Ezra Levant and Alan Bokhari dissect Trump’s early moves—abolishing USAID ($40B+ slush fund for leftist NGOs) and targeting Pentagon/DoE fraud—to expose Big Tech censorship tools like NewsGuard, funded by U.S. agencies to suppress populism globally. Comparing Elon Musk’s "king-like" leadership to Trump’s 80% majority strategy, they argue their partnership could dismantle D.C.’s entrenched bureaucratic control, forcing opponents into a losing stance. This shift signals a potential realignment where tech and politics collide, threatening establishment dominance with unchecked public support. [Automatically generated summary]
One of my favorite people, one of the smartest people I know, one of the clearest thinkers I know, and I love his accent too, is my friend Alam Bokhari.
I used to know him as the senior Breitbart editor for big tech.
Now he works fighting for freedom online.
Alan Bokhari is our guest today.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, when was the last time you felt great about big tech?
Well, I'm feeling that way now.
I'll tell you why.
It's February 11th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
Oh, hi there.
Have you ever heard the phraseology blue pill or red pill?
It comes from the sort of sci-fi deep thinking movie of a couple decades ago called The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves.
And you're inside the Matrix, and it's a very strange, half-psychological, half-computer place.
And you can take the blue pill and go back to your blissful ignorance, sort of like the before you were cast out of the Garden of Eden, before you ate from the tree of knowledge.
Or take the red pill, which would wake you up to the harsh realities of the world, but at least you would be conscious rather than unconscious.
That was from the movie, but the kids invented two more different pills.
Black pill is when you're just, you've given up.
Everything is so desperate, there's no hope.
Blue pill is you're numb.
Red pill is you're alive, and fighting black pill is we're all doomed.
But white pill, white pill, say the kids, is when suddenly you're full of hope and your troubles have washed away.
And let me tell you that our special guest for today's podcast has personally taken me through all four pills.
He's the one who helped red pill me back in the day about the big technology censorship, the war on dissident ideas, especially if you were pro-Trump or pro-freedom.
He's the one whose books and investigative reports made me blackpilled, thinking there's no way out of this.
It's only going to get worse.
Censorship and big tech control are like a ratchet.
They only get one way.
But in recent weeks, he has, along with me, become white-pilled, the amazing hope that big tech might actually become free again.
And we're both marveling at what Elon Musk is personally doing.
So those are the four pills that I've gone through all four of them with our guest, Alan Bokari, who sat down with me yesterday for a feature interview.
Here's that interview now.
Well, every day I can hardly wait to wake up and roll over in bed, turn on my phone, and check Twitter to see the next chapter in an unfolding story, the battle between Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk and his hand-picked wizards, versus the deep state.
Incredible Twitter Battles00:05:03
It's incredible to see.
He's got this team of young guys.
They're all in their 20s or even their teens.
They all have fun nicknames.
One of them goes by the name Big Balls, and I ain't afraid to say it.
These are coding geniuses who are working their way through various government spending databases.
They went through USAID, which is a massive $40 billion plus slush fund for every crazy woke scheme around the world.
They did so much revealing that President Trump just abolished the whole department.
Now they're moving on to the Department of Education, and soon they'll be unleashed on the Pentagon itself, nearly a trillion dollars a year.
Well, this isn't sitting well with the Democrats who are invariably the beneficiaries of all this.
Let me show you a beautiful moment, and this is worth it in itself, a security guard standing in front of the doors and just not moving when a gaggle of entitled Democrat congressmen demanded him to, and just the forlorn look on his face.
Give this guy a prize.
Take a look at this wonderful exchange.
That's Maxime Waters, a fossilized Democrat entitle maniac.
Take a look.
Are you prepared to stand here all night if we decide to stay?
I guess, yeah.
All right, well, you just stay right there.
You just stay instead of.
Why are you letting us go to that desk like we were able to do last year?
No, he's not.
He's not a U.S. employee.
This is a public institution.
Did Elon Musk hire you?
Who do you work for?
Look them in the eye.
Come on, hold your face up.
Look at him.
Let them see you.
This is him.
Look at it.
What's your name?
Tell us your name.
Give me that ID again.
I've given you the idea first.
So what?
I showed you the ID.
You do what?
I showed you the ID.
Would you let me see the ID again?
No.
No.
Will someone else ask him for the ID?
Will you ask him for it?
He won't let me see it again.
You dare see it.
I asked him to see it.
I didn't see it.
Well, he held the line just like Big Balls is holding the line every day.
They're trying to dox these kids and get them fired.
By the way, yesterday, Donald Trump was asked aboard Air Force One if he trusts Elon Musk.
He almost laughed it off as a ridiculous question.
Here's Trump's answer to that.
And I've had a great help with Elon Musk, who's been terrific.
Tom, you say you trust him.
Trust Elon?
Oh, he's not gaining anything.
In fact, I wonder how he can devote the time to it.
He's so into it.
But I told him to do that.
Then I'm going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education.
He's going to find the same thing.
Then I'm going to go to the military.
Let's check the military.
We're going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse.
And, you know, the people elected me on that.
It's clear the regime media is trying to drive a wedge between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Here's the cover of Time magazine.
The president was asked about that too, and his answer was classy.
He didn't even know Time was still around, did you?
Mr. President, do you have a reaction to the new Time magazine cover that has Iran Musk sitting behind your resolute desk?
Is Time magazine still in business?
I didn't even know that.
It's incredible to me to see the shoe on the other foot.
You will recall that for a better part of a decade, Democrat politicians had riveted themselves straight into Silicon Valley, and it was the political deep state that was telling the Twitters of the world what to do.
It's incredible to see the tables turned, and now Twitter is not just telling the Democrats what to do, just cutting off their slush funds by the billions.
Joining us now to talk about this is someone who has been tracking big tech for, well, really, since the beginning of its social media and its interface with the political system, our friend Alan Bokari, who is the managing director of the Foundation for Freedom online.
Alam, great to see you again.
We got to get you a nickname, by the way.
Not sure I can compete with big balls.
You know what?
I love saying it because it's so silly.
And you can just get, there's sort of a dorm room frat boy aura to these guys.
But I think sometimes frat boy phraseology is for jocks who don't study, who just fool around.
These guys are super smart brainiacs, sort of in the mold of Elon Musk himself.
In fact, several of them were his former interns.
And they have that banter.
They have that self-deprecating humor, but they bring the big smarts.
They have managed to do more auditing of the government in the last week than I dare say any auditor general has done in the last decade.
Pentagon's Crypto Soft Power00:12:59
Fill in some blanks for our viewers.
What's really going on?
Well, it's been truly incredible to see.
Just over the past week, we saw an entire U.S. government agency, U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, with a $40 billion dollar budget just get completely dismantled because the Dogeboys exposed that it was what we've been tracking at the Foundation of Freedom online as well,
that USAID really became a slush fund for far-left NGOs, for foreign influence operations that were geared towards advancing online censorship and really geared towards undermining the domestic political opponents of the blob in Washington, D.C.
And that's just one example.
They're also going to now look into the Pentagon as well, which, you know, the Pentagon is supposed to be for national defense.
In the Biden administration, in the Biden years, the Pentagon was funding organizations like NewsGuard, which is a private for hire censorship shop that builds blacklists of disfavored news outlets.
The Pentagon gave them, I believe, over $700,000 under Biden.
So you see, across so many government agencies, you just see the censorship industry being bankrolled.
You see partisan NGOs and nonprofits being bankrolled.
And you see agencies just going way, way beyond what they were founded to do.
You know, it's I understand foreign aid, and I understand some of it can be charitable, but I think much of it is designed to promote a country's national interests.
But it seems like it was sort of this private crypto government on the side.
I mean, truly, a deep state that had its own will.
Here's a tweet that the president of El Salvador, Naebukeley, put up.
And he was saying that all these NGOs and civil society groups had opposed a certain measure.
I think it was a mining measure.
But without the USAID money and manpower to gin up the street protests, he posted a photo from overhead showing a few dozen people.
And you saw Viktor Orban of Hungary saying similar things.
And you've seen people in Ireland saying similar things that USAID was financing color revolutions around the world, that it was ginning up opposition to conservative populist leaders.
And that without that money, this whole left-wing movement, political movement that faked being grassroots, it's just gone.
It was an American astroturf, as they say, not real grassroots, but fake grass, AstroTurf.
And it was run by Samantha Power, if I got her name right, who was a hardcore lifelong Democrat.
I can't believe she was allowed to stick around until a few days ago.
Yeah, I mean, so here's the thing.
To really understand this, you got to take a big step back into history and look at when these organizations were founded and for what purpose they were founded.
So USAID and other organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, which similarly to USAID gives out all of these grants around the world, you know, millions and millions of dollars.
Nothing compared to USID, which had a $40 billion budget.
But they were all Cold War assets.
So their purpose, their original purpose, was to spread U.S. soft power and build movements to undermine international communism and the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union's assets.
And they were very, very successful at this.
Don't get me wrong.
You go back to the 1990s and you'll see articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times praising organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy for doing out in the open what the CIA used to do covertly in terms of regime change.
And that's, I think, pretty much a direct quote from the Washington Post's David Ignatius in 1991 when he's describing the National Endowment for Democracy.
USAID performs a very similar function.
But while it's initial, what we're dealing with here is you have this huge global apparatus of soft power, which had a purpose during the Cold War, fighting communism, fighting America's global enemy, the great global enemy, the Soviet Union, that then becomes purposeless after the Berlin Wall falls and rediscovers its purpose after 2016, gets turned around, weaponized, turned on the American people,
turned on the global populist movement because the deep state decides that its number one enemy in the absence of the Soviet Union is Donald Trump and the populist movement.
And that's what we're dealing with there.
You are so right.
You know, I remember I used to work a long time ago for the great John O'Sullivan, who was an attaché to Margaret Thatcher when she was PM and then he was, I believe, with the Daily Telegraph in the UK.
And he was really part of the, he was attached to the period of time where the Berlin Wall fell.
In fact, O'Sullivan wrote a book about Thatcher Reagan and Pope John Paul II and how they sort of together helped bring down the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War.
And when the solidarity movement in Poland, in that Polish shipyard of Gdańsk, started mobilizing, there was a ton of Western actors and helpers, whether it's fax machines they were giving or just advice.
Absolutely.
And That was, in doing so, Alam, they probably saved, God forbid, a war would have, a hot war would have happened during the Cold War.
They would have saved millions of lives.
And to have a peaceful collapse of the Soviet bloc, you can't even measure that in trillions of dollars because all the blood saved.
So give credit where it's due that there were some State Department and CIA operatives who helped bring an end to the Soviet empire peacefully.
But you're so right.
We've got this massive deep state permanent military industrial complex that's like a shark.
It's got to keep moving forward.
It's got to keep eating or it dies.
And it's decided to eat not just political allies like Hungary and El Salvador, but turn on Americans itself.
You mentioned the News Guard.
That's a censorship organization paid by the U.S. Air Force to attack North American media.
I think you might know that a few years ago, there was a military contractor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock that was hired by the U.S. Naval Intelligence to do a workup on rebel news.
What have we got?
First of all, I'm not even a good swimmer.
So why is the Navy coming after me, Alam?
On a more serious note, like, what on earth are they doing?
Is it just about giving contracts to their friends and making everybody rich?
Why would they take on rebel news?
Maybe it's because we were really the only outfit in Canada that was pro-Trump.
But that is not a legitimate expenditure.
And if Elon Musk and Big Balls and the rest of those lads wind up cutting tens of billions or even a trillion dollars, or I think $2 trillion was their goal, I don't think America's going to be any weaker.
In fact, I think it'll be stronger, like when Elon Musk cut Twitter by 80% and the product got better.
It's just a miracle to behold.
And it's just amazing.
Yeah, well, you mentioned fax machines in Gdansk.
And you can see the same thing in the modern era where during the Arab Spring, the State Department was trying to keep social media platforms alive across the Arab world and make sure the forces of destabilization in the region against its enemies had access to Twitter, had access to Facebook.
And this ties into why they became so concerned with online censorship and controlling social media, because what they saw as an asset during the Arab Spring, they saw as undermining their own power in their own countries, the power of the establishment, the power of the blob.
When Donald Trump won the election, when Brexit happened in the UK, they suddenly realized, oh no, social media is going to undermine this system that they had in place for decades where they'd have a very friendly mainstream media that controlled the public's access to information.
Suddenly, social media broke that, which is why we've done this at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
You track all the government funding to all of its soft power assets around the world.
So much of it has been spent on combating so-called disinformation, which is the pretext that these organizations use to advance social media censorship, to encourage governments around the world, actually, to regulate American tech companies.
It doesn't sound like it's in America's interests for foreign governments to be fining and regulating and banning American tech platforms.
But the establishment, the blob, including the foreign policy blob, sees it as very much in their interests to stop social media's encroachment on the legacy media, stop it from weakening its stranglehold over the flow of information.
And I think, you know, the past election shows that they really did fail.
And that's why that blob is now being dismantled.
Because what essentially happened is, yes, I mean, the foreign policy blob did a great job during the Cold War.
No question about it.
They won the Cold War without really firing a shot.
But what happened, and you see the same thing happening throughout history, whether it's Roman Praetorians or Turkish junissaries, the people who were entrusted with defending the United States, defending the West, decided that the Western public itself had become a threat.
And the West needed to be defended from itself.
And they were the people to do it through this vast censorship apparatus.
And now that's being dismantled.
You know, it's like every single bad guy, if they were out of office, they could count on a safety net being there through USAID or one of these other programs.
I mean, all around the world, I just forgot his name now, the former Australian prime minister who is now, I think, the ambassador from Canberra to Washington.
I've just read or something.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Like Politico, a left-tilting news organization, $8 million worth of subscriptions.
That's insane.
I think the New York Times itself got, was it $40 million worth of subscriptions from, I think it was AID, or that maybe another government department.
How do you even, like, there's not enough people.
Like, did they buy literally every bureaucrat a subscription just to launder money to their friends?
Like, it's so gross and it's so ubiquitous.
Like, it's as bad as anyone ever claimed it would be.
Again, Alex Jones-level conspiracy theories are not enough to take in what actually happened.
This is another one of those Alex Jones was right moments.
Yep, and another example, just in the past few days, we published a new report at the Foundation for FreedomOnline.com on the use of U.S. money in Europe funding European NGOs and journalists.
And, you know, we found over $9 million in subscriptions to just one media company in Europe, Francis AFP, one of the largest news agencies in the world.
$9 million in subscriptions, together with funding for 21 other organizations in Europe, all of which are either enforcers or signatories to the EU's code of practice on disinformation,
which has become the Digital Services Act, which is being used to go after Elon Musk's ex, being used to go after American tech platforms that are deemed by European bureaucrats to be insufficiently committed to censoring hate speech or disinformation.
That is supported with U.S. government money spread across all of these NGOs and news organizations in Europe.
Judges Blitzkrieg Executive Actions00:15:25
So it's a perfect example of what I was just talking about, which is the soft power apparatus, which was built for the Cold War, now being turned around to censor Americans and undermine American tech platforms.
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You know, there's something else that's going on that's just incredible.
And I think we all noticed it the very first day, January 20th, which is Trump's pace is unprecedented.
He, you know, people used to talk about the first hundred days of administration.
I think the first hundred hours of this administration is even too long a period of time because the number of executive orders and changes, like they started deporting illegals the same day.
They started, they made moves the same day as he was inaugurated.
And even just yesterday, so Donald Trump goes to the Super Bowl.
But even in his journey, he's signing executive orders.
Sometimes they're trivial, like getting rid of the penny, which he announced yesterday.
You know, the penny costs two cents to make.
He put out a tweet saying so.
Bringing back plastic straws, stopping the rules for those awful paper straws.
Some of it is trivial.
Some of it is taunting or amusing, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
But is it really funny?
Because how many things does the left rename?
How many historical traditions do they tear down and rename?
You know, in Canada, some of our great founding fathers, so to speak, have had streets and subway stations named after them, renamed some woke name.
Why can't Trump rename things?
But what I'm getting at is the speed, the momentum.
He's keeping his enemies on the back foot.
He's moving so fast.
They're still reacting to what he did a week ago, but he's done six more things since then.
It's a kind of blitzkrieg, pardon the analogy, of executive actions.
I don't even think there's been any votes in Congress on any substantive bills or anything.
It's just Trump moving with every lever of power that he has, and it's awesome.
What do you make of the pace of it?
And, you know, on two counts, I think Democrats and the establishment that oppose Donald Trump have themselves to blame on this because they spent so many years, decades, even building up executive power.
And now that executive power is being used in ways they don't like, finally, in ways that it certainly wasn't used during the first Trump administration.
And that's another way in which the establishment and its allies in the blob and its soft power apparatus and its allies in the media sort of undermined themselves because they used all of their energy, used so many dirty tricks during the first Trump administration, so much censorship to make sure he lost in 2020.
They co-opted Silicon Valley platforms.
They destroyed free speech on those platforms, which was part of the founding DNA of those companies.
They expended all that effort.
And the only effect they had was to give Trump four years to prepare for his new term.
I think if he won in 2020, he wouldn't have had all that time to prepare.
He wouldn't have had time to put everything in place.
I think it was sort of a silver lining for Trump that he was out of office for four years and could prepare this frimsy of activity that we're now seeing play out.
I see a couple of judges, local, I think they're called district judges.
I'm not familiar with the court system in the U.S. to understand the difference, but I understand that sometimes a district judge will, in one locality, say, I'm now going to make a ruling that applies to the entire United States of America.
And those often get slapped down.
But in one case, a judge said you can't simply en masse stop all these payments.
And I think he was referring to the USAID, if I'm remembering the case correctly.
And they're coming up with judges who are often partisan.
I mean, every judge is appointed by some president, but these are some particularly activist judges.
I suppose that's the empire strikes back, isn't it?
I mean, I suppose everyone knew Trump was going to take some steps and they were going to lean on the Democrat strength of activist judges and activist lawyers.
I don't know if that's going to work.
I mean, I suppose some of it is how quickly Trump can get a superior court to knock those down.
And I suppose in some ways Trump might literally just not listen.
I mean, Joe Biden didn't listen when the courts said his student loan forgiveness was unlawful.
I mean, what are you going to do?
Arrest him?
I think that the courts by overreaching, by prosecuting the lawfare against Trump for the last four years, have sort of burnt up their moral authority, is what I'm saying.
I think conservatives are generally very law-abiding and respectful of legal authority.
But when you spend four years bending the laws to get Trump, there's not a lot of respect left in at least the Republican side of the populace to say, hey, Trump, you better slow down.
This judge might have a point.
I think those activist judges torched the reputation of all judges in a bit.
What do you think?
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think when you had, like you said, four years of lawfare, what is it, 400 indictments against Trump already, a completely weaponized judicial system, really, combined with Soros-funded DAs letting violent criminals out onto the streets.
I think a lot of Americans know that just because someone's a judge or a DA doesn't necessarily mean they're not a partisan political operative.
And I think many of these judges who are now coming out with rulings against Trump fall into that category.
I think a lot of this will end up at the Supreme Court.
A lot of it will end up at higher courts.
And we'll see what happens there.
But certainly with the Democrats not in control of the House, not in control of the Senate, not in control of the White House, and not in control of the bureaucracy.
They were arguably the establishment was still in control of the bureaucracy, arguably, during the first Trump term.
That's clearly not happening this time around.
So their only option really is to, number one, fall back on the courts, on the judicial system, and number two, I think, fall back on their foreign allies.
There's a lot of hopes, particularly in the censorship industry, the vast network of disinformation researchers and private companies like NewsGuard that support online censorship, that the European Union with its Digital Services Act can somehow bring Silicon Valley to heel.
But the Trump administration has a weapon against that too in the form of tariffs.
You could argue that the DSA with its massive fines on American tech companies is a tariff in all but name on the tech sector.
And Trump and the American government is perfectly within their rights to respond to that with their own trade measures.
You know, I remember when Mark Zuckerberg had his conversion on the road to Damascus when he renounced, and we talked about this before, he even used the language of the right in jettisoning transgenderism and things of that sort.
To me, by far the most important thing in Zuckerberg's comments were when he alluded to the fact that the State Department would help Facebook liberalize its approach to free speech in foreign countries.
And to me, and I think we agreed on this, that's code for the State Department would push back on any government that said to Zuckerberg, no, no, no, you've got to keep doing our bidding, whether it's in Brazil or in the UK.
And just this morning, it looks like Rumble, the free speech platform, is back in Brazil.
Something must have moved there, which is surprising.
I think something did.
I think that something was the USAID going away.
You have to.
It's important to remember here that it's not.
It's not so much the the current State Department and the current US government pressuring these foreign countries.
It's more a case of them undoing the damage that they had already done over the past.
You know, half decade or more.
Because you know, as we've, as we show in our latest report, in Europe and also frankly, in Brazil, there was millions and millions of US government money flowing into these places, into Brazil, into Europe, into NGOs that were across these countries, across the continent of Europe, whose sole purpose was to create a panic around disinformation and to encourage regulators in those countries to go after American tech companies.
So really, that you know, if Trump pushes back on that with with what Mike Benz calls free speech diplomacy, if they push back on that with tariffs or with a new direction from the State Department, that's really undoing the damage that the foreign policy blob had done in promoting online censorship around the world.
It's so interesting, you know I'm not sure if you know this, but a few months ago, when Brazil banned Twitter in general in Brazil, because there was an activist judge, Alexandre De Moraj, who was ordering Twitter to silence certain critics of the regime, but for Twitter to stay silent about it.
They were basically saying, censor this guy, but don't tell anyone.
We told you to do it and Elon Musk and Twitter said, we're not playing by those rules.
So this De Moraje banned the whole app.
We went down there for a day because we heard there was going to be a rally in support of Twitter.
I thought I got to see this and it was huge.
I've heard you know 100,000, 200,000.
It was that big half of Sao Paulo's downtown was shut down and everyone really was there to talk about freedom.
It was the most astonishing rally.
It was the largest rally I've ever been in my life by far, and I could just imagine operators on the street.
You know what?
What USAID would have had on the other side.
To that, I mean, I just when you're in a hot third world country.
I don't know if Brazil's third world, that's the kind of place where the CIA and USAID, I suppose they operate, and maybe they were one of the reasons.
As you say, maybe they were one of the reasons Twitter was banned and Rumble was banned.
Rumble's back.
I see the White House has announced they're having a Rumble platform account, like they do with YouTube.
I don't know.
I'm just a little bit hopeful that freedom's on the march and it's fun to me because I follow the news in other countries.
I follow the news in Ireland.
For some reason I'm sort of hooked on that and that's a country with tens of thousands of NGOs.
It's almost a joke that there's an NGO.
There's actually an NGO for every 100 Irishmen.
Like I'm not exaggerating, that's not a rounding error.
There's about 40 or 50,000 NGOs in a country of 5 million people.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
So when USAID shut down, that immediately devastated the left wing in Ireland and there was like some $70,000, $70,000 grant for a play and this for, and all these Irish are saying, which play was it?
Like, all of a sudden, everyone realized they were living in this artificial world funded by the U.S. deep state.
It's amazing how, and I'm sure it was heavy duty in Israel where USAID would have been against Netanyahu.
Absolutely.
I mean, and I'm just trying to think of other countries where, I mean, Hungary, obviously, probably Italy with probably Germany to shut down the AFD, probably France to go after Maureen Le Pen.
Like, I think that the whole world has had a burden lifted off them that they didn't even know was American.
I mean, it's $40 billion worth of propaganda a year.
That's a lot of nudging, isn't it?
It's a lot of nudging.
And when you consider the wealth disparity between the United States and most of the rest of the world, you can really see how this $40 billion budget can just overwhelm domestic political opposition in some of these countries.
You know, there's just so much money available that domestic political forces just don't have, especially in the developing world.
So it's very easy for this self-power apparatus to gain this much influence, which again served a purpose during the Cold War.
It would still serve a purpose if you're actually fighting America's adversaries like China.
The problem is it was used in this global crusade against populism because the foreign policy establishment, along with the rest of the establishment in D.C., decided that Donald Trump was their number one enemy and not, you know, say a country like China.
Let me ask you one last question, and it's sort of how I started.
I mean, Elon Musk is a unique human.
He's one in a billion, I'd say.
The combination of smarts and his style of getting people to do things his way.
You know, who else could have built SpaceX, Tesla, against all odds?
His hands-on approach and the way he deals with subordinates is rather unique.
He spent a quarter billion dollars on Trump's campaign.
He personally campaigned in Pennsylvania, a key state.
And he is the alpha dog everywhere he goes.
He's the boss of everywhere he goes.
Either he owns a company outright or he controls the dominant shareholder interest, or he has the total respect of the.
So the man isn't like a president.
He's more like a king in his own companies.
He issues a decree and it happens.
There's no official opposition at Tesla.
There's no official opposition at SpaceX.
So you got a man with a bigger-than-life personality, the largest following on Twitter, if I'm not mistaken, loves to comment and chirp on everything.
And then you got Trump, larger-than-life, big ego, likes to comment on everything, but he's actually the one who won the election.
He's actually the one who wields the power.
You can see the left is trying to pit these men against each other and have a falling out.
Is that how this is going to end?
Or do you think those two men know that this is the most politically profitable partnership in recent times?
Maybe since JFK and RFK were president and attorney general together and there was the bonds of blood between them, the two brothers.
I mean, I'm trying to think of a duo.
80/20 Issues Profitability00:04:27
And Elon Musk is elected by nobody, but this is such an important partnership.
In fact, I don't think anyone else in the world could do what Elon Musk is doing with Doge right now.
Is this a stable molecule?
Or are these two atoms going to spin apart?
That's certainly what the press would like to happen.
I see no signs of it happening right now.
And, you know, I think the only way they'd succeed is if they somehow managed to completely nuke Elon Musk's popularity with the American people, which I think is, you know, quite, they're going to, obviously people on the left are going to hate him naturally.
I think it's very hard to get a majority of the public to hate someone who successfully sends rockets into space and brings them back down again.
You know, all of these technological achievements.
You know, it's hard to say that Musk and his companies and the talent that he attracts to his companies who are now going to work on the federal government aren't just enormously capable and enormously competent.
And when it comes to Trump, I think Trump has always respected winners.
And there are a few bigger winners than Musk and his companies.
And I think you look at how much has been accomplished already with the USAID.
I don't think anyone in DC or in the legacy media can keep up with these guys.
Because I was reading this funny, funny story I saw on X actually about how a lot of people in DC don't know how to deal with people who want to work on Fridays, who want to work on the weekends.
It's just completely an alien attitude to the bureaucracy.
And I think a lot of people in America, a lot of people in the public realize it's been a long time coming for this bloated blob that's been in charge of the country for so long.
Hey, let me show you a quick clip of one of my favorite commentators.
He's on CNN, which makes him even more remarkable.
I think you know who I'm talking about, Scott Jennings is his name.
And he's such a good talker.
And I really think he's a good thinker.
Here he is talking about how Trump is good at the 80-20.
And what he means by that is he finds an issue where 80% of people are on one side and 20% on the other, like men in women's sports or like Doge cutting through the fat.
Trump takes the 80% side, but because so many Democrats are reflexively anti-Trump, they choose the losing side.
Here's Scott Jennings saying it a lot more poetically than that.
He's describing what is currently the dumbest strategy in politics, which is Democrats taking the 20% side of every 80-20 issue in America.
USAID, people want this pared down.
They want it streamlined.
They want to know where the money is going.
Democrats have a meltdown.
Today, Donald Trump signs executive order on keeping boys out of girls' sports.
Democrats take the 20 side of that issue as well.
All these issues, this is like Trump's superpower, finding a bunch of 80-20 issues, getting on the 80, and everybody who's sort of reflexively against him gets on the 20.
And now the Democratic Party has like a 31% approval rating.
This is why.
I think he's right.
And I think so many of Trump's opponents really do have Trump derangement syndrome that no matter what Trump does, they'll oppose him, even if it's wildly popular.
I've got to think this Doge cutting of crazy spending, I mean, I haven't seen polling on it, but I got to hope that it's extremely popular.
How could it not be the kind of waste they've discovered?
And for the Democrats to dig in either shows that they're just anti-Trumpers, or maybe they were on the take.
I think it's such a winner.
I'm so excited.
And I hope and wish one day it comes to Canada.
Last word to you.
Yeah, I think that's what the blob is really afraid of, that the example set by Musk and Trump just in the past few weeks is going to spread to other countries because the public in Canada, I'm sure, are fed up.
Public in Britain are fed up.
The public in Europe are fed up with their leaders who've just slavishly followed what the global establishment based in Washington has directed them to do over the past few decades.
And I think there'll be demands for similar things elsewhere.
Alan, it's great to see you again.
We're super fans of yours.
We've been reading your stuff for years.
Everybody, we've been talking with Alan Bukhari.
He's the managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
Keep in touch, my friend.
Good to be on, Ezra.
All right, there you have it.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.
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