Ezra Levant examines Meta’s January 7th pivot away from censorship, scrapping biased fact-checkers and relocating moderation teams to Texas—mirroring conservative shifts. Skepticism lingers over Zuckerberg’s past concessions to governments like China and Canada’s C18 bill, but Alan Bokari hails this as a decade-long victory against Silicon Valley’s "censorship industrial complex." The episode contrasts U.S. government-funded pressure campaigns in Brazil (banning WhatsApp) and Europe (backing the Digital Services Act) with Meta’s new stance, while praising Harmeet Dillon’s Trump-backed nomination to fight alleged anti-white discrimination in tech. With personnel changes like Nick Clegg’s exit and Kevin Martin’s rise, Levant suggests a historic reversal—though vigilance is key as Meta implements its promised reforms. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't know if you heard the news, but Mark Zuckerberg has declared the era of censorship at Facebook over.
I can barely believe it.
I want to show you the video of Mark Zuckerberg saying so, and we'll talk more about it with Alan Bokari, who's been leading the fight against internet censorship for a decade.
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Tonight, Mark Zuckerberg declares that the era of censorship on Facebook is over.
It's January 7th, and this is the Answer Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorism bug.
Well, you've heard the phrase red pill and blue pill.
It's from the movie The Matrix.
To take the red pill means the scales fall from your eyes.
It's like eating an apple from the tree of knowledge.
You see what the world is really like, and maybe you wish you didn't.
The blue pill is: no, I want to go back to the Eden times where I'm unaware of how troubling the world can be.
Well, there's two other pills that the kids talk about.
Being a white pill means something that gives you a lot of encouragement and hope.
And being blackpilled, well, that's just things are futile.
It's a fatalistic end of the world.
Anyhow, I'm a little bit too old to be using slang like red pill, black pill.
But I have to tell you that two years ago, I was feeling rather blackpilled about the state of freedom because I felt like it was a ratchet.
Once you lose it, you'll never get it back, especially as machine learning and AI overtook human decision-making.
I mean, if you program AI to be evil, to be censorious, how can you ever undo that?
And everything in our lives was through the focus and the filter of our phones.
I was blackpilled, that's for sure.
Blackpilled About Free Speech00:14:39
And then Elon Musk bought Twitter, and then he started to bring back literally from the social media grave people who were regarded as too far beyond the pale.
Alex Jones being the most prominent example.
Donald Trump, I suppose, being even more prominent.
And now we have news from Mark Zuckerberg, the owner and founder of Facebook, that he's actually going to pull back from the brink to reject censorship and over-regulation, and that he's going to follow Elon Musk down the path of freedom.
Now, I'll believe it when I see it.
But you got to take the guy at least at face value.
Let me play for you a five and a half minute announcement by Mark Zuckerberg.
I want you to watch the whole thing and then we'll talk about it afterwards with a guest who knows this subject better than anyone else in America, I think.
I'll reintroduce Alan Bokari to you in a moment.
But first, here's a video statement by Mark Zuckerberg that'll make anyone pessimistic white-pilled.
Take a look.
Hey, everyone.
I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
I started building social media to give people a voice.
I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today.
But a lot has happened over the last several years.
There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content.
Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.
A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.
Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.
These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.
So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people.
And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.
The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
More specifically, here's what we're going to do.
First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US.
After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.
But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US.
So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
Second, we're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far.
So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.
We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation.
Now we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations.
And for lower severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.
The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't.
So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.
We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.
The reality is that this is a trade-off.
It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
Fourth, we're bringing back civic content.
For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed.
So we stopped recommending these posts.
But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.
So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas.
As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.
Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.
China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government.
And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship.
By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.
But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.
It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems.
They're never going to be perfect.
There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.
But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.
I'm looking forward to this next chapter.
Stay good out there, and more to come soon.
Well, I will stay good out here.
It's a very surprising thing.
Maybe there was a premonition this was coming.
I saw an announcement by Facebook that they were appointing Dana White of the very macho, very Trump-friendly ultimate fighting UFC to the board.
And I thought, gee, boy, he sure is trying to ingratiate himself with Trump.
And I know he met with Trump and he made a million-dollar gift to the Trump inaugural.
I thought, well, those are all symbols.
What about the substance?
Well, today, we heard the substance.
And who better to talk to about this than a man who has literally written the book about it?
I'm talking about my friend Alan Bokhari.
He used to be at Breitbart.com.
That's where we first became buddies when he was their senior tech editor there.
But now he's the managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
What a pleasure to be joined again by our friend Alan Bokari.
Alan, great to see you again.
And thanks for joining us.
I feel like these are momentous times for social media.
I don't know if you heard Mike talk about black pill, white pill, but I'm feeling for the first time since 2017, I'm feeling hopeful about freedom of speech online.
How about you?
I'm feeling very hopeful.
And, you know, I've been quietly white-pilled on Facebook for a while because even last year, I was hearing rumors inside the company from inside the company that there was a shift in direction or a planned shift in direction.
I guess the company was waiting for the outcome of the election to really solidify that and take it to the next level.
And wow, how have they really done that?
That statement from Mark Zuckerberg is really quite comprehensive.
I wasn't expecting, even though I was optimistic, I wasn't really expecting Meta to go that far.
It's a little bit of a bizarre feeling.
It's a good feeling to hear, you know, you hear the language before we even get to his policy changes, but you hear the language Mark Zuckerberg is using there.
He's talking about the legacy media.
He's talking about politically biased fact checkers.
He's talking about the whole censorship pressure, the whole censorship ecosystem of the last 10 years, the last decade being driven by political bias.
I mean, it's a bizarre yet good feeling to hear my own talking points, you know, the talking points we've discussed here on this show for the last decade repeated back to us by the CEO of Meta.
Yeah, it's great.
It's positive.
It feels like a massive, massive victory.
You still have to keep an eye on Meta to see how they implement this, how successful they are, how well executed it is.
But the policy changes Zuckerberg announced are very, very clear and very, very significant.
It touches on every single aspect of the censorship regime.
You're so right to point out the use of language that you just did, because embedded in that language is a bunch of assumptions that someone who is still dedicated to censorship would never say.
And to say we're going to work with President Trump, that's something that a typical Silicon Valley Democrat could not force their mouth to make those words with a straight face.
I also got a chuckle out of one of the things he was promising was to move the word regulation from California to Texas.
I mean, that's a slap.
I mean, there's no reason for that other than he's basically condemning California censorship culture and embracing Texas freedom culture.
Like that's that to me stood out as a quirky thing, but everyone who would think about freedom would understand exactly what he means.
Wasn't that a funny little wrinkle?
That was a funny little wrinkle.
I think there's actually a long history there, because if you go all the way back to, I think it was either 2017 or 2018, right when the censorship industrial complex was really in full steam and getting going, in the first ever appearance of Mark Zuckerberg before a congressional committee, I think it was a Senate committee.
You can see him getting grilled by, I think it was Ted Cruz on the left-wing biases of his employees.
And Zuckerberg's response back then in 2018 was that, yes, Silicon Valley is a very left-leaning place.
That's why so many Facebook employees vote for the Democrats and donate to the Democrats.
So he recognized it back then, and that's a culmination of that logic and that pressure that Meta and other Silicon Valley companies have always been under from Republicans and from the conservative media, that their employees lean to the left, that they're part of a very left-wing culture.
They're based in the most, possibly the most left-wing place in the United States in the San Francisco Bay Area.
And I think him moving the trust and safety team to Facebook is a good, you know, a very big symbolic move, as well as like a real move, because if it means there are going to be more Texan employees, that will change things as well.
It also means they'll be subject to the laws of Texas rather than the laws of California.
And, you know, another thing, I'm sure the trust and safety employees will be happy that they're much less likely to step on a heroin needle walking down the street than they would be in San Francisco.
You're right.
I mean, there are some left-wing places in Texas, as hard as that is to believe.
Austin, for example, is a little bit lefty, but the Texan culture still is dramatically more freedom-oriented than California.
It's interesting.
I mean, I've been extremely critical of Mark Zuckerberg.
I mean, I know you're the expert in this field.
I think he's part of me thinks he's just trying to move with the times as any wise businessman would.
He's even got a bit of a makeover.
He's got that new hairstyle.
He's wearing a chain.
He's sort of cool.
And part of me wants to be skeptical because I don't want to be easily tricked.
But I think you have to be open-minded to your opponents changing their point of view.
You have to meet them.
You have to at least start off thinking, okay, he's doing these things in good faith.
And I mean, as they say, the test of the pudding is in the tasting.
We'll see how it really goes.
But he talked about some issues.
He talked about gender.
He didn't say transgenderism in sports and bathrooms, but that is a really hot frontline battle now.
And that used to be one of the most censored issues.
I remember on the old Twitter, if you misgendered someone, if you called a transgender person by their biological gender, you would be suspicious.
I don't know how they did it so quickly, but you would be suspended immediately if you deadnamed someone.
So if you were to call Mark Jenner Caitlin Jenner or vice versa, that would get so to give up that frontline in the culture wars and immigration.
I think part of it is getting with the Times, but those are pretty key parts of the Democrat message bundle.
That's quite an astonishing thing.
That's very specific, isn't it?
He's not going to crack down on transgender stuff anymore.
That is one of the things that struck me about Zuckerberg's statement and really impressed me actually was the level.
It wasn't just a vague commitment to free speech.
We're going to be more free speech friendly.
It was very, very specific.
He mentioned immigration.
He mentioned gender.
And he said specifically that they've been used as excuses.
The speech controls around those subjects have been used as excuses to shut down political debate.
That's a very specific and a very specific commitment to get rid of those speech controls specifically.
That is huge.
And the way he discussed the technical implementation of it as well, he said that automated AI censorship would now only be reserved for the most extreme illegal content.
Things like child exploitation and things like that.
AI will be used for that, but it won't be used for the more minor rules around civility and hate speech.
That have to be a report first.
And that is a really significant technical change that he specifically referred to as well.
Not just getting rid of the speech controls over immigration and gender debates, but also changing the way the technical enforcement of all the rules is implemented.
U.S. Imperialism and Online Censorship00:15:45
And it's very, very positive.
Like you said earlier at the start, very blackpilled about the idea of these AI censorship algorithms being used to monitor and censor speech automatically.
Zuckerberg saying they'll only be reserved for the most illegal content.
That's a huge move.
Yeah.
I found that very encouraging.
Another thing, one of my favorite things about Twitter these days is what they call community notes.
And I've had two community notes.
That's when viewers say, hey, not so fast.
You got an error here or you're leaving this context out.
It's a way that ordinary viewers can fact check you.
And I sort of love it.
The two times I've been fact-checked in that way, I'm slightly miffed, but I have to concede there's some good points there.
I love the fact that you can put a community note.
Again, it's sort of like voting by the public to correct.
You can correct anyone.
You can correct the New York Times.
You can correct Elon Musk.
I think he has been community noted almost 100 times.
And there's something wonderful about it that it's sort of grassroots.
You've got to make sure it's not games like Wikipedia is.
But for Mark Zuckerberg to say he's going to revert to a popular community notes-based system rather than an AI system, first of all, that's kudos to Elon Musk, who pioneered that at Twitter.
And second of all, it's just, it gets it out of the hands out of the Silicon Valley leftists.
You know what?
I don't want to be overjoyed.
That's not the feeling.
It's sort of a relief and like you've been shot at by a gun and they missed and you feel like you have a second chance.
Yeah, I was talking to Alex Jones earlier today of InfoWars.
I remember when he was canceled by 14 different social media apps on the same day.
And I know you watched that moment too.
I mean, even iTunes deleted his old work.
Even LinkedIn, how did he get canceled by LinkedIn?
Pinterest.
I don't know how does Pinterest 14 on the same day.
And there was a real collusion and a real cartel.
Some of it was ideological, but in fairness to Mark Zuckerberg, some of it was coming from the government.
One of the things we've seen in recent litigation is that the government was threatening these guys to go further than even their own political ideology wanted them to go.
So I don't want to be, I want to be mean to these tech oligarchs.
They deserve it.
But they don't deserve 100% of the odium because some of it was basically threats by the Biden administration.
Do this or else.
Yeah, as we look back on the censorship era, which now thankfully seems to be fading quite quickly into the past, I think a good sentiment is, forgive, but don't forget.
Never forget how bad it was.
Never forget that they censored a sitting president of the United States, even sparking global outrage.
Never forget, like you said, they shut down independent journalists, banning them on every single platform.
And not just the speech platforms, but also the payment platforms, trying to cut them off from the economy, trying to destroy their livelihoods, their business.
And this happened to so, so many people in this era.
And, you know, when it comes to people like Mark Zuckerberg, I try and separate Silicon Valley into three categories, right?
On, you know, category number one, you have the true heroes who stood up for free speech from the beginning, who stood up for ideological diversity from the beginning when censorship was at its worst.
And they often paid the price with their careers and being canceled.
James DeMoore, the Google whistleblower from, well, not even a whistleblower, just the Google dissenter whose name was leaked to the media back in 2017.
He's a great example of someone like that.
And then, you know, the category I would put someone like Mark Zuckerberg and even Jack Dorsey and some of the other CEOs from the era in would be the pragmatist side, right?
These weren't, they weren't like super idiologically committed to censorship, but they blew with the wind.
They were pragmatists.
They saw all this pressure coming from the media, coming from the government, coming from government-funded NGOs, coming from foreign governments as well, coming from advertisers.
There were advertiser boycotts, and they caved into it.
It would have been great if they had a collective backbone and stood up to it, as Elon Musk did two years before Trump even won.
He took a big risk doing that, really.
But many in Silicon Valley didn't stand up to it.
They were pragmatists.
They saw all this pressure.
They succumbed to this pressure.
And they only stopped when that pressure started to dissipate.
Those guys, you know, forgive them.
They responded to incentives.
They responded to outside pressure.
Don't forget what they did either.
That's very, very important.
That's a very good idea.
Also, don't forget that they only started changing, I think, after around 2022 when Republicans took back control of the House and started launching all these investigations into the censorship industrial complex.
And of course, the reason they were able to do that was, you know, because of the work of people like you, Ezra, because of the work we've done at the Foundation to research and expose the various tentacles of the worldwide censorship regime and, you know, the nonprofits that are funded by the government and the advertiser boycotts.
It was a collective effort that finally defeated and put the census back on the back foot.
And we should savor the victory that Meta has decided they don't have to listen to the online censors anymore.
They don't have to listen to these people who are pressuring them over the last 10 years.
Yeah.
There was an interesting line in there, if I recall it right.
Zuckerberg said he sort of needs the help of the U.S. government to defend against censorship efforts by foreign regimes.
He mentioned Latin America.
I know Brazil is being particularly harsh.
I actually flew down there for a pro-Twitter rally in Sao Paulo when the government of Brazil was cracking down on its opponents and ordering Twitter not to reveal anything.
It was quite any.
I won't try to explain what was going on, but around the world, and you see, even in recent days, Prime Minister Kier Starmer of the UK, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor of Germany, the leader of Norway, all these Eurocrats and other others around the world are saying Elon Musk must be silenced.
Maybe Elon Musk is so bold because, as Mark Zuckerberg alluded to, they're going to have the backing of Donald Trump to not roll back their First Amendment.
It's an interesting battle.
As Zuckerberg said, America has the strongest free speech protection in the world.
I think that's true.
Wouldn't it be something if that empowered global companies like X, Facebook, et cetera, to push back against censorship in other countries?
I suppose other countries could ban American firms, but if Trump was ornery enough, he could sort of react to that too.
Help me figure that out.
Because I think one of the reasons why Elon Musk has seen so being so bold in the last week is I think he knows he's got Trump, Trump has his back.
I think that's why the Europeans are being cautious too, because they're thinking how close is this guy to Trump?
Why don't you talk a bit about that?
Yeah, this could be potentially one of the most significant things that the incoming administration can do.
My colleague Mike Benz, who founded the Foundation for Freedom Online, has got a great word for it: free speech diplomacy.
The United States using its global clout, using the clout it has with its allies specifically to roll back some of these assaults on free speech.
Not just the free speech of their own citizens, but also the free speech of Americans by trying to destroy free speech platforms like X.
And again, you look at Mark Zuckerberg's statement, you look at its specificity.
He specifically mentions Latin America, Brazil.
He specifically mentions secret courts in Latin America.
That, I believe, is a reference to Brazil and their very, very powerful judicial system that has been used in the past, not just to go after X, but also to go after WhatsApp, which is a meta-property.
WhatsApp has been shut down in Brazil multiple times because Brazilian judges see it as a way for Brazilian citizens to evade censorship, to share alternative narratives, alternative information that isn't in the mainstream news.
And Zuckerberg also mentioned Europe, the Digital Services Act, this mammoth piece of social media regulation that came into force last year, the European Union.
We've done some reports on this at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
If you go and search our website for our report on the 2024 censorship blueprint, we found the architects of online censorship in the United States, people who were involved in that government, in those U.S. government-led efforts between 2016 and 2020 and today.
They're talking about the European Union as their last hope, the last really powerful government, that really powerful institution that's on their side and has the clout to really threaten companies like X and other free speech platforms.
But as powerful as the EU is, they are aligned with the United States.
They have a lot of trade relationships with the United States.
There are a lot of levers of pressure that the United States can use on Europe and even more so on Brazil, also on Canada, on the United Kingdom.
So that if these jurisdictions start going after American companies, there are a lot of tools in the U.S. government arsenal to a lot of trade pressure, diplomatic pressure, all sorts of things that the U.S. can do to blunt those assaults on American free speech, if not completely reverse.
Yeah, you know, listening to you describe those non-military levers, the word soft power comes to mind.
Hard power, I suppose, is military power.
But 25 years ago in Canada, the Liberals in particular talked about soft power.
We may not have a military anymore, but we've got soft power.
People listen to Canadians.
I'm not sure if it was ever quite true around the world.
We were a little bit into peacekeeping back then.
I don't think it was ever really true.
But that's what you're talking about.
You're talking about America using the bully pulpit, using trade access, basically saying to other countries, if you enjoy interacting with America financially, diplomatically, militarily, we now have some demands on you.
And it's shocking to hear those.
Like, I mean, even Canada has not been spared.
Donald Trump is making great demands of Canada.
He's making enormous demands of Panama.
He wants the canal back.
He's talking about taking Greenland.
But that's the Trump wave, by the way.
I repurchased the art of the deal, and I started rereading it because I wanted to understand how Trump negotiates again.
And he makes dramatic claims to reset the balance of things.
And I think that's his way of saying, I don't always want to go to war, and I don't want to be pushed over either.
I'm going to use these soft power tools.
And what better way than to basically call the bluff on the world's either real dictators or little dictators and say you're not going to infringe the freedom on our companies?
By the way, that applies to Canada too.
What makes me sad about this announcement, Alam, is that I think Zuckerberg said it's starting in America.
That doesn't mean Canada.
In Canada, I don't know if you know this, you can't even post a news story to Facebook because Trudeau passed a bill called C18 where Facebook would have to pay $100 million a year to news companies that it linked to.
So now if you're a Canadian like we are, you post one of our stories to Facebook.
It says this story unavailable in Canada.
So that's really damaged independent journalism.
But more importantly, it's damaged individual freedom.
So I wonder if Trump will be able to wash away that bill from Canada.
We need some saving up here too, Alan.
Yeah, and that's a very sad situation for the independent media in Canada.
And it's entirely the government's fault.
I was actually on Meta's side when it came to that issue.
Because of course, I mean, if you're forced to choose between propping up the legacy media, paying them hundreds of millions of dollars and banning them, I think banning them is the way to go.
Of course, the legacy media should not be bailed out with hundreds of millions of Silicon Valley dollars.
And I'm pleased to say that I was pretty heavily involved in stopping a similar bill in the United States, which would have done similar things called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.
Similarly to the Canadian bill, it would have funneled all of these ad dollars to legacy media companies.
And it was written in a way that excluded the independent media from any of those benefits, podcasters, new news websites, any news website, in fact, that didn't have sort of legacy publication numbers that all the old media companies do.
So I'm glad we blocked that in the United States.
There's also a similar one in Australia, of course.
But, you know, a very important point because on the use of U.S. pressure, because I already know what the legacy media is going to say in response to this.
I know what the censorship industry is going to say.
I know what the, you know, the die-hard supporters of the old woke pro-censorship regimes are going to say, especially in places like Europe and the United Kingdom, where Keir Starmer's in power and Canada, where the liberals are still in power.
They're going to say, this is U.S. imperialism.
This is the U.S. imposing its will upon us.
You know, this is, you're unpatriotic if you support these U.S. efforts.
Well, hold on a second.
For the last 10 years, the U.S. government has been using its soft power for the opposite purpose.
They've been using their soft power to pressure other countries to censor even more.
In Brazil, the U.S. government funded counter-disinformation researchers.
The U.S. Embassy in Brazil even held workshops on combating online media disinformation that included pressuring social media companies, American social media companies, to censor.
So they're actually training Brazilians on how to censor American social media platforms.
They even funded groups that worked with the Brazilian superior electoral court, the same court that's gone after Elon Musk's companies and ordered WhatsApp to be banned.
So the U.S. government, you know, if you want to call it U.S. imperialism, U.S. imperialism has for the past 10 years been promoting online censorship in places like Brazil.
In Europe as well, Biden's State Department actually supported the Digital Services Act.
Silicon Valley tried to get the State Department to lobby Europe to dilute that act a little bit and make it less aggressive.
The Biden State Department did the opposite.
They hailed it as a great step forward.
And I'm sure there have been similar efforts in other countries.
U.S. government dollars flowing to arms of U.S. soft power abroad to promote online censorship, to promote what they call combating disinformation.
So, you know, just because the shoe is about to go on the other foot doesn't make it U.S. imperialism because you're going to have to say the same thing about what happened before.
Yeah.
Well, hopefully this will cut off a lot of the money to so-called fact-checkers and so-called disinformation experts.
Canada is just full of them.
Harmeet And Civil Rights00:03:31
I want to talk about just one more thing.
You've been very generous with your time, but you and I have a mutual friend, Harmeet Dillon.
She's a lawyer in San Francisco.
Harmeet's great.
She's amazing.
She's actually done some work for Rebel News to help us when we were canceled by a cruise ship company.
I first heard of her when she helped James DeMoore.
You mentioned him earlier in the interview.
He was the Google staffer who just objected internally to some conversations about feminism, and he was fired and she helped him.
Harmeet was just nominated by President Trump, if I've got this right, to be the Deputy Attorney General for Human Rights.
You correct me if I've got that title wrong.
It's something like that, civil rights or something.
What do you know about that?
And Harmeet basically fought for freedom and fought against cancel culture at the hands of big tech.
I think she is single-handedly perhaps the most active American on this file who's a lawyer.
I mean, you do this full-time for a living, so I'm taking nothing away from you.
And there's some politicians, but in terms of on the ground, boots on the ground, I think she's the number one.
And when I saw Trump name her, I was absolutely thrilled because she knows, like, there's no way she'll be co-opted by the department.
She's there for a mission.
Tell me your thoughts on Harmeet and what that appointment possibly means for America.
I think that's a fantastic appointment and should be perfect for that role.
I'll tell you what, if I were Google, if I were Alphabet, I'd be pretty nervous right now because Harmee Dillon, as you mentioned, was James DeMoore's lawyer.
She sued Google back in 2017, a very, very high-profile class action case, actually.
There were other Google employees part of that lawsuit that made a very strong case.
I thought that Google discriminated against its employees on the basis of their political viewpoint and on the basis of their race and gender, because DEI policies at the time across many, many companies clearly discriminated against white males and to some extent Asian males as well.
That was another part of Dylan's lawsuit.
And that ended, I believe, in arbitration.
And the National Labor Review Board, which is this DC bureaucracy, refused to take the case.
But now Harmi Dylan is going to be leading civil rights.
Civil rights is sort of, you could say it's the heart of darkness when it comes to the government DEI regime, you know, this promotion of anti-white discrimination across all of society, these promotions of diversity quotas.
Really, if civil rights means anything, it should be that everyone is protected from discrimination.
But we know across the corporate sector that discrimination against white people, against white males, even against Asian people to some extent, it was endemic.
It was rife.
And now we've got someone at the Civil Rights Department who really, really understands that issue, who did the first big high-profile case on this very issue.
So it's fantastic news, really.
I can hardly wait to see what she does.
I mean, I couldn't believe she did so much work.
She was also a senior personality in the Republican RNC.
So I don't know how she found the time, but she was great.
I'm glad you share my view on that.
Well, Alam, it's great to catch up with you.
I truly am feeling hopeful.
And like you say, forgive, but don't forget.
Mark Zuckerberg presided over a lot of terrible censorship.
But for whatever reason, he seems to be coming around.
Congratulations on New Role00:01:34
And I agree with you.
He's using language and specificity that suggests perhaps he means it.
And I think Donald Trump is blunt enough that if he feels Zuckerberg is a problem, he'll certainly say so.
I think Zuck is getting ahead of the curve.
And you're right.
If I was Google, I would be a little bit concerned.
Last word to you.
Keep an eye on the personnel as well.
Personnel is policy, and the promotions at Facebook are really, really good.
Nick Clegg, big supporter of censorship, is out.
And people like Kevin Martin, who former FCC chairman, is being promoted.
He opposed censorship apparently throughout the entire era of censorship.
So that's great news as well.
Yeah, Nick Clegg, for sure.
That was such a strange hire.
He was a politician from the United Kingdom who did not share First Amendment sensibilities.
So I'm glad he's out.
Alam, great to see you.
Congratulations on, because you yourself have some paternity over these things.
You've documented.
Tell me the name of your book again.
I don't want to misquote it.
What's the name of the book?
Deleted Big Text Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal an Election that came out in 2020, just before that election, which Silicon Valley did indeed play a big role in stealing.
Yeah, your book really is what made me so sad.
So now I feel happy that the pendulum is swinging back.
Keep in touch, my friend.
We've been talking with Alan Bukhari.
He's the managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.