David Menzies exposes Justin Trudeau’s fear of working-class dissent through GM’s 2022 suppression of protesters and media, including unpaid evictions of employees and threats against Blacklock’s reporter—evicted by armed police from the National Press Building. Parallels emerge with Twitter’s censorship of Hunter Biden’s laptop story in October 2020, orchestrated by Vijaya Gaddi ($17M in 2021) and Yoel Roth, who justified blocking it to protect Biden’s election, despite no hack evidence. Musk’s Twitter Files reveal systemic political bias, from shadow banning to enabling extremists while silencing conservatives, culminating in a broader war on free speech and transparency that implicates governments, corporations, and legacy media alike. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, we all know that the Justin Trudeau liberals hate the independent press, but get this, so does General Motors.
It's Tuesday, December 6, 2022.
I'm David Menzies, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you sensorism bug.
For what it's worth, folks, my initial experience with General Motors dates back to 1980.
I was still in high school at the time, and I decided that the acquisition of a boss car would perhaps marginally improve my dating chances.
So it was that I made the single most tragic financial decision of my entire life.
I sold an appreciating asset that would be my comic book collection, in order to purchase a depreciating asset.
That would be a used 1974 Chevy Camaro.
And in the Department of Insult to Injury, in just two years, the Camaro would be rendered a write-off.
What an investment, eh?
Especially given that the Chevy failed to clinch a date.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm blaming my lack of romantic success on an automobile.
Maybe I should have splurged for a set of chrome-colored mag wheels.
Oh, and P.S., had I held on to that comic book collection, I could now buy a new Ferrari off the lot today.
Loser.
My only other GM experience came via Lady Menzoid acquiring a Chevrolet Venture minivan in 2001 and a Chevrolet Uplander minivan in 2009.
Same van, different name.
If GM believed in truth in advertising, they should have called those vehicles the Chevrolet dump truck, better suited for hauling garbage rather than people.
Actually, a garbage hauler might be too kind.
Indeed, I think of that classic Klingon put-down of the Starship Enterprise in the episode, The Trouble with Triples.
Don't you think you should rephrase that?
You're right.
I should.
I didn't mean to say that the enterprise should be hauling garbage.
I meant to say that it should be hauled away as garbage.
Yeah, those GM minivans were cheap to acquire, all right, and the ownership experience was proof positive that the old adage of you get what you pay for is true.
Indeed, those Chevy minivans in no way resembled such superb minivan products as the Toyota Siena or the Honda Odyssey, which might explain why GM got out of the minivan business more than a decade ago while its Japanese competitors still sell these vehicles in impressive numbers.
So you may ask, why am I going down memory lane vis-a-vis my experiences with GM?
Well, it's because yesterday I had my absolute worst GM experience, and it had nothing to do with a GM product and everything to do with GM politics.
You see, Ace videographer Lincoln J and I ventured out to Ingersoll, Ontario, the site of GM's Cami factory, which is currently being retooled to make electric commercial vans.
Why GM Sent 200 Canadians Home00:04:02
By the way, we weren't crashing a party here because on Sunday evening, I was personally invited to this press conference, stated the invite, quote, GM officials will be joined by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and Ontario Minister Vic Fideli for an announcement, end quote.
Oh, joy, I thought, GM has actually officially invited me to an event involving the PM and the Premier, both of whom look upon rebel news staffers these days as being so many skunks to the garden party.
But the truth of the matter, and you won't see this reported in any legacy media outlet, folks, is I had already been tipped off by an insider regarding some shenanigans that would be taking place in Ingersoll that day,
which is to say this, the head honchos at the plant, which is still being retooled for EV production, told about 150 construction workers and some 50 programmers to stay home that day.
Why?
Well, that's the thing.
No reason was given.
Just that all of these tradespeople were suddenly deemed to be persona non-grata, at least for the Monday press conference event.
Don't you find that odd, folks?
And the workers, I'll tell you, they were mightily miffed.
Missing a day's work meant losing eight hours of regular salary plus two hours worth of overtime.
Canadians are hurting these days, given inflation and rising interest rates.
So why were they being given this unwanted day off?
Well, according to sources, the unspoken strategy was simply this.
Justin Trudeau is increasingly morphing into a control freak these days.
That's why his itinerary in terms of where and when he is going to be isn't typically announced until the very last minute.
That's because Justin is getting a little weary of this sort of reception.
Go, Trudeau, you're nothing but a communist pig.
That's what you are.
You're disgusting.
You should resign.
Disgusting.
Communists.
The 22nd, you fit it.
Go back to China.
Go back to China, you lover.
Great to see you here.
Great to see you.
Sonia!
And I know you're all electronic.
This is a moment to gather and to celebrate.
Being able to matter once again.
Gee, it looks like even the canine contingency despises Trudeau these days.
Jolly good for Fido, I say, who is once again proving that a dog is truly man's best friend.
Now, the crux of the matter regarding that one-day layoff of electricians and carpenters and assorted other real men and women building things with their hands was this.
Trudeau's handlers were terrified that Justin would be targeted, you know, with a middle finger, or someone might heckle him, or someone might unfurl one of those infamous F Trudeau flags.
Security Escort00:02:36
Oh, we can't have that, can we?
Justin is very sensitive, you know.
So, in order to protect Justin's uber-sensitive eyes and ears, GM management actually sent home more than 200 hardworking Canadians on that Monday merely on the suspicion that somebody might misbehave.
Oh, and they weren't the only ones sent home that day.
Because even though myself and Lincoln had invites from Aaron Strolovich, she, her, a GM senior communications manager, a not-so-funny thing happened en route to the GM Ingersoll plant.
By the time we got there, we were deemed to be persona non-grata and told to beat it.
Oh, by the way, here's a photo of Aaron Strollovich, she-her.
Do you think that anyone has ever mistaken Aaron Strolovich, she, her for a he-him or a Zeezer or a Temters, or a Vizvers or an E-M?
By the way, folks, I'm not making up this pronoun crepola.
I'm referencing this from some LGBTQIIAPP, etc. resource center.
Oh, death, where is thy sting?
Anyway, once we arrived on site, a lady with a clipboard, and forgive me, I don't know if this person was a she-her or not, tersely informed us that we weren't allowed to take part in the press event, even though we showed her the printed invitations sent to us from Ms. Strolovich, she-her.
Then along came another security person who told us to scram, or else, yeah, and you guessed it, we'd be facing trespassing charges from law enforcement.
We're not allowed access for you guys.
Oh, I think there's been a mistake, sir.
Aaron Strollovich last night.
That's our confirmation.
This is GM property.
Right, a GM product communications person invited us.
I'm just telling you this is trespassing, okay?
Even though I've been invited by a GM employee, how is that trespassing?
What the hell?
It seemed like Lincoln and I had devolved from invited guests into the Batabe brothers from a night at the Roxbury.
You know, those lovable losers who can never make it past the gatekeeper because they are never on the list.
Ladies, all right.
Blacklock's Eviction By Police00:14:40
See you next week.
My good hombre, remember us?
No.
Doug and Steve Butabbi?
Your brothers?
No.
Yes?
Man!
It works every time.
Yeah, I know.
Now, remember, you can't come in.
It's time to play a little softball.
Hey, good man.
How's it going tonight?
Good.
You still can't come in.
Well, that's not what a friend of mine told me.
Maybe you know him.
His name is Abraham.
You don't know.
What about his two friends?
George Washington and George Washington.
Let's not forget the other boy in the band, George Washington.
He's a little lonely.
Wants to join his buddies.
And look who else we got.
Roosevelt?
Roselabel?
Jefferson.
Great.
Yeah, that's pretty much how Lincoln and I felt, except unlike the Batabi brothers, we were on the list.
So it was that under threat of arrest, we decided to exit the parking lot, which is indeed private property.
That's because we know that Justin Trudeau has no problem with utilizing violence as the unnecessary invocation of the Emergencies Act has proven.
Indeed, almost exactly a year to this day, we found out that Justin's Royal Canadian Mounted Henchman, well, they don't take kindly to pesky independent media people who might be prone to asking impolite questions of Prime Minister Blackface McGroper.
Check out this video from last December outside the brickwork cider house in Toronto.
And keep in mind that Lincoln and I were on a public sidewalk and posed absolutely no threat to anyone.
What are you doing?
Get off me.
Hey, I can.
Hey, this is assault.
I'm on a side.
I'm on a sidewalk.
I am on a side.
What is this?
You cannot crush me.
No rush in order.
Hey!
Are you kidding?
Are you kidding?
I told you.
What is this?
You can't.
Am I under arrest?
Because otherwise you have no right.
Absolutely egregious.
And the biggest question of all is this.
Did Trudeau actually order his stooges to rough me up like that?
It's hard to believe that Justin's minions would spontaneously and collectively act like that, wouldn't you say?
I can never prove my hypothesis, of course, unless one of those mounties steps forward to do the right thing and confess to what really happened that night.
But alas, that would not be a smart financial move for that particular mountie now, would it?
Oh, speaking of being financially compromised, that brings us to the legacy press.
As we full know, the media watchdogs have now devolved into lapdogs.
And yesterday, they were A, welcomed into the GM plant for the press conference.
And B, did not raise a fuss about the independent media being barred.
And C, did not report that 200 plus tradespeople were sent home without pay.
Oh, and D, did not give one second worth of coverage to the people who assembled outside the Ingersoll plant to protest against Justin Trudeau.
Here, check it out.
Well, I actually work here and I lost my job over the mandate.
So this was a protest I wasn't going to miss.
Is this because you refused to reveal your vaccination status?
I was even a health and safety representative here and I was kicked out of the plant as well.
Wow, and was it suspended without pay or actual termination?
Okay, okay, then.
And is there my job back in June?
Oh, so you're back at the plant then?
Are you not worried they might, you know, be offended of you speaking to us?
Oh, no, if you don't have freedom, you don't have anything.
I have a little daughter at home and it means a lot to be here.
Yeah, nothing to see here, folks.
Oh, and by the way, so adverse is Trudeau to protesters that his motorcade actually took back routes to the GM plant and entered via a back entrance as opposed to the main entrance.
What a soy boy wimp.
Incidentally, the very same day we were getting the bums rush in Ingersoll, Blacklock's reporter published a very disturbing story regarding what recently happened to them.
Now, if you're not familiar with Blacklocks folks, you should get to know this superb independent media outlet.
Like Rebel News, Blacklocks doesn't take Trudeau bailout and bribe money.
Indeed, this outlet often blows the whistle on the mainstream vipers who gladly hurl themselves out to the Liberal Party of Canada.
But they are very thin-skinned, these legacy media types, you see, and they are prone to carrying out vendettas in order to serve their political puppet masters.
Check out this story entitled Blacklock's Eviction by Police.
Quote, Parliamentary press gallery executives, accompanied by armed police on Friday, evicted Blacklocks.
All questions were referred to a House of Commons employee.
Blacklock said the eviction, first of its kind in the history of the National Press Building, was clear reprisal over its continued protests against media subsidies.
Eviction followed gallery president Guillaume St. Pierre's threat to terminate Blacklock's membership.
The eviction letter stated Blacklock's managing editor Tom Korski was impolite, disturbs the journalists around him, and streams parliamentary committee hearings on his computer.
The complaints were made by three reporters, Emily Bergeron and Michelle Saba of Canadian Press and freelancer Helene Buzzetti, a former gallery president.
14 other reporters assigned desks in the National Press Building did not sign the complaint.
Failure to observe these prohibitions could result in further and potentially more serious sanctions, including further and potentially permanent prohibitions, wrote President St. Pierre, correspondent for the Journal de Montréal.
End quote.
Oh my goodness gracious me.
You mean Blacklock's employees were treated like criminals, perhaps even terrorists, because Mr. Korski is impolite and that he disturbs the journalists around him?
Well, off with his head then.
Oh, but wait, folks, there's more.
Quote, Blacklocks is the only press gallery member eligible for federal subsidies that neither solicits nor accepts government funding.
The eviction came one day after Blacklocks published access to information records detailing a private meeting between 35 unnamed publishers and the Canada Revenue Agency on distribution of $595 million in subsidies.
End quote.
Wow, hey, whatever happened to that old chestnut, folks, you know, the public has the right to know.
Oh, that media mantra is deader than disco when it comes to the lamestream press having its dirty laundry displayed in public.
Funny that.
Every outlet from Torstar to Global News would rather Canadians not know about their filthy lucra coming in via the PMO.
What a disgrace.
But Blacklocks is a lot like Rebel News in that it does not bend the knee, it does not get intimidated, it does not fly the white flag of surrender to it.
Quote, we will now see the press gallery in court, Blacklock's stakeholders said in a statement.
Our subsidized competitors met in secret, plotted punitive measures over petty grievances, and served an eviction notice accompanied by armed police.
Their conduct is outrageous, end quote.
This, folks, is indeed the sorry state of journalism in Justin Trudeau's Democratic People's Republic of Canada these days.
First, he bribes the mainstream media to reinvent themselves as so many trained SEALs and stenographers.
And for those unaccepting of the carrot, well, out comes the stick, figuratively and literally.
And just wait to see what the Canadian free speech biosphere looks like should the Liberals be successful with their various bills to censor the internet in the months ahead.
For our protection, of course.
Trudeau more and more resembles a dictator.
This great Dominion more and more resembles a banana republic.
Although we don't grow bananas here, do we?
So let's just call this nation a maple syrup republic, except it's far more sour than sweet.
Oh, incidentally, while Trudeau and Ford praise the Ingersoll plant for going all EV, how odd that this would seem to be yet another case of do as we say, not as we do.
Which is to say, did Blackface McGroper and Fat Bastard show up in electric vehicles themselves?
Are you kidding?
Range anxiety is for the ham and eggers out there, folks.
These esteemed leaders get around in Chevy Suburbans and Ford expeditions.
You know, V8 festooned supersized SUVs that aren't powered via dilithium crystals, but good old-fashioned and reliable fossil fuels.
Oh, and keep the engines running, Jeeves.
We wouldn't want Justin's precious arse to be greeted by cold leather seats once the press conference wraps.
Now, would we?
As for what was said in that press conference, you'll have to reference the mainstream media reports for all the self-congratulatory details, given that, as I said, we were banished from that event under threat of arrest, even though, as previously stated, we had been invited there.
But when it comes to GM choosing to honor an invitation or kowtowing to Justin Trudeau, well, it's really a no-brainer for the general to act unethically and immorally, wouldn't you say?
After all, should GM go bankrupt yet again and require yet another taxpayer-funded bailout, you really don't want to make an enemy out of your Ottawa-based sugar daddy, do you?
And for decades now, GM has not been run by rocket scientists.
Indeed, you go back to the 1960s and GM's North American market share for vehicles hovered around 50%.
That's staggering.
Imagine that.
One out of every two cars on the road was manufactured by the general.
And today, well, GM's market share is less than 16%.
And consider this.
The last time General Motors skidded into Chapter 11 was 2009.
According to the Harvard Business Review, the reasons were many, including GM makes cars people don't want.
GM is too slow to innovate because of its size.
GM is too bureaucratic and unable to adjust to changing markets.
GM's dealer network is too large.
GM sold off its formerly profitable financing business, GMAC.
Oh, and one more thing, GM had stopped making a profit since 2005.
Indeed, since 2005 to the first quarter of 2009, folks, GM had lost a staggering $90 billion US.
In the here and now, GM is gambling big time on electrification.
The company has stated that by 2035, which isn't really all that far away, 100% of its vehicles will be electric.
But what if this strategy does not pan out for a multitude of reasons?
What if GM again craps out on its business strategy?
Well, that's where government comes into play.
GM, as the saying goes, is too big to fail.
So if GM does go belly up in the years ahead, federal governments on both sides of the border will likely yet again bail out this bloated behemoth with your tax dollars.
All of which is to say that GM unprofessionally revoking its invitations to Lincoln and I and then threatening to have us arrested, that was a no-brainer for the company.
We're just a couple of schlubs that are part of the icky independent press.
But the Liberal Party of Canada, ooh, you don't want to offend those cats.
After all, in 2035, they might still be in office or return to office.
And if GM needs yet another bailout, it might be a really, really good thing to play nice with those politicians cutting the checks.
Elon's Hostile Takeover Mystery00:12:23
A few months back when Elon Musk began his hostile takeover of Twitter, many observers, myself included, found it somewhat baffling that the left was losing its collective mind over the proposed acquisition.
After all, the lion's share of social media platforms are owned by left-leaning Silicon Valley tech giants.
Why should they be so concerned that a single major platform would be veering right of center?
Well, last week we received an answer to that query.
That's when Elon Musk and journalist Matt Tebby released the first batch of emails detailing collusion between the Biden campaign and Twitter under its previous regime.
Indeed, it was revealed that former Twitter executive Vijaya Gaddi, who headed the company's legal policy and trust department, played a key role in the story suppression and that Twitter worked alongside the Biden campaign to censor content on the platform.
That is a bombshell for this is not a conspiracy theory, folks.
Rather, this is a bona fide conspiracy period.
And now this just in, Wikipedia is voting on the deletion of a page covering this topic because its editors have deemed it to be a nothing burger, with many claiming that the story isn't notable because mainstream media outlets did not provide it with significant coverage.
Wow, as they say in the news business, talk about burring the lead.
And with more on the ongoing story of Twitter is rebel news reporter Ian Miles Chong.
Welcome to the Ezra Event Show, Ian.
Hey, happy to be on here.
Fantastic.
Ian, so much to digest here.
But first of all, what were your thoughts about former Twitter executives colluding with the Biden campaign to bury that Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the first place?
Well, it doesn't come to me as a surprise given the predilection of these executives and the views that they hold.
I mean, they all live in San Francisco, and I think Elon Musk even said it best, that San Francisco is basically exporting its culture to the world, right?
Its narratives are being exported right now, whether it's social, like how they view society, how they view gender, for instance, and of course its politics as well.
And if anything, they would want to protect their golden goose, which is, of course, Joe Biden.
So to have a story that is humiliating to him, possibly damaging his chances at the election is something they would want to suppress.
And that is exactly what they did.
And it's fascinating, Ian, isn't it?
Because we go back to when that happened, Twitter actually deleted or de-platformed the Twitter account of the New York Post, no less, because they had the scoop on this story.
Meanwhile, they were still catering to accounts held by the Taliban, held by the Mullahs in Iran.
Ian, this is astonishing that a company based in the land of the First Amendment would go on such a journalistic jihad in the first place.
Absolutely.
And I think a lot of conservatives in the U.S. have argued that Twitters and Facebooks and all these other platforms should lose their Section 230 rights because they're acting as a publisher.
They're behaving like editors instead of being neutral social media platforms.
And I'm inclined to agree.
Now, however, I would, you know, given that Elon Musk has taken over, maybe Section 230 is good after all.
I think that we should be looking at all these other platforms, Meta and TikTok and YouTube, of course, which have similarly suppressed free speech and as well as the truth, just in general.
And, you know, it's so perversely ironic, isn't it, Ian, when we go back to when Elon Musk first set his sights on Twitter and people were freaking out and people at Twitter were freaking out.
But to me, I talk about being the author of your own misfortune.
In other words, if Twitter hadn't been so blatant in its censorship, if they hadn't been so obvious in deplatforming right-of-center views, this never would have aroused the curiosity of Elon Musk in the first place.
What say you, my friend?
That's absolutely correct.
I mean, you don't have to be a genius, you know, looking at Twitter and not realizing that the suppression only goes one way.
They talk about trust and safety, and yet the only people affected by their decisions, their moderating decisions, are people on the right or people on the center.
Whereas Antifa, for instance, which is a far-left militant organization, has been allowed to organize violent actions on Twitter itself and do so with impunity.
You know, again, it is just fascinating to me.
And it brings us to your most recent story on the rebel news site, Ian, which is about Wikipedia having a non-trivial left-wing bias.
Those are the words from Elon Musk himself.
What do you make of this business of Wikipedia thinking that this whole Hunter Biden laptop story is a nothing burger when I would argue it's the precise opposite?
Well, it's working side by side with the media.
This is not the first time that we've seen a kind of unspoken collusion between Wikipedia editors and their friends in the media, because I don't think they openly talk about this, but they certainly serve the same agenda, and that is what we're seeing right now.
They want to suppress this story as a so-called nothing burger because it damages their narrative.
So they will do anything in their power to ensure that the story doesn't gain any traction or gain any legs.
And they will claim that because the media is not covering it, therefore it's not a story.
And the media in turn can say the same thing.
They'll say, well, there's no Wikipedia page on it, so therefore it is not a notable story worth covering.
And they've done so numerous times.
They did the same thing with the lab leak theory a couple of years ago when that was suppressed, that was censored.
And so hopefully Elon Musk comes out with his next batch of Twitter files that will include the suppression of that story.
I'm inclined to, you know, I would love to see that, to see a bunch of people exposed, like maybe in the government or maybe with pharmaceutical companies.
Who knows?
And maybe even law enforcement agencies, Ian, from what we're hearing about the FBI's role in this, you know, the suppressing of the Hunter Biden story.
But, you know, here's the thing: Ian, Elon Musk has the fight of his life ahead of him, I think, with, you know, getting control of Twitter, warding off his enemies.
We know Elon Musk, he does not wave the white flag of surrender.
He does not bend the knee to wokeism, you name it.
But I'm wondering, does he have any allies in his corner?
Does he have any high-powered, big financial allies that are going to come to his side in this battle against big tech?
I would say so.
I mean, and even the people in big tech appear to, some of them appear to be on his side, but they're simply too afraid to speak out against the media, to speak out against the establishment.
I mean, very recently, we saw that Apple had pulled its advertising from Twitter and Amazon had done the same.
And the media was cheering it on.
They were like, oh, Twitter's dead because it's lost about $200 million a year in advertising.
And all Elon had to do was take a trip to Apple to talk to Tim, the CEO there, and he immediately resumed the advertising.
So I think that he does have allies.
They're just very silent about it.
So I'm not too concerned about it on that front because I think a lot of people believe in Elon's vision for a democratic future, one that allows for free speech.
And that future cannot happen if the establishment suppresses people and enacts tyranny on the majority of us because we deserve to know the truth and we deserve to be able to talk about it.
And I think a lot of people understand that the future that Elon wants cannot be realized unless there is democracy and freedom on the internet.
And, you know, when it comes to democracy and freedom on the internet, Ian, I mean, I look at the other fight that Elon Musk is having with Apple, and Apple had announced it was dropping its airdrop app for the demonstrators in China.
And I mean, there was much to demonstrate about the Uyghur Muslim minority.
There is a genocide going on right now.
There are forced labor camps.
There are people being physically sealed into their apartment units.
And yet, where is Apple when it comes to speaking out against that?
Or where is the NBA or Disney or Hollywood?
The silence is deafening, isn't it?
It's absolutely deafening.
I mean, look at the athletes who instruct everybody to bend their knee to Black Lives Matter, for instance.
LeBron James, for instance, he is a cheerleader for China.
And at the same time, he talks about social justice in the West, but he's not concerned about the social justice issues that are happening elsewhere because he's more than happy to take their money and money for him.
And a lot of people like him, people in positions of power, celebrities, they are more than happy to virtue signal, but that's all it is.
It's just virtue signaling.
They don't actually care about these issues.
They only go with what's popular.
Yeah, the hypocrisy.
turns my stomach in.
It really does.
One last question, my friend.
I'm going to ask you to look into your crystal ball here.
If you're to look down the road, say three, six months, a year from now, and I know this is a fast-moving story.
It's changing every day.
But where do you see Elon Musk and Twitter in the months to come?
I mean, does he emerge as a victor?
Is Twitter going to be a profit-spinning platform?
What do you see, my friend?
I believe so.
I think that he has a vision.
He has a plan.
This is a man who has some of the most lucrative companies on the planet.
We're talking Tesla.
He took a company that was basically nothing and turned it into a trillion dollar enterprise.
It's one of the most valuable companies on the market.
It is a leader when it comes to EV technology or even the future of automobile.
So I think that Twitter is going to be the future of social media.
He does have a plan for something called X, which is basically his idea of having a universal social media platform that incorporates YouTube style videos, TikTok-style shorts and so on, as well as long-form written content, which is something that is currently dominated, I guess, by Substack and Medium.
But to be able to monetize it and have it all on Twitter for content creators, for writers, for journalists, independent journalists like Matt Taibbi, for instance, and Barry Weiss, who also has access to the Twitter files, for them to be able to promote to their audience a whole bunch of content.
And of course, Glenn Greenwald, he's amazing, and he would have video content on Twitter.
So I do see Twitter being that medium, and he does have a plan for that.
And speaking of Twitter itself, I mean, just today, just a few minutes ago, Elon announced that he was cleaning house and he removed a certain individual who was responsible for the suppression of the Twitter files when that was happening.
So he is definitely taking action to clean house and to make Twitter in general just a better place.
Twitter's Future Plans00:03:14
Well, I hope you are right, Ian.
And I suspect you are.
I mean, like I said, this is a fast-moving story.
There's so many revelations to come, I'm sure, in the weeks and months ahead.
And I would say there are some very nervous people who haven't been outed yet in terms of their role in suppressing certain stories and, dare I say, going against the First Amendment of the United States.
Incredible piece.
Ian, thank you so much for your insight.
As always, my friend.
Thanks for having me on.
You got it.
And folks, that was Ian Miles Chung somewhere in Malaysia.
Keep it here.
more of the Ezra LeVant Show to come right after this.
Well, folks, tons of feedback regarding Ezra's monologue yesterday, and that would be about how Oxfordshire County in England has come up with a crackpot war on the car scheme that just absolutely baffles the mind.
Chapters 04 writes, it's an incredible story which has been barely reported on in the UK despite or perhaps because this is being a horrific abuse of power.
You know, you're absolutely right.
By the way, folks, the story in a nutshell is how Oxfordshire County is implementing traffic filters.
That's a fancy way of saying you can't drive on these particular streets at these particular times or you'll be fined.
They want people to walk, cycle, or take public transit.
Here's the thing, though.
What if I don't want to walk or don't want to cycle or don't want to take public transit?
What if I can't?
What if I'm picking up bags and bags of groceries and I need my car?
Oh, no, no, no.
You will do what the powers that be do.
Of course, they'll likely be getting around in their limousines.
What a disgrace.
Viscerally Truthful writes, traffic filter, Orwell warned us about the use of these euphemisms.
You know, you're absolutely right.
You know, if there's one person from history who I could sit down with folks and have dinner with, it would indeed be George Orwell.
For his, you know, future world of 1984 to become true with every passing month and year, I'm sure would even scare him.
And CHRCH writes, gee, it's almost as if the conspiracy cooks were right again.
You are watching the beginning of the climate lockdowns.
Yeah, you know what?
I don't even know if the climate crisis is part of this nonsense.
Just folks, do me a favor.
Please, please, please, none of you send that story or Ezra's monologue to Mayor John Torrey.
He's used the last two and a half years of the COVID pandemic to declare his own war on the car, ripping out car lanes for bicycle lanes.
We sure as hell don't want John Torrey to cotton on to this hair brain scheme.
Twitter Files: 2020's Shadow Ban Mystery00:08:15
Well, folks, that wraps up tonight's edition of the Ezra Event Show.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
The big boss man, he'll be back here tomorrow, Wednesday night.
In the meantime, stay safe and stay sane.
Journalist Matt Tybe released an explosive thread detailing Twitter's decision to censor the New York Post reporting on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, which revealed evidence of corruption at the highest levels of the government to the highest levels of the FBI and big tech.
Internal emails revealed that the Biden campaign in the DNC colluded with Twitter to censor both information and their political opponents as they were given a direct line of service to Twitter's team of censors.
The executive at Twitter who was named and playing a key role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story is none other than Twitter's top lawyer, Vijaya Gaddi, the former head of legal policy and trust who has a history of being accused of censoring conservative voices.
We're a platform that serves the world.
So we're a global 75% of the users of Twitter are outside of the United States.
So we don't apply laws of just one country when we're thinking about it.
We think about how do you have a global standard that can meet the threshold of as many countries as possible because we want all the people in the world to be able to participate in this conversation.
And also meet elections like the Indian election coming up as well.
Right.
And my understanding is you were also accused of being biased against conservatives in India recently.
There was a report on that.
As well as you held up a sign that said something offensive about the Brahmin.
Yeah.
So in that sense, even in other countries, you're accused of the same things that you're being accused of by American conservatives.
I think that the situations are very, very different.
And I don't think that the ideologies in play are the same at all.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration appointed Gaddy to be on the advisory committee of the Department of Homeland Security's new cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, otherwise known as the Disinformation Team, which was ultimately disbanded after public outcry.
Gaddy's role on Biden's disinformation team was to provide advice and recommendations to Homeland Security about how the government could better combat misinformation and disinformation, according to the New York Post.
During her time on the committee, she helped draft a report that had similar characteristics to George Orwell's Ministry of Truth, which demanded that the government have a greater role in censoring social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper-partisan media, talk, radio, and other online resources.
Gaddy has also been accused by Elon Musk of playing a critical role in Twitter's decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform.
Her role as Twitter's top censor reportedly made her $17 million in the year 2021.
So, what exactly did the Twitter files reveal?
Let's dig in.
Journalist Matt Tabey, who obtained exclusive access to Twitter's internal documents, writes: The Twitter files tell an incredible story from inside one of the world's largest and most influential social media platforms.
Twitter, in its conception, was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true, real-time global conversation possible for the first time.
In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.
As time progressed, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers.
Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
But slowly over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools.
Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well.
First a little, then more often, then constantly, Matt writes.
By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine.
One executive would write to another, more to review from the Biden team.
The reply would come back, handled.
Celebrities and unknown allies alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party.
Both parties had access to these tools.
For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.
However, this system wasn't balanced.
It was based on contracts.
And because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left, to Democrats than the right.
Which brings us to the Twitter files, part one: How and why Twitter blocked the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Matt writes: On October 14th, 2020, the New York Post published Biden's Secret Emails, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop.
Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress this story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be unsafe.
They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool reserved for extreme cases like child pornography.
White House spokeswoman Kaylee McInanney was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Michael Hahn.
This led to Twitter's public policy executive Caroline Strom to find out the reasoning behind why the story was censored.
Several employees noted that there was tension between the communications and policy teams, who had little or less control over moderation, and the safety trust and legal teams.
Strom was told that the laptop story had been removed for a violation of the company's quote hacked materials policy.
The decision was made at the highest level of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with the former head of legal policy and trust, Vehea Gaddy, playing a key role.
One former employee told Taby that hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn't going to hold, but no one had the guts to reverse it.
The confusion was evident in a lengthy exchange, which included Gaddy and former trust and safety chief Yoel Roth.
Communications official Trenton Kennedy writes, I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this story unsafe.
Y'all Roth writes, this is an emerging situation where facts remain unclear.
Given the severe risks and lessons of 2016, we're erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.
Roth's remarks about 2016 is in reference to the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, which was released close to the 2016 presidential election.
Like how the New York Post reporting was released close to the 2020 presidential election, Roth didn't want the report to ruin Joe Biden's chance of becoming president.
The former vice president of global communications, Brandon Borman, asks, can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?
To which former deputy general counsel Jim Baker advised that caution is warranted.
Tybee writes that the problem with the hacked materials ruling, several sources said, was that this normally required an official law enforcement finding of a hack, but such a finding never appears throughout what one executive describes as a whirlwind 24-hour company-wide mesk.
Musk says that the idea behind Twitter files is to come clean on everything that has happened in the past in order to build public trust for the future.
Taby concludes that there is more to be exposed, which will include answers to questions about issues like shadow banning, boosting follower accounts, the fate of various individual accounts, and more.