon Musk took a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc. to become the platform's biggest shareholder.
A week after hinting he might shake up the social media industry.
Twitter shares surged as much as 27% after Musk's purchase was revealed Monday in a regulatory filing.
The gain marked the stock's biggest intraday increase since its first day of trading following the company's 2013 initial public offering.
The stake is worth about $2.89 billion based on Friday's market close.
Musk, 50, polled his more than 80 million followers on Twitter last month, asking them whether the company adheres to the principles of free speech.
After more than 70% said no, he asked whether a new platform was needed and said he was giving serious thought to starting his own.
Well, he's got enough dough either way, but I think there are enough startup competitors to Twitter already.
Getter, Gab, Parlor, Trump's own truth social.
There's a ton of them, but they all lack one thing that Twitter has, the market leader, the place where everyone already is.
A lot of those are, you know, other sites are dedicated to catering to conservatives, which I appreciate because conservatives have been censored.
We have been here.
Deplatform, but that's not the same as the public square then, where everyone goes in the middle of town, right?
That's a ghetto, a private club.
What I like about being on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and the others is that people who don't agree with me, they can interact with me and vice versa.
How do you ever convert anyone to your point of view?
How do you ever have a debate?
How do you ever an interesting discussion?
How do you ever make a new friend if you're only ever talking to your existing friends or political fellow travelers?
Plus, I think it's fun bantering and heckling some liberals, including prime ministers and presidents.
Fun to meet new people.
And by the way, you don't actually have to hate every liberal you meet.
You know, I don't know if I've told you this before, but I have one liberal friend.
I'm not going to say his name to protect him, not to protect him from conservatives who would be mean from him.
I don't think they would be, but to protect him from liberals who would be mean to him for being my friend.
Twitter calls itself the public square.
They use that phrase.
And it's true that that might change one day, but for now, it is the place, especially for public politics.
And now Elon Musk is the biggest owner of it.
Not enough to commandeer the ship just yet, not yet, but this could just be the first step.
I'm not sure what the press reports mean by saying it's a passive stake.
When I read the SEC filings, there was nothing really that said passive about it.
Those are voting shares.
Elon Musk has been thinking about Twitter for a while, I should tell you.
He has more than 80 million followers online himself.
He's one of its biggest users.
I think he obviously uses it to talk about his businesses, including Tesla and the SpaceX rocket ship company, but he also uses it for fun, almost in a silly way.
In fact, I would say he's quite silly.
Elon Musk's Influence00:08:24
He tweets out jokes or visual jokes in the form of memes, as the kids say.
I think Elon Musk is really entertaining.
Not as combative as Trump, but just as much fun.
I think it's a reason why he's liked by so many people.
Look at this tweet, by the way.
This is from Musk a few months back.
This is in December when Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, left, and someone named Parag Agarwal took over from Jack Dorsey.
That is a Stalinist picture.
Obviously replacing faces with Agarwal and with Jack Dorsey, disappearing a political rival by removing him from an old photograph.
They did that a lot in the Soviet Union long before Photoshop.
They would just cut out persona non grata from photos.
Here's what Musk was worried about.
The new boss of Twitter is a censor.
And he really doesn't care who knows.
I've told you this before.
Here's a New York Post story summing it up.
In a 2018 interview, Agarwal said Twitter should focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.
Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard, he went on.
And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content, how we direct people's attention.
Just to translate it in plain English, what he means is you can have all the free speech you like on Twitter, but Twitter will decide whether anyone hears you.
If anyone's allowed to see what you have to say, you'll be muffled.
You'll think you're talking to the world, but you're just talking and no one else is hearing you.
Twitter will block that.
Whereas the new favored people, that is, think-alike leftists, will have their voices boosted.
Recommended.
Boosted is a phrase they use, so everyone gets the right to speak, but Twitter will decide who is heard.
It's about the least free thing you could ever say or do.
Anyways, that's not how Twitter always used to be.
They used to say they were, quote, the free speech wing of the Free Speech Party.
Here's the former Twitter executive who is sometimes quoted as having said that way back in 2012.
Tony Wang is his name, but he's no longer with Twitter.
But here's what he had to say in October of 2020 when Twitter had silenced the New York Post, one of the most venerable newspapers in America, suspending their account, stopping people from reading their scoop about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Here's what Tony Wang said back then about the free speech quote attributed to him, Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party.
Tony Wang said, I don't think this is embraced by current execs like Vijaya, but that's understandable.
Companies, like people, evolve and learn.
Companies are not perfect, and they certainly are not born perfect.
It's important to allow companies to adapt as the world around them changes.
So Wang said it was important to give free speech to dissidents trying to speak truth to power in certain countries.
He chose places where I think most people would agree that's really necessary.
Here's what he said: not to say that the 2011 version of Twitter was less responsible, not at all.
Twitter was being used by activists in places like Tunisia, Egypt, and Iran.
It was central to our responsibility to provide dissidents with a voice.
All right, I agree with that.
But how about speaking truth to power in other countries with powerful governments like Canada, the United States?
I like challenging the Ayatollahs, but could I also please challenge, I don't know, Pfizer or no?
Tony Wang is gone, and he himself says the new executives don't care about freedom of speech.
Jack Dorsey's Twitter leader, he's gone to here's Dorsey a few months back talking to Congress about his decision to suspend that New York Post story just on the eve of the election.
He was being asked questions by a Republican congressman here named Steve Scalise.
Here, just watch for a minute.
First of all, do you recognize that there is this real concern that there's an anti-conservative bias on Twitter's behalf?
And would you recognize that this has to stop if this is going to be Twitter is going to be viewed by both sides as a place where everybody's going to get a fair treatment?
We made a total mistake with the New York Post.
We corrected that within 24 hours.
It was not to do with the content.
It was to do with a hacked materials policy.
We had an incorrect interpretation.
We don't write policy according to any particular political leaning.
If we find any of it, we route it out.
So we're going to wash it.
We will make mistakes, and our goal is to correct them as quickly as possible.
And in that case, we did.
So Dorsey claims that the New York Post was suspended, not because it was embarrassing Biden, but because they were using hacked materials.
But the laptop was not hacked.
It wasn't hacked at all.
It was lawfully obtained.
And the censoring in the New York Post absolutely skewed the election.
I saw this tweet by Dorsey just this weekend.
He says, the days of Usenet, IRC, the web, even email with pretty good privacy were amazing.
Centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet.
I realize I'm partially to blame and regret it.
Yeah.
So he's talking about really early internet stuff back then.
I remember those days.
I appreciate his contrition, if that's what that is.
And what little he said to Steve Scalise.
At least he's realized what he's done, although he hasn't made amends in any way.
Who knows?
Maybe he sold his shares to Elon Musk.
And Jack Dorsey's successors are always worse.
Maybe Elon Musk can change that.
I don't know.
The thing is, it's not just the corporate culture of the tech companies.
The entire society we live in is about censorship now.
Here's Vox, the flagship liberal website in the U.S. Look at what, I mean, just this is so atrocious.
Kicking people off social media isn't about free speech.
The debate over deplatforming Trump has overshadowed how effective social media bans are at fighting extremism.
Yeah, sorry, mate, by definition, the president of the United States is non-extreme or marginal or fringe.
And anyone who would say otherwise is truly using the communist way of thinking, destroy any political opponent in any way, deplatform them, erase them.
Here's what Jack Dorsey said about that, actually.
He said, I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban Donald Trump from Twitter or how we got here.
After a clear warning we'd take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety, both on and off Twitter.
Was this correct?
Yeah, what a lie.
Trump was a threat to physical safety.
Yeah, right.
While Communist China, Putin's Russia, Iran's Ayatollah's are all on Twitter with impunity.
What a lie.
Jack Dorsey's deep thoughts are, well, they're more than nothing, but not much more.
It's the whole culture now.
So much of that freedom is lost.
It's uncertain how to win it back.
I mean, so many taboos are broken.
If you can deplatform a sitting president, you can deplatform anyone.
Get ready for what they're going to do to try and save the Democrats this November in the States.
And that's nothing compared to what they'll do in 2024 when the presidency is up for grabs.
You can see what they'll soon do in the United States by looking to see what Justin Trudeau is doing up here in Canada.
His censorship plans, regulating social media, appointed boards of censors, giving government the power to destroy.
Remember this from Stephen Gilbo, who drafted the censorship bills now being debated.
He said it's to stop criticism of politicians.
We've seen too many examples of public officials retreating from public service due to the hateful online content targeted towards themselves or even their families.
Big White Pill00:14:20
And if you don't stop, they'll, quote, drop a bomb on you.
Envision having blocking orders.
I mean, that's that.
Maybe.
It's not, you know, it would likely be a last resolve nuclear bomb in a toolbox of mechanism for regulators.
Yeah, and back then they hadn't even discovered the thrill of seizing their opponents' bank accounts either.
It's dark times, but Elon Musk's surprise move is a little, little ray of hope.
Well, here's hope, at least.
Stay with us for more on this with Alan Bukhari.
Last week, my spider senses started tingling.
I wasn't alone.
Elon Musk, the world's richest man and a bit of an iconoclast, a bit of a dissident, and someone who says that free speech is very important.
Actually, I believe him when he says he feels that way.
Started musing about Twitter, the social media company that really is the host of so much public debate.
I mean, Facebook is great and it's huge, but Twitter really is where a lot of political discourse happens.
And it's one of those rare platforms where both liberals and conservatives go really to fight, although conservatives more and more have been restricted.
Of course, Twitter, having a very fundamental role in the last U.S. presidential election, deciding at the late hour to block and ban discussions of Hunter Biden's laptop, even though the New York Post published them.
Huge censorship that likely swayed that election.
Anyways, Elon Musk started doing interesting things.
He asked his viewers, his readers, his followers, to vote in a poll.
Is Twitter free enough?
Should he get involved?
He started dropping hints.
And then bam, today it's announced that Elon Musk has acquired 9.2% of the shares of the company.
An enormous stake and perhaps a signal of things to come.
Joining us now via Skype from Austin, Texas is our friend Al Bakari, senior tech writer for Breitbart News.
Great to see you again, Alam.
It's been too long.
Normally it's just bad news after bad news, more censorship, more deplatforming.
But the startling news that Elon Musk is now the big dog at Twitter is very encouraging.
What do you think?
It's certainly a big, a big white pill.
You know, the one criticism I've heard of Elon Musk is that, you know, he signals to conservatives a lot, but he doesn't really put his money where his mouth is.
I don't think he can really be accused of that now, unless, of course, he sells his stock.
You know, the value has gone up by, I think, over 30% just today.
So we'll see what happens with that.
The other thing to point out is that he bought a passive stake.
So what he bought does not give him the ability to directly influence the company, take a day-to-day role just yet.
But analysts are saying this is sort of just, you know, getting the foot in the door.
Down the road, he could buy an even bigger stake that gives him more sway over the company or even buy out Twitter altogether.
You know, Elon Musk is worth over $250 billion.
So it's well within his means to buy the entire platform.
And that's exactly what conservatives were urging him to do when he came out with that comment a couple of weeks ago.
It's incredible.
I mean, I see that Jack Dorsey, the founder and really the spiritual leader in many ways of Twitter, just the other day expressed regret that the glory days of the free internet are no longer around.
And he says he takes some blame for that.
The first generation of tech people always claim they're for freedom.
I mean, the Google guys, they actually had the motto, don't be evil.
And then they made the decision to remove that as their motto.
I think they had enough self-awareness to realize they couldn't say that anymore.
The success of generations are always worse.
I think the corporate culture of these places is absolutely colonized by woke leftists who really don't know much on the tech side, but they know a lot on the woke politics side.
I mean, these early guys were computer engineers, math guys, computer guys, you know, nerdy guys.
But they've been all pushed aside by a wave of people who couldn't program to save their lives.
But boy, do they know about microaggressions?
To me, that's probably a quarter of the staff at Twitter, YouTube, Google, just a quarter of the people are just the censors in the schools these days.
I don't know what the math is, but they really have been transformed, haven't they?
I think that's absolutely true.
And I've always said, you know, it's very easy to direct all your hate towards the most public figure at the company, which is the CEO in Twitter.
That was Jack Dorsey.
Facebook, the owners, Mark Zuckerberg.
But in my opinion, these guys are nowhere near the worst people at the company.
Jack Dorsey, I've heard from people who work for Twitter that Jack Dorsey was nowhere near the worst guy at the company.
He was actually holding back some of the crazies at the trust and safety department, which is where all the censors congregate inside these tech companies.
And of course, when he was replaced by Parag Agrawal, there was an immediate purge of conservatives.
You're right.
I described this in my book, Deleted, about how Silicon Valley went from these ideals of decentralization, of just allowing people to say what they want and giving people a platform rather than taking an editorial role to these very, very censored platforms that they've now become.
It's a complete inversion of the ideals that the internet was founded on.
And actually, this was something that Google admitted.
I obtained a document from Inside Google in 2018 published on Breitbart News called The Good Censor, in which they admit that the Internet was founded on principles of free speech, but that this was all changing after 2016 in response to political events.
So this is something that Google, arguably the most powerful tech company in the world, admitted in its own research.
So it's absolutely exactly as you described what's happened to Silicon Valley over the past decade or so.
Yeah.
You know, Elon Musk has certainly got his foot in the door, and you're right.
He has enough wealth to take things over.
But the thing is, let's say he was even more free speechy than Jack Dorsey.
I don't know how many people work for Twitter.
I guess I could look it up.
It's thousands of people.
And you can be the boss, but frankly, my observation of these companies is that there's this internal culture.
If you were to say we're for free speech now, it would either be ignored or subverted or sabotaged.
Who knows?
Maybe a lot of people would quit.
I just, I sometimes wonder if these companies are even under the control of the CEO.
So if there was a directive, whether from the board of directors or if there was a resolution passed at the Twitter annual shareholders meeting to re-embrace free speech, okay, that looks nice on paper, but you've got a thousand little, you know, critters burrowed into Twitter, and they're there on a mission.
They're not there just as a job.
They see it as a mission, and they're not going to give it up.
I think that there's going to have to be a purge or there's going to be sabotage.
I think that's likely, but I think it's a lot more possible to do these kinds of employee turnovers at private companies compared to, say, Washington, D.C. You know, Trump struggled with this as well.
He'd put out an order and then the bureaucracy would just ignore it or subvert it.
But it's a lot harder to fire a bureaucrat than it is to fire an employee of a private company.
And we've seen examples of this where I think it was Coinbase.
The Coinbase CEO, he said he no longer wanted politics to be discussed in the workplace.
And he gave employees who disagreed a very generous deal to leave the company if they disagreed.
And a lot of them did.
So it's been done before.
I think it can be done again.
Another thing to remember is that while the social justice warriors, if you will, have a lot of influence inside these companies because they're the most vocal minority and they have the media on their side, there are lots of other employees who simply just don't agree with the craziness but keep their heads down because they don't want to be targeted.
I wouldn't underestimate how big that cohort is.
They may not all be conservatives, but a lot of them think the social justice nonsense in Silicon Valley has gone far too far.
Well, I tell you, you used the word white pill.
I mean, from the movie The Matrix, the red pill is to have the scales from your eyes and to be, you know, to lose your Garden of Eden in naivete.
And the blue pill is, no, I want to go back to that, you know, lack of knowledge.
It's like the red pill is when you eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you see how things really are.
It's a pessimistic view, but it's a realistic view.
The kids say black pill is that you're just, you think there's no hope.
You've been too disillusioned.
But white pill is the phrase for, you know, renewed hope.
And you used that phrase when we just started our conversation.
I have to say, this is the best news I've seen in a long time.
And Rumble, the YouTube competitor, the video platform that's now getting into the servers business, Peter Thiel has a stake in that.
So you've got Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, really the two most freedom-loving guys in Silicon Valley.
They're both putting their money with their mouth is.
I'm excited about it.
I mean, I think that still we're losing every day.
It's maybe just today we're losing a little less slowly.
Yes.
And, you know, both PayPal founders.
I think there's a lot of positive things happening in Silicon Valley outside of the big tech companies.
Again, we have to see what happens.
Maybe Elon Musk simply wanted to boost the price of Twitter and then sell his stake.
Who knows?
He doesn't really need more money.
But we've got to wait and see to see if he'll buy more shares and obtain the influence he needs inside the company to actually change things.
He hasn't done that quite yet because it's a passive stake, but it's a big move.
And, you know, he certainly has, as he said, put his money where his mouth is.
You know, he's a really avid Twitter user.
I mean, I enjoy following him.
I feel like I learned things.
I think he's really got a quirky sense of humor.
I don't know if that's him or if he is a writer.
I have to think it's him because in interviews, he's got that sort of mischievous grin and he says and does things that are a little quirky.
I think that's his own style.
I don't think, I think, like Trump, he writes his own tweets, except for I don't think they'll be able to cancel him.
He's not, I mean, there's a method to his madness.
I think that we're into for exciting times.
What do you think?
What's the reaction been so far?
Has Washington, D.C. condemned this or something?
I'm not sure they know how to take it at the moment.
I think they're also going to see where this goes.
But yeah, as you said, there could be exciting things down the road if Elon Musk increases his shares.
You know, I know that Musk, even though you might think he would be in league with Joe Biden and the Democrats, because he's really a green energy pioneer, he's repeatedly said he himself did not ask for the subsidies.
That was his competitors, GM, et cetera.
And he had the courage to say, well, the way to solve this problem in Ukraine and Russia is to produce more oil in America.
Like he really, for a guy who you would think, all right, you're a leading green tech guy, you're going to be a Democrat, he really has that independent streak.
I don't know.
I'm really excited about this.
But let me just close with a slightly more pessimistic note.
Twitter is where guys like you and me hang out.
It's the political discourse.
It's the newspaper people tweeting their own commentator.
But it is nowhere near the importance of, say, a Google, the world's largest search engine, or even YouTube, the world's largest search engine for videos.
This is like taking over a niche.
Like it really is a niche market for political discourse.
It's far less important than infrastructure things like Google or YouTube.
Am I right?
I think that's accurate.
And Facebook as well.
Facebook is absolutely huge for news in particular and political news, which is why they've been relentlessly targeted by the left that wants to control that information flow.
So yeah.
But let's not underestimate Twitter.
You know, Trump was an avid Twitter user.
He used Twitter to, I think, maximum effect politically just to get around the media and get his message out.
So it's still a very, very important platform.
If we can just have one of those big platforms that's ready to free speech, that in my view would be a game changer, even if it's not on the level of Google or Facebook.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I'm hopeful.
Thank you for your encouraging reports.
Your book, again, deleted.
Tell us just in one more minute about that, because you were prescient on a lot of things.
Give us one more minute on deleted, which you published in the run-up to the last presidential election.
Yeah, full title, Deleted Big Tech's Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.
So you can kind of figure out what it's about.
Relied on sources from inside Silicon Valley to tell that story of how the big tech companies underwent that massive sea change after 2016, completely altered their platform simply to overwhelmingly just influence the next election.
And you'll see that full story laid out there, but in Portugal, that is kind of what happened in 2020.
Hopefully people can use that book as the guide to stop it happening again.
Deleted Tech's Battle00:02:09
Yeah.
There you have it.
Alan Bokari, Senior Tech Boss over at Breitbart.com.
Hope to see you again soon.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right.
Cheers.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Someone named Rand says, I've been following Alex Epstein for years, common sense and tons of facts, backed by detailed research about energy reality.
He is a beacon of sanity in the climate discussion.
Trudeau or any of his minions should debate Mr. Epstein.
That would be entertaining.
You know, I've known Alex for, I don't know, at least 10 years.
And what I like about him is that he doesn't concede the ethics of the morality of energy to the left.
You know, a mistake that too many conservatives make is saying, yeah, it's bad, but I mean, it's almost like a self-loathing tobacco executive saying, well, fine, we have a bad product, but will you let us sell it to adults or will you let us sell it with plain packaging?
They're sort of bargaining with you.
They acknowledge like some, I'm saying, you know, a self-hating person.
A lot of woke oil companies and politicians on the right are, well, fine.
Energy is bad, but please can we have some?
Epstein takes a different point of view.
He's saying it's not bad.
It's positively good.
And energy and cheap, affordable, reliable energy is what has lifted us out of poverty and misery.
So I love that approach.
It doesn't grant the moral high ground to the other side.
It takes it away from them.
So I think he's good.
I got a little mug that says I love fossil fuels, by the way.
RMXC says it's earned its name, the Washington Compost.
Yeah, they certainly don't like alternative voices like Alex Epstein.
Jim Moore says, referring to radical trans activism, he says, I cannot understand the overreach to defend these immoral actions to promote what amounts to 1% or less of the total population.
Police Raid and Firearms00:09:34
Yeah, well, you know, it's like our discussion with James Lindsay the other day.
If you look at it through the Marxist lens, it doesn't matter who the bullet in the gun is.
If the gun is communism, I mean, Karl Marx used economic Marxism, the, you know, the working class versus the bosses.
But Marxist race Marxism divides people on race, gender Marxism, and trans Marxism.
If you see it as a way to weaponize people, destroy the establishment, then the critical theory template makes sense.
I think it is a shock, a shocking attack.
Sure, it's on sexual norms, but it's on the establishment, the society itself.
And it won't be the last thing.
It absolutely won't be the last thing.
We'll see what more is to come.
That's our show for the day.
It's great to be back in the chair here.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubble World Headquarters, good night.
Keep fighting for freedom.
And let me leave you with this great video of day of our friend Avi Yamini down under talking to his security guard.
You know, Avi is one of our best guys.
He's two years a row now voted our viewers' choice report.
He's just great, top voter, according to our top reporter, according to our viewers.
We give him a bodyguard because he's pushed around by Antifa or any thug.
The bodyguard's got his back.
But sometimes the cops and sometimes others go after the bodyguard to try and get to Avi because they know we'll defend Avi.
We have very firmly.
So they go after Avi's bodyguard, but we've got his back the same way he's got Avi's back.
Enough talk from here.
I'll leave you with this video.
I'll see you there.
Daniel, thank you for joining me again today.
It's been a while since we've caught up and a lot has happened that the viewers don't even know about.
Those that have supported you at stanwooddaniel.com.
There is a whole part of the story since that infamous day where you stood up and protected me from violent assailants.
You did your job.
This is what's going to say that's a good thing to do.
Look at you.
You're going to pick on the girl.
You're going to pick on her.
You can't pick whoever I want, you fucking piece of shit.
Look at me.
Does anyone want to talk to you at all?
Does anyone want to talk about the virus?
The virus.
Can you tell us what happened after that incident?
After that incident, there was a lot of online chatter going on.
Certain prolific troll who had been encouraging followers with my name, my security number and the number of LRD to give them a call, make mass complaints, frivolous, vexatious complaints.
And from there, I was called by police.
I was told that they weren't really pressing charges.
Asked me to come in for an interview and I declined the interview and I thought that was the end of everything.
But things turned a little bit weird at some point because it became very bizarre when you hadn't heard anything from police, but Lance was on there online saying that your house had been raided and that your firearms had been confiscated.
It turns out, like you, Lance was right once again.
And you've now been raided and had your gun license suspended.
I saw that pop up online and he had mentioned, which I thought was funny because nothing had happened.
I'd had no word.
He'd mentioned my house had been raided, which there was no reasonable cause for police to ever enter the property anyway.
But he was boasting about how my firearms, I'd been raided, my firearms had been taken, which at the time of the boasting simply wasn't the case.
Now, you've got to ask yourself, how do I know that Daniel Jones has been raided and had his gun license suspended?
How do I know that?
He hasn't posted about it.
It wasn't in the media.
How do I know?
How do I know that?
Because I'm Australia's most prolific snitch.
There was no way anyone knew about what was to come.
Police hadn't even contacted you, so you didn't know about it.
But Lance Simon was online boasting about how your house had been raided and your guns had been confiscated before police even reached out.
Correct.
That's exactly what happened, yeah.
And then not long after that, I actually did receive the letter from police notifying of a suspension of my firearms licence.
What'd you do?
I spoke to police and because I was a bit bemused by it.
I didn't know why it was happening.
That's where I was told by police I had to have the papers served in person.
When I went to the police station, they were saying my firearms were an exhibit, that I had to relinquish them to the police station.
I couldn't get them stored at a registered firearms dealer.
So I asked the police if I was being charged.
They said no, so I willfully disobeyed that request and took everything to a registered firearms dealer anyway.
And right after having your guns taken away, you soon after received also a notification that your security licence was under review.
Is that right?
Correct, correct.
Yeah, I got a please explain from LRD in response to the incident at, where is it, out the front of Parliament House by the cafe there.
Straight away we got you the best lawyer who specialises in this field.
Tell us what's happened since then.
Well since then, and I'd like to thank that lawyer.
He is the best and he did an amazing job.
And since then, he did get the firearms license reinstated with no reason.
The plastic was just returned in the mail with a letter basically saying you've got it back, that's it.
After months of communicating with LRD, they produced no evidence for their claims and eventually a letter was sent just saying that all charges or investigation had been dropped and the licence was clear.
Which is fantastic news because I remember when this all went down, I promised you one thing is Rebel News will have your back no matter what.
I told you our supporters, if they hear what's happening, you know, the targeted campaign to try get you really to get at me, the people will support you no matter what.
And we haven't mentioned it till now.
We've let it roll so it could play out.
It's been an amazing outcome and we have used, thankfully to the supporters at standwithdaniel.com.
We've, you know, we've been raising money for your Supreme Court action that's still going on.
But we use those funds to get you the best lawyer and we're purposely not mentioning his name, not to turn him into a target because we've got him in our back pocket ready for each and every time.
Now, two parts.
Obviously that campaign was illegitimate.
Are you doing anything about going after those who tried unlawfully to create that and to have you cancelled like that?
I'm certainly talking with lawyers about the options on the table and what we can do about that insofar as what we can pursue and what we can do.
I think it is important that we pursue each and every person who is behind that campaign and we're going to make sure we do do whatever we can to hold them accountable.
We're going to use the best lawyers each and every time.
That's what we've learnt at Rebel News.
Use the best lawyers and you get the best outcome.
The outcome is pretty good now.
We do have your other matter still in front of the Supreme Court, Victoria Police, the arrests and we encourage people to keep helping us at standwithdaniel.com to ensure that we can take that all the way to the end.
Plus, follow this through.
What would you like to say to the people at home watching this who really didn't even know that they were helping you with all this but have managed to regain your license, regain your firearms?
I'm just very humbled by it.
I'd like to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart because it's just humbling and amazing that people would support me in what's happened.
Well people love you, you know, after what happened that day and the professionalism you showed that day and you know you're a tough guy I know.
We've been in sticky situations but people got to see it firsthand and you became a hero at the rallies that I felt like I stopped I wanted to stop bringing you because you were getting all the attention.
Yeah I had to put a no selfies ban on while at work.
Look at what they've got.
Capture it.
That's fine.
Capture it.
This is police brutality in Melbourne mate.
That's uncallful.
He's a security guard working on the job.
Did you do that to Channel 9?
Did you do that to Channel 7?
Did you do that to SPS and ABC?
Did you remember trying to do that?
And he's not an offender.
He's not an offender.
He's my security guard.
Well before we go there is one other piece of amazing news because you were fined that day you were arrested and we fought that as well and what's the outcome of that now?
That was dropped.
That was all cleared, all dropped.
That's gone.
Withdrawn.
Correct.
We're just winning with you, Daniel, and we're going to keep winning with you because we know that as long as we fight for you, that means you're going to fight for me and you're going to always be there by my side.
And I feel safe and protected when you have my back.
Thank you so much, brother, for everything.
Thank you.
It's an absolute pleasure to know that everybody at home and our team, we will leap to your defence every time in the exact same way you've leapt to my defence several times already over the years.
So thank you, everyone at home that has helped us at standwithdaniel.com.