Ezra Levant and Gavin McInnes critique modern censorship, with McInnes—founder of Vice, Rebel News, and Censored.tv—calling it a "Thunderdome" for right-leaning voices like charter school supporters or climate skeptics. Levant highlights YouTube’s permanent demonetization bans (e.g., Alex Jones) while Musk’s $44B Twitter buy offers cautious optimism, though Musk’s refusal to reinstate Jones and Tesla’s China ties temper expectations. McInnes notes selective prosecution (e.g., Trudeau freezing truckers’ accounts) and how cancel culture radicalizes fringe figures, comparing it to failed historical tactics like targeting families in wars. Both celebrate Rebel News’ 2016–2017 viral impact during YouTube’s throttling and hope Musk’s shift reverses discourse stagnation, restoring free speech as a counter to echo chambers and performative politics. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a 101 feature interview with our most rambunctious alumnus, Gavin McInnes.
And this is the Eslevance show.
Shame on you, you sensorism bug.
Well, over the years, Rebel News has had dozens of different on-air personalities.
Some people retire.
Some people get married and have kids and do other things.
Some people leave the media business.
Some go out on their own.
One of the most interesting people to pass through our offices over the years is our friend Gavin McInnes.
He's known for so many cultural projects.
He invented hipsterism, or at least defined it.
I'm not sure if we should thank him or condemn him for that.
He was one of the founding minds behind Vice.
He was famous for their fashion do's and don'ts, which I think drove the growth of that company.
It's hilarious.
If you don't know what I mean, you should look it up.
And then he joined Rebel News, where he became a YouTube staple, really doing the advice to young men circuit before Jordan Peterson came around.
In fact, he made a movie with Fox called How to Be a Man.
Here's a clip from that.
We have a good relationship and we love each other very much.
If you want to have an affair, that's fine because I know you can't get pregnant.
That is true.
Once you pop a baby in, it seals up and then...
You don't worry about affairs after that.
Right.
Right.
Like I could get jizzed in like three or four times a day and you would never know.
Some guys like they want to jizz.
They're not pregnant.
Yay.
I just saw this post.
It's an old friend of mine.
He's looking for a cameraman to help him make a video.
Who is this guy?
My mom, she's Facebook friends with you.
She looks a lot like a chick I used to fuck.
God So what do you need me to do?
I need you to film me giving a bunch of life lessons to my unborn son and I need you to do it now because I'm not going to be around for long.
I'm dying.
Think about bullies is they're always going to be there.
How do I fight?
Let me show you.
Look at my shirt.
It's totally spotless.
Fuck your shirt.
It's my dying wish.
You ever heard of Death Row?
They get to eat whatever they want.
They'll have ice cream and steak.
This is my ice cream steak.
Do your balls, you get down there.
And it's just doodle leap, one armpit, doodle loop, one armpit, done.
No shower for a man should be more than one minute long.
Well, Gavin McInnes is one of the driving forces of Rebel News as we grew in our early years.
And so it wasn't a surprise when he was snapped up by a larger American company that could simply outbid us for his talents.
Alas, I don't know if they knew what they were getting into.
He was a little bit too rambunctious for them.
And now he has his own company called censored.tv, which gives you a bit of a hint of what he's up to.
I want to catch up with Gavin.
It's been a couple of years since we've said hello to him.
And I want to talk to him about some free speech issues, including his interview with Kanye West, which had overtones of free speech, cancel culture, and what can you say in America today.
And I want to ask him about Elon Musk, once again, the world's richest man, who bought Twitter with one of the purposes of liberating it.
Joining us now via Skype from his studio is Gavin McKinnis.
Gavin, great to see you again.
Last time you and I saw each other, it was in a pub in New York and we were catching up.
You were working on censor.tv.
Back then, you were getting things going.
I want to catch up because you're one of our favorite people for our fans.
Let's start with what you're doing.
Give us an update of censored.tv.
When I look through your list of shows and talent, it really is every censored person in America.
It's like you've gathered them all up and given them a home in a sanitarium or something.
Yeah, it's the island of misfit toys from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.
And we take all the outcasts.
We give them a commission on all the subs they bring in.
And it's very lucrative because censoring people has become mainstream.
So I'm not getting the David Dukes and the Gigi Allens and the freaks of society.
I'm getting basically people who agreed with Obama and the Clintons 10 years ago.
Moderates, slightly right of center moderates, and that's considered radical and unspeakable these days.
So the roster, if you watch censor.tv, you're just watching normal, sane dad culture, but that's radical these days.
Well, I think that you're different than me, obviously, and America is different than Canada because some of the folks on censor.tv, well, if they wouldn't get your YouTube channel canceled, they would certainly get you demonetized in every way.
You'd have trouble.
Like, I remember when they came for Rebel News in 2017, they took away our DNS server.
I still don't know exactly what that is, but it was a piece of internet architecture that took us off the internet entirely for a couple of days.
We weren't prosecuted in any way, but I feel like you are one standard deviation edgier than Rebel News ever was, and yet you're thriving.
I mean, we lost PayPal.
They simply refused to do banking with us anymore.
No reason, no explanation, no warning, no appeal.
They just sent us an email one Friday night, anonymous email saying you violated our terms of service.
Didn't tell us what term, didn't tell us what.
So if we have trouble being as edgy as we are, how can you run a business and you're much tougher than us?
Because the market wants it.
The market wants free speech.
There's a massive demand for this supply.
And people feel like they're going insane when they watch the news, when they hear Lori Lightfoot talking, when they hear Joe Biden trying to talk, when they hear the press secretary say Joe Biden is the most articulate person in the White House.
They feel like they're losing their minds.
When they see us do nothing for Ohio, but do everything for Ukraine.
They go, am I nuts?
And then they see us be normal and they go, okay, I'll pay two beers a month for that.
And the gatekeepers before, whether it was the comedy gatekeepers at Comedy Central or the stand-up gatekeepers or the media gatekeepers, they were all getting this money.
It was just pouring all over them.
And they were doling out little scraps to the creators.
Well, now that we've circumvented the gatekeepers, we realize there's plenty of money in the market for this kind of content.
It was being restricted.
It was being strangleholded earlier.
And now everything from movies to stand-up to true comedy can thrive because we flanked it.
We went around it and realized, wow, you guys were taking a lot of money for yourselves.
Well, I'm thrilled to hear that you're a commercial success because we have found it difficult and our viewers know that we always crowdfund.
I don't think you crowdfund.
So you survive on subscription.
I guess America and the world, you probably have subscribers in the UK and Australia and Canada too.
I guess America is large enough that even if you're only appealing to the most rambunctious 1%, well, that's still 3 million people.
That's a lot of dough that they have to chip in 10 bucks a month.
Sure.
But it's also, you'd be surprised.
We do these comedy tours.
We had it last year.
It was called the Cognitive Dissidents Tour.
And this year it's the End Racism Tour.
And we're calling it the End Racism Tour.
So people feel bad if they cancel it.
You just canceled ending racism.
But the people that come to these shows, it's not like they're punk rockers or freaks in like leather fetish wear.
They're newlyweds.
They're thanking me for telling them to put a ring on it.
They've got a newborn at home that mom is looking after.
Like there's a lot of chicks there, I think, because I always say, you know, venerate the housewife.
They're surprisingly mainstream.
So it's sorry to repeat myself, but we're not that as rambunctious as you say.
And I would also add something, Ezra.
You're a Jew and Jews are less parsimonious than us Scots.
I think Jews are always shocked when they come and step into us in the cheap ring and see that they ain't got nothing on Scottish penny pinching.
Well, I like your model of hiring anyone and everyone, but they have to eat what they kill.
They have to live off what they bring in and subscriptions.
That's a great model.
I'm just pleased that you've managed to survive it and not be canceled digitally and not even be prosecuted.
I mean, for a moment there, I saw in the background, I think you had some footage of the January 6th protests at Capitol Hill.
The left calls it a riot.
I think you called it the great meandering or something.
The fact that you have not been prosecuted, I mean, one of your creations, you created vice, you created hipsterism, you created the Proud Boys.
And I say again, for years, that was taking care of how to be a man, giving young men a way to think and be proud of themselves and get their act together.
And Jordan Peterson sort of came along and added a PhD to the same kind of thinking.
But that was becoming a huge movement.
Now, the Democrats and the FBI and the left said, oh my God, we can't let this happen.
And they actually prosecuted.
I genuinely was worried that they would try and get you wrapped up in that.
In Canada, I know this is insane.
They actually called the Proud Boys a terrorist group.
There has literally never been a single Proud Boys event or action in Canada other than five folks in the Canadian forces who stood up for the flag, several of which were indigenous or gay.
Like it was the most diverse rainbow freedom protest, and yet it's called a terrorist group.
I was worried about you.
I'll be honest.
I was worried they were going to try and come for you.
Yeah, me too.
I'm starting to think I'm a Fed.
How do I keep getting away with this?
I went to Canada recently for my brother's bachelor party, and I was like, all right, I told my wife and kids, like, I might not be coming back.
I might end up in this Lambert and I just breezed right in.
I think one of the reasons I haven't been prosecuted is because they know it would be a very public case.
I would obviously have enough lawyer fees to fight it and I would have a lot of backing.
And I think a lot of them, a lot of these prosecutors don't want the headaches.
The beauty of prosecuting the Jan 6 guys is they're broke, they're anonymous, and it's easy to abuse them.
I think they know that abusing me wouldn't be so easy.
And the same with you, too.
I mean, obviously, if either of us was to go to court, it would be a spectacle.
And I think the bureaucrats who bully the average Ottawa trucker character is they just want to abuse them, get them off the map, and move on to the next guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the 200 people in Canada whose bank accounts were seized or frozen by Trudeau, they were all working class people who likely could not afford a lawyer, wouldn't even know how to get a lawyer, wouldn't know how to put out a press release, wouldn't have, like, they were just, it really was a working class rebellion, the trucker convoy, which was amazing.
And I think that's one of the reasons why Justin Trudeau hated it even more.
How dare those grubby truckers stand up to us?
But, you know, we haven't had the kind of over-the-top 18 months in prison, or I guess it's two years in prison business that January 6th says.
But we had truckers doing 50 days in prison.
We had a pastor in Alberta, 50 days in prison.
Tamara Leach, sort of the Joan of Arc of the truckers, 50 days in prison over a mischief case.
I know that's less than the January 6th guys, but it shows that the left who talk about civil rights, they never really mean it.
It's just a cover.
Just like Justin Trudeau pretends to be a feminist and he sexually assaulted Rose Knight.
He pretends to care about diversity, but he's Mr. Blackface.
They never really meant it when they said they were for civil liberties.
They never did.
No.
And you got to also remember that lawyers, especially Canadian lawyers, are pussies and they don't want to be seen defending the truckers because it's bad for their rep. And every time these lawyers refuse, they refuse me too.
I go, you know that Jeffrey Dahmer had a lawyer, right?
Like they don't even understand that if you defend someone evil, you're still doing your job.
You don't get to pick and choose your clients like that, but they do.
Yeah.
Oh, we had that same thing six years ago when we had Tommy Robinson acting for us.
We had to go through eight different law firms before we found one that was willing to represent him.
And we literally went with the law firm that had a website advertising that they defend accused war criminals.
That is how we finally found a lawyer who would deal with someone whose politics were, you know, a little bit coarse in the eyes of the mainstream.
And, you know, and in Canada, on the trucker side, even defending anti-lockdown protesters, like forget about, you know, January 6 or you and the Proud Boys or Tommy Robinson, just defending people who got lockdown tickets, it was extremely hard to find lawyers in Canada and Australia because if you would become known as that kind of lawyer, you would kill your career.
They really claim to be morally better than us, the left, but they are worse in every way.
Hey, listen, I want to ask you about cancel culture a little bit because one of the most interesting things I saw over the last few months was Kanye West, who I admire in many ways.
I love his music.
I think he's incredibly creative.
I love his Christianity.
I love his Sunday service.
I love there's so many things about him I like.
Kanye And The Liberal Elite00:02:30
But I think something, a switch flipped in him and he went, I think he went into say anything mode.
I'm going to, I think he made a decision.
Whatever you told him he could not do or say, he was going to do or say.
At least that's how it looked like to me.
Now, you sat down with him, and I want to play a couple of clips of that.
And I'd like you to explain how it came to be that you had to sit down with Kanye West, because I think that's probably very interesting.
What you thought of him and what was motivating him then?
And how did you think it goes?
So before we get into that, let me just play a clip for our viewers.
This is, here's a few excerpts of Gavin McInnes and Kanye West.
Take a look.
And yeah, that's my answer to that.
Okay, here, this is, I'm going to have an intervention here for you and Nick.
And let me just make a case.
Yes, there are almost 80 to 90% of Hollywood is Jewish, probably more.
Media, yeah, I'm going to say like 80% of media is Jewish.
But I see the Jews we're talking about in these cases as liberal elites, high IQ people, whites.
And when you have, like, they're disproportionately represented in medicine too, because they have high IQs.
So the problem isn't these Jews, and most of them are secular Jews, atheists.
I don't see Soros as Jewish.
So we have these secular, mostly atheist Jewish people with high IQs who dominate fields that tend to require high IQs.
They're overrepresented in chess and mathematics too.
So the real issue here, and there is an ethnomasochism, there is some sort of like, let's burn it to the ground.
But I think that trait is a white trait, a liberal elite white trait.
Oh, not even white per se, a liberal elite trait.
Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, they also have these traits.
And there's some sort of like lemming DNA in white people where when they reach a certain amount of success, they just want to take it off a cliff.
And I don't like when Jews get pulled into that because when I think of my Orthodox Jewish friends and even my Hasidic friends, these people are conservative, Trump-supporting, you know, American patriots.
And the Jews that are getting lumped in with this sort of ethnomasochistic cultural suicide tend not really to be Jewish.
I call them ginos, Jews in name only.
It's liberal elite whites you should have a beef with.
Yeah, but I lump them all in together.
Ethnomasochism and Elite Traits00:15:38
That's what I did.
That's how I did it.
That's good.
That's why the tweet said that, Jewish people.
Okay.
But this trait, like, you know, blacks are overrepresented in violent crime.
But when you meet an individual black person, you don't apply that.
You start with a fresh slate every time you meet someone.
Do you do that with Jews?
Nope.
This intervention isn't going very well.
Tell us what it was like there.
I mean, first of all, how did you connect with him?
He's such a big shot.
I mean, he's in trouble now, but how did you connect with him?
How did you convince him to come and talk to you?
Because I'm here in the outskirts of society.
I'm banished.
I'm in the gulag.
I'm in the caves.
So when you get kicked out of society and they close the gate to the village, I'm there with all the dead bones around me going, hi, welcome to nowhere.
So you reached out as one deplorable to another.
Yes, yeah.
I know Ali very well, and I know Nick Fuentes.
And I said, I killed to get an interview with Kanye and they go, or sorry, yay.
And they go, okay, fly us up to New York, which I looked into.
It's 50 grand to rent a jet.
So I said, no.
And then they said, well, you can be at his studio tomorrow.
So we just ran down to the airport, scooted over there, and we were there within 24 hours.
It's weird over there.
He's in this massive studio, this massive factory, really, where he makes his clothes.
It goes on for like two city blocks.
Very amicable dude, very unusual guy, very out of touch with what's going on.
Like he said to me, if I'm going to become president, what should I do?
And I go, build a wall, jobs, job, jobs.
That's all anyone cares about.
And he goes, well, I was thinking about giving amnesty to everyone who's here.
And I'm like, dude, that's immigration 101.
Like everyone knows that argument.
And the argument is, if you give amnesty to whatever 30 million illegals that are here, you're just going to get more.
You're rewarding bad behavior.
You're going to get more bad behavior, obviously.
And if you're saying that, that amnesty argument, then you're not really into politics because that's like kindergarten when it comes to the topic of immigration.
But what I think people don't get about Ye is he's an artist.
David Bowie did this exact same thing in the late 70s.
He wore fascist gear.
He had the Nazi armband.
He talked about Jews and said that he wants World War III.
And this is art to him.
And I think the worst thing Jews can do when someone does a silly, I don't know, experiment like this is to overreact and condemn and freeze his bank account because that creates anti-Semitism.
What you've got to do is what I do when the Proud Boys are called white nationalists is I just roll my eyes and laugh and make fun of the person.
I don't have the power to, you know, cancel their bank accounts, but I wouldn't if I did.
You just got to let these guys do their silly art.
You know, just to go off at a tangent briefly, there's this Canadian punk band called the Forgotten Rebels.
And they have a couple of songs.
One is called Bomb the Boats about the boat people, bomb the boats, feed the fish.
Another one is Hey Little Girl about a pedophile where they called the cops and someone snitched to the pigs and now she's gone away.
He's playing a villain in the music, but you can't get it on Apple Music anymore because we've killed color, we've killed irony, we've killed someone, you know, playing a character, being the devil's advocate.
And I think a lot of what Ye is doing is sort of based on that.
He's off at a tangent doing playing a character.
And you got to let these artists do their silliness.
It's not like Jews are getting lynched because of what Ye said.
You know what?
And I deal with this issue from time to time myself because I'm not amongst the deplorables as deeply as you are.
But in Canada, in the Canadian scene, I suppose I do.
I'm adjacent to folks who are on the populist nationalist right.
And I can see how sometimes they tip over into conspiracy theories.
Sometimes they tip over into globalist equals Jew.
No, I criticize globalists every day.
I criticize George Soros if we went to the World Economic Forum and made trouble for them.
There's nothing Jewish about that, but I understand that sometimes people on the right who are trying to figure out this crazy world for themselves and the internet is their main source of information, you can get caught up in anti-Semitic theories.
And unfortunately, there's enough little strings that they can tie together because George Soros, even though he's anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, he was born Jewish, for example.
And the Rothschilds are wealthy.
But when they sew it together in a big conspiracy theory, I feel like I want to talk people off the ledge and say you can still be a dissident, a contrarian, you can still challenge George Soros in the World Economic Forum, but you don't have to overlay it with anti-Semitism.
Let me help you come back from the edge of the cliff.
That's how I feel because I know most of these people, they don't have a black heart.
They just, they've got carried away or wound up, or they've had so much confirmation bias from so many people saying yes, yes, yes in their years, especially on social media.
So I sometimes try and have an intervention personally because I know they're not bad people, but once you say something anti-Semitic in public, like you say, the Anti-Defamation League or anti-hate groups smash you so hard and destroy you so hard that that actually proves their theory.
They say, look, I've just proved my theory right because it's the one thing you can't talk about.
It's the one thing you can't say.
And so in effect, the reaction to their Step one anti-Semitism turns them into hardcore anti-Semites because they say, I just proved everything in my theory.
So you were saying.
Yeah, this is why free speech is so important.
This is why open dialogue is so important.
We used to have that.
You used to have David Duke on CNN arguing with Wolf Blitzer.
You used to have Richard Spencer on ESPN arguing with, I forget who it was, Shaquille O'Neal or whatever, about racism in this country.
And that was very healthy.
Bad ideas get rooted out.
Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant.
And then the left realized that a lot of people on the right, even the dissident right, are pretty intelligent.
And as they got dumber, the far right got smarter.
And these debates were becoming abusive, basically, because our side knew so much and their side knew so little.
So then it became, don't give Nazis a platform.
And that was a major turning point, not just in American culture, but in Western culture entirely, because then it became, we're no longer talking to the other side.
We're in control.
And what that did was it radicalized a lot of moderate conservatives.
And it was a really bad move on the left.
And I think it precipitated this national divorce where we're now agreeing to disagree.
I hate your guts.
Let's have our communities, our media, our restaurants.
And it's segregation all over again.
Not just racial segregation, but political, philosophical segregation.
Yeah.
You know, on CNN about 20 plus years ago, there was a show called Crossfire.
In fact, Tucker Carlson was on it.
And the whole concept of it, a permanent host on the left, a permanent host on the right, guests coming in two by two, one on the left, one on the right.
And Canada, our state broadcaster, the CBC, had a copycat version, which had a wonderful name, Face Off.
Isn't that a great name for basically a knockoff of Crossfire?
You had Judy Revick, who was a socialist feminist, head of the feminist movement, and you had Claire Hoy, who was sort of a grouchy conservative.
And they brought guests in two by two.
And that would never happen today because they would never legitimize the other side of the story.
That's our Ottawa Rebel News, telling the other side of the story, because it used to be, everyone said, of course you have the other side of the story.
Even if it's fringe, even if it's wrong, let's hear it.
When I was on campus, the political clubs, like the parties, and when I was in school, there were four main parties at the University of Calgary Reform Party, PCs, Liberals, and NDP.
There were public debates all the time.
It was assumed that you would participate.
And if you didn't participate, you were being anti-democratic.
The idea that they would have a debate like that now with the Reform Party type people, that would be like the People's Party, is unthinkable.
It would be banned and boycotted.
People would ring the fire alarm.
They would say they were triggered.
It used to be everyone was part of the community.
Everyone had their say.
And you know one of the benefits of that, Gavin?
Is if you felt you had a conspiracy theory, the world had to know, if you felt you had some secret knowledge that would bring the whole establishment down, you could say it.
And when the whole world didn't come tumbling down, it would make you think, oh, well, maybe I didn't have this secret knowledge that would change the world.
And my entire life has been burning within me because I've been censored everywhere.
One of the things about being censored is you think, I have the secret knowledge, I'm being persecuted for it.
If only I could tell the world and save the world.
But if you're allowed to tell the world and no one cares, that's a good check on you.
You think, oh, well, maybe I'll do something else with my time in my life because actually no one seems to agree with me.
But at least I was hurt.
At least I had my moment.
That's why on the internet, comment sections are so popular.
Reddit or the comment sections are so popular.
And that's why they're being censored now, too.
And by the way, that person you just described is now smarter than he was before.
When two people debate about climate change, pro-life, when they debate about the economy, you're watching that.
And now you're more intelligent because you have applied your philosophy to a degree of rigor that it wasn't normally applied to.
So we're losing that intelligence.
We're losing it.
It's like boxing.
If you don't spar, you're not a good fighter.
And when you don't spar, you become obese.
We are mentally obese now.
And this is incredibly evident when you see streeters with young people.
And they say things like, Do you think Trump is racist?
Yes.
Why?
They can't formulate an argument because they've never tried it before.
They just know that I'm on this side and that is my new Puritan religion and everyone else is a blasphemer.
That's it.
Yeah.
And then they just download the next message track.
Oh, it's on vaccines today.
Oh, it's on Ukraine tomorrow.
It's on Proud Boy.
Let's just watch the new message track.
I will say it.
And I'm safe now because I'm with the herd.
So I won't be culled.
And even if it's crazy or wrong, I don't have to think about it because there's safety in numbers.
But this is, go ahead.
This leaks into the justice system.
So Proud Boys are Nazis.
They're white nationalists.
They're domestic terrorists.
Okay, you can have that silly belief.
It's as dumb, by the way, as calling the Amish Satanists.
But now Amish are in court accused of Satanism.
And they're getting like Nick Oakes is doing four years right now because he meandered into the Capitol reporting on it the same way Elijah Schaefer would.
We have a show with him, by the way, where we use AI to bring his letters from prison to life and we deep fake his face.
But it's not a joke anymore.
It's not just a silly rumor about you.
It comes up in court.
And one thing I wanted to mention earlier, too, is you and I are around the same age.
When we were young in the 90s, political correctness was gaining its stride.
And those people, we thought they were nuts.
There were blue hairs.
There was like feminists who believed in a world without men, all that kind of silliness, but they were esoteric.
Now they're judges.
Now they're prosecutors.
Now they're in control of the justice system.
Now they're in the White House.
Now they're in parliament.
Yeah.
Oh, you're so right.
You know, and you just made me think that Justice Paul Rollo, who had the Trucker Commissioner inquiry, one of his findings was that the government was justified in bringing in martial law because the diagonal on hate group, it's literally some goofy pranksters on the internet with a made-up flag.
And I think they're stupid and I think they do so much damage because they are proof of hate groups.
They're not funny.
They're just, you know, oh, I was just kidding everything I said.
But that was relied on by this judge to excuse throwing the entire country under martial law some Facebook pranksters.
But it goes to show you that that, you know, you're right.
And that judge isn't even particularly young.
Hey, I want to try out one.
One more thing, though, because, well, they were supposed to be.
But it's like, it's like a joke.
Take my wife, please.
You know, it's the delivery.
But if you look at it, he said, take my wife.
Your honor, he literally said, take my wife.
Like, my point is a joke out of context in black and white, a photo.
It's not funny anymore.
It can be weaponized in any way.
Let me change subjects, though, because I know you're pressed for time.
It's great to catch up with you.
I was getting more and more despondent about how censorship and cancel culture was going.
And it felt to me like it was only going one way.
We have a liaison on YouTube who abuses us, demonetizes us, punishes us, suspends us.
It's an atrocious, abusive relationship.
We're still in it because we have 1.6 million YouTube viewers and I want them to see our stuff, but we're not allowed to sell ads to them or get tips from them or anything.
It's really atrocious.
But one day I asked our YouTube manager, I said, can anyone come back from being banned?
Because it's the one thing in life where progressives are in favor of a life sentence.
You know, you shoot someone, they say, oh, he was misunderstood.
He's rehabilitated after six weeks in jail.
Let him out.
But, for example, Alex Jones, could he ever come back to YouTube?
He was huge on YouTube, extremely popular.
And I was told, no, it's a life sentence.
There's no room for redemption, no room for a change of heart, no room for anyone to learn.
No room for anyone to say, you know what?
I think maybe I did get one or two things wrong.
I'd phrase a little bit differently.
And I'm older now, and maybe I'm wiser.
I'm a little more seasoned.
Maybe I'm a little calmer.
Let me try again.
No.
I was sort of shocked, but not surprised to hear that they have a, and so I thought to myself, it's a ratchet.
Never Coming Back00:03:16
It only goes one way.
So when you were banned from Twitter, when Laura Loomer, when 100 conservatives were banned, I thought, I have to be careful because it's just a matter of time before I'm banned.
And there's no coming back to life.
Well, there is changed.
There is for the center.
I talked to an insider at Twitter too who told me the same thing.
She said, no, you're never coming back.
She said, the 10% on the right and the 10% on the left, so like the Antifa direct action psychos and me are never coming back.
And it's funny because their idea of radical left is truly radical, Molotov cocktail, kill cops.
Our radical 10% are just like, there's two genders, climate change is not a big deal, and we should have more charter schools.
That's their idea of super radical, but we're never coming back.
But I don't know if you remember the movie Thunderdome, but there's a dude down there who works with the methane gas pigs, and he has pig killer tattooed on his forehead, I believe.
And he's got a life sentence to work with the pigs in the feces building methane gas.
That's where I am.
And it's not so bad down here.
Like you get used to the smell after a while.
You build a little house for yourself.
You know, you got your wife and kids.
And the other good thing about being, you know, a pig killer down here in Thunderdome is this cancellation, it's a fashion fad.
So whereas they were ostracizing my kids and vandalizing my house a few years ago, they lose interest after a while and move on to the next thing.
They don't have the courage of their convictions.
So, you know, every time I meet one of these people on the street and they call me a Nazi or something, you just walk up to them and they immediately cower and apologize.
There's no heart to any of this radical cancellation from the left.
They don't mean it.
You know, maybe that's the difference between Canada and the United States.
Maybe it's just a difference between your style and my style.
I am so lucky that I have not in my personal life, either directly to me or my family, had any of that cancel culture.
And I don't want it.
I'm not governing my life to avoid criticism.
It's just, I know some of the things you were put through, and I think it's atrocious, and I feel terrible for you.
And I wonder if that's a Canadian difference or if it's just people in Canada are more passive, aggressive, and would just never say anything to my face.
I don't know why it is, but I, you know, knock on wood, but I just haven't had that same experience.
Well, that's what they did.
I've avoided it.
They did it in the American Revolution.
They did it in the Boer War.
The English were famous for this.
If they couldn't get to the guy, they would attack his family, burn down his house, kill his wife and kids.
It's a tactic for cowards.
And sometimes it's effective.
In the Boer War, the English did win by terrorizing their families and they gave up.
In the American Revolution, it just made them angrier.
And that's where I'm at right now.
The fact that you came out, my wife and my kids, my car, my house, you know, ostracized my kids at school.
Now I'm really mad.
And I am never quitting.
I don't care if I'm as senile as Joe Biden.
Tactics Of Cowards00:05:43
I'm going to sit here and say, come on, man, this is what it does.
There's two genders, man, corn pub, and then the other gender.
Come on.
That's not a joke.
You think I'm kidding?
It's not a joke.
That's not a bad impression.
But where I was going with that is I was feeling, as the kids say, rather blackpilled about the whole thing, rather despondent.
And then the craziest thing in the world happened.
The world's richest man bought Twitter for $44 billion U.S. and obviously loves tweeting himself, tweets things that would have got him banned under the earlier regime, tweets skepticism of the Ukraine war, tweets attacks on wokeism all the time, tweets about tweets about gender issues, tweets about race.
He stood up for Scott Adams, who was the Gilbert cartoonist.
I mean, so Elon Musk, you know, he's got his blind spots too, but, and he's exposed to China because Tesla does big business there.
So he has some vulnerabilities, but he has been very strong against cancer culture.
I know he hasn't forgiven Alex Jones, for example, but suddenly dozens or hundreds or maybe even thousands of people who were banned are being brought back to life.
I mean, including some of your talent, like Laura Lumer, used to work for Rebel News briefly too.
So I'm left with some hope.
Now, Elon Musk may be the richest man in the world, but he's not bigger and more powerful than the CIA or the FBI or, let's say, BlackRock or other groups like that.
So the story's not finished yet, but I've been given a whole new hope when it comes to freedom of speech by Elon Musk.
What do you think?
Yes, I agree with you.
I think it's really exciting.
And, you know, my ex-pal Owen Benjamin once said, he said, you've got to get over that was my idea.
Or I came up with that and I should have copyrighted it.
As long as the idea is out there, then you're winning.
And I know that you and I will never, well, you're still on Twitter, but I know I'll never get back on Twitter.
I'm fine with that.
Because my ideas, our ideas are still getting out there.
And, you know, this war on meritocracy, the war on kids, this bastardization of what it is to be a woman, which I see as a war on woman, is all getting pushed back on Twitter thanks to Elon Musk.
And for whatever reason, Twitter controls the national conversation.
It controls the international conversation.
So it's not just an app.
It is where we all, it's our town hall for every town.
So the fact that meritocracy is getting its day in court is a really good sign.
And I mean, and I'm seeing it every day, like Lori Lightfoot getting booted out yesterday.
That's a major step here.
I think the left is finally realizing that they were better off under the patriarchy and they should maybe give Archie Bunker a little bit more power because Kids' Day, which is what the past five years has been, isn't working out.
It's time for mom and dad to come back home and tell you to eat your vegetables.
Yeah.
Well, listen, my friend, it's great to catch up with you.
And it's fascinating to see the path you've taken, which is very different than the path we've taken at Rebel News.
And you've been successful at it, which is miraculous and hopeful.
And, you know, as I said when the last time we met, your sense of humor fused with the issues of the day really caught the imagination of millions of people.
And I think you really did paved the way for a lot of the public intellectuals out there now.
I mean, I think Jordan Peterson was beavering away on his own, and I'm not sure how much of your stuff he consumed.
But I think you were tilling the same field there.
And I love watching him fight canceled culture too, by the way.
Like he's too big a fish for many of them to swallow.
It's great to catch up with you.
And I look forward to staying in touch.
Yeah, just one last thing.
I was at the airport in West Palm Beach yesterday, and this happens to me on a regular basis.
Someone comes up to me and they go, Hey, man, what are you up to now?
I give them a censored.tv card.
They don't really care about that.
But they always say the same thing.
They go, I used to watch you on YouTube on Rebel.
And the guy last night was saying, I used to fall asleep to listening to you on Rebel.
I don't think you can underestimate the incredible impact Rebel has had.
You can be on Blaze, you can be on Fox News.
No one ever comes up to me and says, Hey, I saw you on Fox News.
They saw the viral video with Tamara Holder occasionally.
But as far as like me getting to know your stuff, it's always Rebel.
And it's amazing the long-lasting impact being on your network has had.
It's incredible.
Well, I mean, I remember when we met last time, I told you that you really fueled a lot of our growth in that era, those last twilight hours of freedom on YouTube before we were demonetized, before we were throttled, in 2016 and early 2017.
Millions of people watched, and they couldn't get enough of the humor that was tied to the times we're in.
And I thank you for that.
And it's nice to catch up.
And I hope both of our countries get freer and I hope we both stay safe.
Yes, agreed.
Thanks for having me, buddy.
How's it going, eh?
Take off.
Right on.
There he is.
Gavin McInnes, the boss of Censor.tv and an alumnus of Rebel News.