Pavel Durov’s arrest in France on August 30 signals a globalist crackdown on free speech platforms, with Telegram CEO facing pressure akin to Elon Musk’s Twitter—now a battleground against censorship. Governments like Brazil’s Supreme Court, Venezuela’s Maduro, and the UK’s Starmer demand compliance, while EU bureaucrat Thierry Breton weaponizes the Digital Services Act to silence dissent. Musk’s defiance, from unbanning Trump to relocating servers, contrasts with Silicon Valley’s historic collusion (e.g., 2016 Google town halls plotting voter control). With Trump ahead in polls and fewer restrictions than 2020, the election may hinge on whether innovation or bureaucratic overreach prevails. [Automatically generated summary]
One of my favorite guests, we used to talk to him more often, but wow, we reconnected today.
I'm talking about Alam Bokhari.
He used to be the senior tech editor at Breitbart.com.
Total Silicon Valley insider in terms of his connections, but he fights for freedom.
And we're going to have a great rollicking talk today about Elon Musk, about Pavel Durov, the president of the app called Telegram, who was arrested in France.
Lots of stuff, a feature interview.
Sit back and enjoy.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, they arrested the head of a social media company called Telegram.
Are they coming for Elon Musk next?
It's August 30th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, you know, when I was in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, two names kept coming up.
The two names they were most afraid of.
Not afraid in a personal sense, but afraid that these people would stop their agenda, this globalist, rootless, stateless, socialist agenda, technocratic, the kind of thing that would cause Kier Starmer, the prime minister of the UK, to say he preferred Davos to the Westminster Parliament.
Remember when Starmer said that?
Let's ask you quickly.
You have to choose now between Davos or Westminster.
Davos.
Well, the enemy of Davos, according to the Davosians, these are the World Economic Forum people, was number one, most obviously Donald Trump.
He would stop so many of their schemes and stop some of their wars too, which they love.
But the number two name, and it was a very close second, was Elon Musk.
Now, Elon Musk is a great industrialist, a great entrepreneur, a dreamer, a visionary, a futurist.
I mean, my gosh, the man wants to colonize Mars.
That's the kind of sort of crazy utopian schemes that they normally love at the World Economic Forum.
But the fact that Elon Musk believes, or at least says he believes, and it seems to be true, in freedom and using Twitter to free once censored people, that irritated them in a very deep way.
And there was a link between the two.
You felt it when they talked about Trump, that Elon Musk was rehabilitating him and his supporters.
It was very interesting.
And so when I saw the other day that a billionaire tech tycoon, Pavel Durov, born in Russia, the founder of various social networks and now the CEO of a messaging app called Telegram, when I saw the Durov, when he flew into France, purportedly at the invitation of the French president Emmanuel Macron, who said, hey, come to Paris, let's have dinner.
When Durov landed at the airport, he was arrested and charged with a whole roster of crimes allegedly being perpetrated by his social media app called Telegram.
And all I could think of was that is what they, well, that is a test drive.
That is a dress rehearsal for the big game.
They would, if they could, and they might, do that to Elon Musk himself, joining us now to talk about this and so many other social media things is a man who probably knows more about economic, sorry, about internet freedom rather, than anyone else I've ever met.
someone who's been studying internet freedom and the loss of it at the hands of government and by woke entries in those corporations themselves.
You know who I'm talking about.
His name is Alan Bokari.
He's the managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
And we're just so happy to have him back as a guest today.
Alan, great to see you again.
Great to see you, Ezra.
Do you agree with the World Economic Forum delegates that I met with that after Donald Trump, a close second in terms of jamming their plans, is Elon Musk?
Do you agree with them?
Should they be worried about Elon Musk?
I can certainly see why they said that, and it seems very accurate.
What's really frustrating to them about Elon Musk, I think, because, you know, the delegates at the World Economic Forum have a vested interest in the thing that global internet censorship is trying to protect, which is this global system of narrative control and corresponding political control.
They worry that internet freedom is going to eventually undermine their political power because it'll undermine their control over narratives and over what the public of Western countries and countries around the world believe.
And Elon Musk really epitomizes that, and his takeover of Twitter really epitomizes that.
It really broke down this system of censorship that had been able to build up over the preceding half decade or more.
And what's really frustrating to them about Elon Musk is that he's a little bit different to someone like Pavel Dura because, you know, you mentioned Pavel Durev.
Dura founded the Russians' version of Facebook.
He founded Telegram.
These are those big, big platforms with massive influence.
But Elon Musk has many, many other companies, and he's kind of essential to Western governments.
They can't just, you know, arrest him or bankrupt him or get rid of him in some other way because just look recently at this story with the stranded astronauts.
So NASA had to request help from SpaceX because they have a couple of astronauts stranded on the International Space Station because the Boeing-built spacecraft that took them there malfunctioned and can't bring them back home to Earth.
So SpaceX has to come into the rescue.
The government's increasingly dependent on SpaceX rockets.
You go to Ukraine.
Ukraine uses Starlink for a lot of their operations.
So, you know, Musk is kind of essential to the Western aeros, coming essential to Western aerospace, to Western internet infrastructure, to Western militaries.
And so even though the deep state and the governments of the West hate him for bringing free speech back to the people and threatening the basis of their political power, they also need him because he's shoring up their military power.
And he's succeeding where, you know, older companies like Boeing are failing.
So, you know, on the one hand, he's this massive threat to them.
On the other hand, they still need him.
That is such a good point.
I hadn't heard it expressed until you said it here.
I mean, Durov is an interesting personality.
He's sort of a brooding guy, but he's an innovator, of course.
But he feels like sort of almost like a Lone Ranger.
Whereas, God forbid, if Elon Musk were arrested, I could just imagine what would happen to the price of Tesla.
It would plummet.
SpaceX, Neuralink, all of his projects, he's responsible.
His company alone sends more than 90% of all payloads from planet Earth into space.
So SpaceX, the company he runs, does more spacework than NASA, China, the Russian cosmonauts, all combined, times 10.
And he has Starlink is the name of his civilian system, but he has a military system that he's putting up there just as quickly.
I forget the name of it right now, but it's military.
So you can't take him out.
He really is an essential man.
You know, they say the graveyards are full of irreplaceable men, but I think that Elon Musk might be the closest thing we have to that.
You would see the New York Stock Exchange tank.
You would see, and he has a lot of friends that he's made very wealthy along the way.
I don't think there's actually another person in history who has created more wealth for others than he has.
That's a very good point.
So in that way, I'm not going to say he's untouchable, but I don't know.
Why do you think they went after Durov this way?
Tech Platforms and Criminal Speech00:11:31
It said, you know, if you look at the official rap sheet, they say, well, you're allowing drug trafficking.
You're allowing human trafficking.
You're allowing other crimes.
You're not disclosing all that.
I suppose in a technical sense, that's probably true, just like cell phone companies are letting people commit crimes on the phone.
And, you know, just like the post office lets you commit crimes if you write mean letters.
I mean, I suppose any platform allows crimes to happen on it.
You don't generally charge the owner of Apple with crime for what's done on their phones.
Am I right?
That's correct.
And this is what liability exemptions for social media platforms and online websites are supposed to protect them from.
It's obviously ridiculous to say that a phone line is responsible for someone using the phones to commit a crime.
But this really epitomizes the new relationship between governments and tech platforms.
After 2016 and right up to, say, 2021, 2022, there was this extraordinary pressure that Silicon Valley really succumbed to from the deep state, from their allies in the NGO media complex, the advertising industry, which Silicon Valley is quite dependent on, to force them to censor their platforms and in particular to censor the 2020 presidential election.
Now, Musk taking over Twitter was the first big crack in that system that then developed.
But now we're seeing more and more people in Silicon Valley coming out and saying, you know, we don't support these government demands for censorship.
We were even tricked by the government.
You had Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg telling the Judiciary Committee recently that the FBI told him that the Hunter Biden laptop story was going to be a Russian hoax.
And that was obviously a complete lie.
So I think many in Silicon Valley feel that they were hoodwinked by the deep state and its allies, that they were unduly pressured by it, as well as the media and advertisers and so on, that they were forced to do things they really didn't want to do.
But with the entire industry acting as one, it was very easy for every company to do the same thing and engage in the same kind of censorship.
And I think Elon Musk was a real sign to those people in Silicon Valley, those other people who had misgivings about what had gone on with censorship over the previous half decade, that it was time to roll back the censorship to come out and say they didn't support it, to come out and say they were pressured.
So it's really, really been a massive, massively positive development.
And I think this coming presidential election is going to be far less censored than the 2020 election, although there are still holdouts like Microsoft and Google, which still have their censorship regimes in place.
I saw that letter from Mark Zuckerberg, and it was interesting that he conceded so much.
He admitted so much.
He admitted that it's some of that we knew before because of lawsuits that caused the disclosure of internal records of how the deep state, the FBI and other government agencies basically had direct backdoor access into various social media companies.
And they had sort of direct back channels to senior executives who would just give them whatever they wanted.
So some of that came out through litigation.
When Zuckerberg basically admits, and I would say even slightly apologizes for it, my first reaction is they're still censoring us today, for example.
One of our former reporters, Tommy Robinson, he's quite a controversial character.
I'm aware of that.
But if you put anything on Facebook with his image or voice, that post will be suspended and you could risk your entire account being taken down.
I don't want to emphasize that one example, but I'm just saying I'm not sure if I accept his apology at face value when he is continuing his woke censorship on a daily basis.
Maybe not so much on Trump versus Kamala Harris, but on so many other woke things.
I think Facebook is just as censorious today as it was a month ago and a year ago.
What do you think?
Like, I just don't believe it's decided suddenly to change its corporate culture and no longer be a politically correct censorship machine.
Yeah, or if it has, it's in a way that's not really noticeable to people who are actually engaged in dissident political conversations.
I remember, I think it was 2022 when I was still a reporter for Breitbart.
I got a hold of Facebook's massive list of so-called hate agents, prominent social media, prominent figures on Facebook that they were monitoring and potentially going to ban.
And there were all sorts of mainstream, you know, big right-wing names on there.
I believe Tommy Robinson was one of them.
There was also Laura Luma and many other people were on that list.
So they had a literal blacklist of political figures that they didn't like.
There were politicians on that list as well, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, I bet Nigeria.
They continue to hold Facebook's feet to the fire and understand if they're actually, like you said, rolling back any of their censorship policies.
I know they reinstated Donald Trump, but that's the bare minimum, I would say.
And it's also interesting to see in Brazil, we see the Brazilian Supreme Court going, electoral court going after Elon Musk and X so strongly, but they haven't really said anything about Facebook.
And I think there'd be much more up in arms if Facebook were moving in an anti-censorship direction, especially because in Brazil, they're so concerned with WhatsApp, which is a Facebook-owned company and so-called misinformation spreading on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp was seen as this critical factor in helping Bolsonaro win and get around media censorship when he won the election there.
So the fact that Brazil is going so hard after Musk, but saying nothing about Facebook, suggests to me that Facebook is still in compliance largely with this global system of censorship.
I find it terrifying that billions of people in the world are at the mercy of individual men in terms of how we perceive things and what we say.
I mean, I remember that famous quote, I'm sure you know it off by heart, at Twitter before Elon Musk took it over.
I think, was it Parag, I forget his name, a senior executive there who said, we don't believe in freedom of, we believe in freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach, I think was his phrase, which is, oh yeah, come on Twitter, say what you like, fill your boots.
We just won't show your words to anybody.
So you'll have the simulation of free speech and you'll feel really good as some therapeutic exercise.
But we're not going to let anyone hear you.
And that's so terrifying because how do you know?
You know, in the internet world, when everything is filtered through these social media apps and their algorithms, how do you know?
How do you know if what you're saying gets out?
And even more terrifying, how do you know that your perception of the world is accurate or what is being kept from your knowledge?
I feel like I've eaten from the tree of knowledge when I'm on Twitter and I see, for example, the recent riots in the United Kingdom.
But for people who aren't on Twitter, who are on more censored apps, they don't even know about that.
If they know something about it, they probably believe the debunked government narrative.
And God forbid Twitter were to follow or must were to be jailed.
I honestly don't know how I would be able to know what the world is like other than what's immediately in front of me because I can't trust things going through any algorithm, through any company.
And it feels like five oligarchs controlling my entire information flow.
I don't know.
Is there a solution?
It is very precarious to have so much of free speech infrastructure, as you said, kind of dependent on one guy.
The fact that the rest of Silicon Valley, you see venture capitalists like David Sachs being increasingly vocal.
You see other figures as Mark Andreessen, Balaji Srinovassan, all these are fairly big Silicon Valley figures, and they're much more vocal in their support of free speech today than they were in 2020, somewhat completely silent in 2020.
So it's more than just Elon Musk.
I think Silicon Valley as a whole has, outside of some of the really big tech companies like Microsoft and Google, has on the whole distanced itself from the system of government control.
But, you know, I've always supported pro-free speech regulation of tech companies.
I'll be clear, I don't support this sort of very strange sort of DC populist idea that you have to regulate the tech companies at any chance you get.
You know, to me, that's just handing weapons to the government that, you know, that, you know, the government that wants new weapons to punish platforms like X and punish people like Elon Musk.
But I do support these bills that have been passed in some of the states.
I think Texas passed a law that says, you know, if you're a user of a social media platform, you should have a private right of action against social media platforms and other tech platforms.
If they ban your account, if they deny you service, you should be able to take them to court and get your account reinstated if they suspended it unfairly or unjustly, which in many cases they do.
It's preposterous to me that you have more due process if you own a physical business with a physical location from being evicted than you do from being banned from your social media account or your Amazon account or your e-commerce accounts or even your PayPal account.
These online accounts are arguably much more important today to having a livelihood than a physical business.
And yet you have due process in one, but not the other.
So I support regulations like that, which sort of go beyond any individual or any oligarch in guaranteeing free speech on social media.
You know, it's interesting.
I think of my own Twitter account, which I've been tripping away at for 15 years.
More than 100,000 little comments I've made, a huge waste of time, I guess.
But looked at from another point of view, I've built up a big audience there through my own input.
I mean, yes, I was a, you know, they are the vendor or I'm the customer and there was a system of rules, but I have put a lot of work into it.
And we've built, same with YouTube, same with all these other apps.
We've built our companies around them based on a certain bundle of promises.
And then they suddenly wake up one day and say, well, it's a fireable offense if you're politically incorrect in this way or that way.
If you, you know. misgender someone, just to give a certain example.
Twitter Office Visit00:03:40
I don't know.
One of the things that I think about quite often, I'm going to shift gears here for a second, about Elon Musk and Twitter.
And I thought of it again when he was called on to bail out NASA, which is just so gorgeous.
NASA is all about DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion.
And that's not my opinion.
That's what they boast about.
I mean, they just won't stop talking about DEI.
They sort of forgot about the going into space park.
So we have to send Musk to the rescue.
I remember, do you remember, Alam?
Right around the time that Elon Musk was about to take over Twitter, there was all these a day in the life of a Twitter worker videos that all these were almost always young women in their 20s, millennial or not Gen Z, but young women in their 20s, typically in HR or some other ethereal subjective department that I don't even know if they could explain what they did.
And they would do, here's what my day at Twitter was like.
I stopped in at the massage room.
I went for a coffee.
I got a free cocktail.
I had lunch.
I was on the, and I mean, take a look here.
I'll show you an example of it.
And I think Elon Musk finally saw one of these and he just flipped his wig.
Here, take a look.
Welcome to a day in my life as a Twitter employee.
So this past week, went to Esta for the first time at a Twitter office, badged in, honestly, took a moment to just soak everything in.
What a blessing.
Also started my morning off with an iced matcha from the perch.
Then I had a meeting.
So quickly scheduled one of these little pod rooms, which were so cool.
They're literally noise canceling.
Took my meeting, got ready for bunch.
Look how delicious this food looks.
Oh my goodness, I was so overwhelmed.
Then made my way down to this log cabin area.
I don't know what this is, but it was really cool.
Played some freeze ball with my friends to kind of unwind a bit.
Also found this really cool meditation room that I thought was super neat.
I didn't do any yoga, but they have this yoga room if you are a yogi.
So also thought that was really cool.
Had a couple more meetings in the afternoon, had a ton of projects that we needed to knock out.
Say hey to my teammates.
Went to the library to kind of get some more work done.
Obviously had to have our afternoon coffee.
So made some espresso.
And then before leaving for the day, had some red wine that's on tap.
Went up to the rooftop and just honestly enjoyed the beautiful weather.
I mean, that looks like who wouldn't want to go to work there?
But the thing is, Elon Musk, if you ask him what he is, essentially, he'll say he's an engineer.
And he looks at Twitter as an engineering product.
He looks at SpaceX as an engineering product.
I don't know much about the boring company, but it's an engineering product.
That's the tunneling company he has.
He's the flamethrower guy.
He's the Neuralink guy.
All this is about hard sciences.
And so when he took over Twitter and fired 80% of the people there, probably every single gal who did one of these day in the life videos, a lot of people said, oh, you've wrecked it.
He didn't wreck it.
He just cleaned the barnacles off the ship.
And he's actually rolled out more product functionality on Twitter in the last year than they did five years previously.
I think if you put Elon Musk in government, as I think Trump has been suggesting he might, you put Elon Musk in charge of any government department.
I don't think it would ever really happen.
Bumped Into Censorship00:05:00
But I think he could cut 80% of any bureaucracy and increase the output.
I know that sounds absurd, but the guy just did it on a $40 billion purchase he just made.
What do you make of that?
I can see that happening.
I think he would absolutely do that.
He really runs his companies very efficiently.
And yeah, I mean, Twitter is still functioning perfectly well today, despite losing 80% of its workforce, as you said.
And it's interesting that one of the things that global internet censors really hope, and they say this in their public statements, they hope that regulations like the EU's Digital Services Act will force platforms like X to rehire some of the people they let go from the content moderation departments, the trust and safety departments, the censorship squads, basically.
They hope that regulation will force those to come back.
But yeah, talking about efficiency in government and what someone like what a Musk-like figure could do for that.
It's not just the government itself, but also the people they favor and the companies they favor in the private sector.
So much of this is because of contracts.
So the spacecraft that failed to bring those astronauts back to Earth, and now NASA has to turn to SpaceX, was a Boeing spacecraft, the same company whose planes are malfunctioning everywhere because of engineering failures, because Boeing became a sort of financialized company that forgot about that deprioritized engineering versus just making profits and having a good balance sheet.
So that's one example of a company that the government tends to favor.
We've also found our recent research found that the government funds the architects of censorship through government contracts, over $10 billion collectively going to the same advertising agencies that were members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, that same ad cartel that was boycotting platforms like X, that was boycotting news companies for presenting dissident viewpoints or allowing too much free speech.
Government funds those companies over $10 billion, like I said, in things like army recruitment ads and public service announcements.
So what I hope happens is a lot of these contracts, which go to entities that support the restriction of free speech and the restriction of viewpoints online get really looked at by the public, that more people are aware that the U.S. government and taxpayers are funding this global network of speech censorship.
Yeah.
You know, we've been censored by a number of these groups.
I'll mention one of them, NewsGuard, which is a self-appointed fact-checker censor.
And they don't actually check our facts.
They check our opinions.
We've gone through the process several times.
It's a waste of time.
They have their answer in advance.
They just go through the motions.
But they never, I don't think we've ever been caught with a factual error by them.
We correct errors when we make them.
We love corrections.
It sort of proves that everything else we got right.
I don't mind making a correction any day of the week.
But what NewsGuard does is it says, well, why did you interview this person?
He has a point of view that's wrong.
But we accurately reported what this person in a contentious debate said.
NewsGuard says you shouldn't platform him at all because he's wrong.
Well, he's part of the debate and we're just showing both sides of the story.
That is not a fact check.
But NewsGuard is funded in part by government contracts.
Save the story for another day.
I bumped in towards censorship.
Another thing NewsGuard does, it'll take blacklists of media companies like yours.
You're no doubt on the NewsGuard blacklist.
It'll take those blacklists.
It'll take them to the advertising industry.
The advertising industry will then use those blacklists to say, okay, they don't get any ad revenue.
We're going to financially throttle them because NewsGuard says they're bad.
They're also working with the European Union on their own, their vast online censorship apparatus.
This is like really a far-reaching censorship organization that stretches across the Atlantic in its influence.
You're so right.
And the NewsGuard browser extension blocks access to our site.
So they're atrocious.
I'll save the story for another day, but I actually bumped in to our censor at an airport once.
He didn't recognize me.
I recognized him.
I said hello.
I was being very pleasant.
And he said, who are you again?
And I said, oh, I'm Esch Levant with Rebel News.
You oversaw the censorship of us.
And he was sort of startled by that.
We spoke for about an hour.
He's not going to change.
He gets paid too much and he doesn't give a care.
Anyway, I'll tell that story another day.
Just briefly before we move on, it's actually quite relevant because if you keep an eye on the Foundation for Freedom online websites, foundationforfreedomonline.com will actually have a report up either today or tomorrow on NewsGuard's work.
Musk's Server Raid00:04:05
What a coincidence.
I was just mentioning that because I bumped into this guy very recently.
I'll check that out for sure.
They're awful.
Hey, let me just, I want to just show you one more Elon Musk thing before I move on from him because he's great.
There's this famous biographer, Walter Isaacson, who's done some very, he's a great best-selling biographer.
The guy can really write.
I think he did Steve Jobs' biography too.
And I saw this little video of him online talking about the get-it-done, no BS, roll-up-your-sleeves attitude of Elon Musk.
And I just want to share it.
It's not really apropos of censorship.
It's not really apropos of anything other than what an interesting guy he is.
And I know this is turning in sort of an Elon Musk fan club here, but there's a lot to admire.
And here's the story that Walter Isaacson tells of very early in the days when Twitter was acquired by Musk, and they had to go to some server farm and unlock some and take some servers out.
And he asked his staff, how long it will take this many months?
Well, you can do it in this many weeks.
Like he was pushing them.
No, no, it doesn't take months.
And in the end, they just flew there themselves.
And Musk and his little team just did the work themselves like that day that they had been told would take months to do.
I didn't tell the story great here.
Look at Walter Isaacson to tell this fascinating little anecdote about the quintessence of a no BS, get-a-done attitude that is so rare.
Take a look.
He was at Twitter headquarters, and he looks at all the engineering things, and they have three server farms for one in Portland, one in Sacramento, and one, I think, in Atlanta.
And he does the calculus in his head, and he said, we don't really need three different redundant server farms.
And the engineers say, well, yes, we do because we need backups and we need caching or whatever.
And he says, no, you're not going back to first principles thinking.
If you look at this.
Anyway, he decides they should get rid of the servers in Sacramento.
Well, they say, fine, but that'll take six months because, and he said, no, you can do it in six weeks.
And the engineers, and I'm sitting there in the meeting, and he's getting really dark, and they don't know how to deal with him because this is like a month after he took over Twitter.
So they don't know this dude.
And they're saying, well, no, I'm sorry, Elon, we can't do it.
And he'd say, you can do it in six weeks.
And by the end of the meeting, he said, you can do it in six days.
He gets really dark.
And he decides he's going to fire them.
But it's December 23rd.
So it's like two days before Christmas.
He does fire them.
But the next day, Christmas Eve, he's flying from San Francisco to Austin, Texas to go home for Christmas.
He's with two young cousins on the plane who are engineers.
And one of them says, why don't we just take those servers out ourselves?
Elon Musk makes a U-turn in his airplane, tells the pilot to go to Sacramento.
They were already over in Nevada.
They land.
He rents, there are like four of them on the plane.
They rent a truck, a sort of what we call a U-Haul truck, a rental truck.
And they go to the server facility and the guard there is like, flummox, it's Christmas Eve, and they're forcing their way in.
And they're looking at the servers.
And one of the engineers says, well, you know, we can't take them out because we need engineers to take off these elevated floors, you know, those floor tiles, or people say.
And Musk turns to his bodyguard and says, do you got a pocket knife?
The guy goes, yeah.
And he takes a pocket knife and pulls up one of the vents, rips up the floor thing, goes underneath the floor panel with a set of wire cutters that he got from Home Depot and cuts the cable to the servers.
And they start moving him out and put him in the U-Haul truck.
Just amazing.
And how many CEOs would actually roll up their sleeves and do something down and dirty like that, let alone one of the richest men in the world?
Go ahead, Alan.
What's your reflection on that little clip?
American Influence Lost00:13:26
Yeah, and I think there is a somewhat relationship to censorship here because this idea that competence should be prioritized is actually pretty horrifying to the deep state and the supporters of censorship.
The idea that you should prioritize, you know, working space rockets and working airplanes and working satellites over DEI quotas or, you know, favor, you know, getting another big contract for your buddies, you know, for the company that you've been buddies with for the last five decades.
You know, this is all very, very horrifying to the permanent governing class in Washington and other places.
And, you know, protecting themselves from calls for competent governance and calls for competence in general, you know, calls for police to arrest criminals and not innocent people who are expressing their political viewpoints.
You know, just calls for results that everyone wants is somehow an alien concept to the permanent governing class.
And I think that's a big part of why they're so desperate to control what people can say online because they'll just, otherwise they'll just drown under a wave of criticism and organizing from people who have had it with their, with, frankly, their lack of competence.
Yeah.
Hey, I want to ask you one last question about Elon Musk.
We've seen a lot of people take swipes at him all around the world.
You mentioned a very senior judge in Brazil who's been issuing astonishing demands against Twitter.
Nicolas Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela, has gone absolutely kooky.
Like, I think he hallucinates that Elon Musk is breaking into his house or something.
France, we've seen condemnations of Elon Musk verbally and the symbolic, you know, precedent setting arrest of Pavel Durov.
The UK Keir Starmer, I should say it with a German accent, Herr Starmer, has essentially blamed Elon Musk, not only for allowing Twitter to show race riots, but says that Musk himself, his comments are themselves inciting hate.
You've seen European Union bureaucrats, one fellow, I want to get his name right, Thierry Breton, if I'm saying it right, basically said on the eve of Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump, he sent off a letter saying, you'd better be careful what you ask him.
You better be careful because you could break European Union law.
The idea of one American interviewing another American on an American app being the subject of censorship of a European unelected bureaucrat is just off the charts, French audacity.
What I'm saying is all these world governments are basically saying, I hate Elon Musk.
He's safe in America.
There's less than 70 days till the election.
Do you think there's going to be some September surprise, October surprise?
We've already had such astonishing things happen.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the coup replacing Joe Biden.
There's still plenty of time for more tricks up the sleeve of the supervillains.
What do you think might happen?
Well, you know, this network of global censorship and this pressure from foreign governments, a lot of people in America, pro-censorship voices in America, really see the European Union and its Digital Services Act, which is what, you know, the vast system of online internet regulation that the EU passed into law this year.
They see that as, which they pushed for, by the way, as essential to controlling American speech.
So they think the European Union, by pressuring American companies, will force them to censor not just people in Europe, but also people in America.
And with Terry Breton's letter, that's sort of exactly what he's doing.
He was using a, you know, Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump, an American interviewing another American in an American presidential election.
Terry Breton, a European bureaucrat, somehow had a problem with that.
It's really none of his business.
And another thing to remember is, you know, European Union, Britain, Brazil, these are all nominally U.S. allies.
The U.S. has a lot of influence there.
And what the State Department is supposed to do in situations like this is stand up for American companies.
They haven't.
They've done more than that.
In fact, they actively supported and encouraged the Digital Services Act, this online regulation regime that Terry Breton is relying on.
And what's even more interesting to me is that, you know, Republicans, supposedly, mostly, I would say, a very pro-free speech party.
Jim Jordan's done great work at the Judiciary Committee, but not apparently entirely pro-free speech because, you know, and there are some pro-free speech Democrats as well.
RFK until recently a Democrat.
Tulsi Gabbat until a couple of years ago, a Democrat.
But interestingly, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over these areas over what U.S. ambassadors and what the U.S. State Department is doing in places like the UK and the European Union and Brazil, hasn't actually said anything about Musk being forced out of Brazil and the EU threatening his company.
It's very, very interesting to me that that committee has said nothing when it's in their jurisdiction.
So it's important not to see these things in the European Union and Brazil and the UK as isolated because they are, you know, America does have some influence there, influence, which it's not using.
Yeah.
You know, I see censorship being, bills and laws popping up around the world in the United Kingdom, in Ireland, in Scotland, in Canada.
In fact, they're often called the same thing, the Online Harms Act.
That's the name of it here, but I think that's actually what it's called in the UK, one of the laws, correct me if I'm wrong.
So I do see it popping up.
It's sort of surrounding America, and America isn't pushing back.
I want to close by showing one of your scoops from years ago.
This is the emergency town hall meeting after Donald Trump won.
This was in the Google headquarters, right?
Why don't you set up the clip?
I want to, there's a couple of clips.
You know the one where the staff were shell-shocked.
They thought, like every New York Times reading liberal, that there was like a 5% chance Trump would win, a 90-plus percent chance Hillary Clinton would win.
And then they thought, oh my God, not only did Trump win, he won because of social media.
Set up this town hall meeting, and then we'll play a couple clips from it.
And then I got a question for you about the 2024 election.
Remind our viewers, what was this clip and where did you get it from?
And we'll play a little bit of it.
Yeah, so this clip was Google's reaction to the 2016 election.
It was recorded just a couple of days after the election in 2016 and I managed to obtain it in 2018 from an entirely, I was receiving a lot of leaks at the time from employees at Google.
Google had just shifted in a massively pro-censorship direction that fired James DeMoore, who was speaking out against ideological conformity inside the company.
So I had all these Google employees reaching out to me with their stories about what was going on inside the company.
And someone, I still don't know who, it was an anonymous email, sent me a Dropbox link containing this video.
And it's fascinating because it shows Google's entire executive team expressing their horror, not just their regular employees, but their co-founders, their CEO, their C-suite, expressing their horror at the Trump election.
And not just that, but also plotting what they would do to make sure similar things didn't happen in the future.
They talk about all the things we saw in the following years, controlling disinformation, controlling fake news, dealing with so-called low-information voters.
So, you know, it's not just a despair session.
It's also a plotting session.
You know, it shows where Silicon Valley is going.
Speaking to white men, there's an opportunity for you right now to understand your privilege in the society.
Take the opportunity to go through the bias-busting training, read about privilege, read about the real history of oppression in our country.
And tomorrow night, watch 13th, the movie that is here.
If you can't watch it here, watch it on Netflix.
Discuss the issues you are passionate about during Thanksgiving dinner.
And don't back down and laugh it off when you hear the voice of oppression speak through metaphors.
And I promise to do this.
Google, I think, hasn't changed much at all.
I think Google, along with Microsoft, which is a partner of NewsGuard still, that organization we were just talking about, the media blacklisting company, those two big tech companies, there's no signs of change at all.
There's a little bit of, we see some signs of change from Mark Zuckerberg.
Like you said, he hasn't unbanned a lot of people, but he has expressed at least some remorse at what he did in 2020.
Obviously, X is now a mostly free speech platform.
But Google and Microsoft have shown no signs of changing, no signs that they're going to change their search blacklists, which again, we were able to obtain them.
They were published at Breitbart News in 2019, YouTube political search blacklists.
Just search for it if you can.
So a lot of the big tech companies are still very much in the tank for censorship.
And despite the changing attitudes in Silicon Valley more broadly, those are still two giant companies that are very much tied to the regime and the global censorship complex.
8.30 p.m. on Tuesday night.
I was at home with friends and family watching the election returns.
And as we started to see the direction of the voting, I reached out to someone close to me who was at the Javits Center where the big celebration was supposed to occur in New York City, somebody who'd been working on the campaign.
And I just sent them a note and said, you know, are you okay?
It looks like it's going the wrong way.
And I got back a very sad short text that read, people are leaving.
Staff is crying.
We're going to lose.
That was the first moment I really felt like we were going to lose.
And it was this massive kick in the gut that we were going to lose.
And it was really painful.
It did feel like a ton of bricks dropped on my chest.
And I've had a chance to talk to a lot of fellow Googlers and people have said different words, similar concepts.
How painful is it?
How painful this is?
Well, that's what they were like in 2016.
Just they were shocked.
They've had eight years to, like you say, plot.
If you had to predict what's going to happen in 2024, you said that it'll be less censored than the 2020 election.
I think some people are awake.
People are alert to some of the tricks.
Zuckerberg himself said, I was tricked by the FBI or whoever.
How do you think the election is going to go?
I mean, when it was Trump versus Biden, I think people were feeling pretty good there for a while.
Trump versus Harris has got a lot of energy into the Democrats.
What's your prediction?
Like me, you're not an American by birth.
You're a keen observer and a friend of America.
What do you think is going to happen?
I mean, it's interesting.
I think Trump's chances are quite a bit better than they were in 2020.
In 2020, you had this combination of so many things.
You had the very peak of Silicon Valley censorship.
Every single platform was controlled very, very tightly.
You know, Trump's most vocal supporters were banned.
He himself was censored on many occasions during the election and lost his account on every major platform just after the election.
And that was all encouraged, by the way, by the US deep state, by the agency within DHS, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency.
There's a lot of material there you can see about how they encourage the sense 2020 election.
In addition to that, the Democrats and their supporters just had a lot of energy going into that election.
They were coming off the George Floyd riots and the mass mobilization there.
They had an advantage because they had a political turnout machine focused on mail-in ballots.
Everyone was locked down under COVID.
So they had all these advantages, which I don't think they'll have this time around.
And also, if you look at the polling, it's true, Kamala Harris had a bit of a bump after she replaced Joe Biden simply because, you know, she's not senile.
But if you look at the polling averages, Trump today is way better than where he was in 2020, and even way better than where he was in 2016 at the same point in the race.
So polling-wise, it's actually looking quite good for Trump, I would say.
It's still a very tight race, so it's really hard to say what the outcome is going to be with any certainty.
Less Censored Election00:01:04
But certainly there is less censorship.
There's a genuine free speech platform in X that people have access to.
Trump's been unbanned on X. He's been unbanned on Facebook as well.
So we're dealing with a much less censored election than we were in 2020, which is great to see.
Yeah, I sure hope so.
Well, I'm nervous about it.
I'm also excited about it.
Almost great to reconnect with you.
Thanks for spending so much time with us and letting me talk so much.
I've just, I find this is one of my favorite subjects.
I find Elon Musk the leading citizen of our day.
And he continues to impress and perplex and challenge and innovate.
And we are the beneficiaries of some of that because we are in the free speech business too.
By the way, I look forward to your NewsGuard story.
What's your website that we can find that at?
Yeah, it'll be up on thefoundation for freedomonline.com.
You'll find plenty of other material there about NewsGuard.
You just tap the little search button.
You'll find a good rundown on NewsGuard, on their work pushing global censorship.