EXCLUSIVE Tommy Robinson interview： Election “wasn't a fair fight” — “They could do this to Trump” next
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Summary
Rebel Media's own student reporter, Jessica, spent two weeks covering Tommy Robinson's campaign to become the first independent MP in the United Kingdom. She was on the ground reporting from the ground in Manchester, covering the events surrounding the election, and saw first hand the results of the vote.
Transcript
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Tonight, Tommy Robinson loses his election in the United Kingdom, beaten by Facebook and Twitter.
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It's May 27th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
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I'm recording this late Sunday night in Manchester, the United Kingdom,
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the night where the election results for the European Parliament were revealed.
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The election was actually last week on May 23rd, but in some strange rule,
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the ballots were held for several days, I don't know, to mature like a fine wine or something.
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I don't know. It strikes me as odd from a ballot integrity point of view.
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We're curious about this whole process because, of course,
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the vote for the European Parliament should never have happened in the United Kingdom.
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As you know, in 2016, 17.4 million Brits voted to Brexit to leave the European Union
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and go, I don't know, like the UK has been for centuries, an independent country.
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Yet the Conservative Party has managed to stall and stall all the way through the day they were supposed to separate, March 29th.
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So this election last week was never supposed to happen.
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And in a reaction to that, well, Nigel Farage came back from semi-retirement,
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created a new Brexit party called the Brexit Party, and he stormed into the lead,
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dominating the election, taking votes from both the Labour Party on the left and the Conservative Party on the right.
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The old UKIP party that Nigel Farage used to lead lost a lot of its votes, too.
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But the vote we were very curious about was Tommy Robinson.
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He was running to become the first independent MEP ever elected in the United Kingdom,
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running in the northwest of England, which includes the large city of Manchester.
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We had, for two weeks, had our student reporter, Jessica, embedded in the campaign,
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I hope you had a chance to watch some of her videos.
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If not, you can see them all at TommyReports.com.
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Grassroots, working-class Brits seemed to love Tommy,
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but there were professional-style Antifa protesters who hated him.
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And, of course, there was a Muslim contingent, including the Muslim Defense League thugs,
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masked, throwing bottles and bricks that attacked Tommy's campaign events.
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The police, interestingly, at best kept the peace, but quite often stood back, allowing attackers to attack.
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It was a kind of deplatforming that followed on deplatforming of Tommy by social media companies.
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Until a few months ago, Tommy Robinson had the third-largest political page in all the United Kingdom on Facebook.
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When he would say something, immediately tens or hundreds of thousands of people would see it.
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And within a day, millions would get the message.
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But over the last year or so, Tommy has been steadily deplatformed, being unpersoned, being disappeared,
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to the point where he was running for this campaign, but couldn't get his voice out.
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The mainstream media would not report on him, and citizen media, democratic media, was banned.
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If that wasn't enough, I told you already how the police stood by on occasion,
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allowing rioters to physically attack Tommy's campaign events.
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And even when Tommy sent brochures through the mail, well, postal workers in the UK simply refused to deliver it.
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Is it possible to win a campaign in the year 2019 with no Facebook, Twitter, severely restricted YouTube,
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Well, the results became known today, and the answer was no.
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Historically, only about 8% or 9% was needed to win the election for an MEP in northwest England
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because eight different people would be chosen from the region.
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Alas, Tommy did not come close enough to the 8% or 9% needed.
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A disappointment to him, to be sure, and we'll have an interview with him in a moment.
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That's not to say that grassroots populist nationalism is dead.
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As I mentioned, Nigel Farage's Brexit party dominated the United Kingdom.
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On the continent, Matteo Salvini's party, he's the equivalent, I suppose, of Nigel Farage,
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but with a stronger anti-migration bent, he received the most votes of any party in Italy.
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Marine Le Pen, the national populist in France, absolutely trounced Emmanuel Macron's leftists.
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So, if anything, the same in Hungary and the same in Poland.
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National populism is very much alive, but in the United Kingdom, a combination of Tommy Robinson's
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deplatforming and the fact that you still had two good alternatives on the ballot,
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the UKIP party and the Brexit party, in my view, that conspired to keep Tommy out of office.
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But here's what's so interesting about this election.
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Not the fact that you've seen Antifa attack violently.
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That happens in Canada and the United States, too.
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Not even the fact that the British labor unions had their unionized postal workers not deliver
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That's a little bit new, but again, we've seen a little bit of that in Canada also.
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What's new is that this deplatforming was committed not against some citizen journalist or some
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private outspoken citizen, but against a registered candidate for political office.
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In fact, halfway through the campaign, an online payment processor, the equivalent of a MasterCard
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or a Visa, it's called Stripe, simply announced it would refuse to continue processing credit cards
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Again, not for him personally, but for his officially registered sanctioned campaign to run for Parliament.
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What is that other than foreign corporate interference with an election?
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That's what's new, that it was meddling in an election.
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But what was even more depressing was the complete silence or even nods of agreement from the entire
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establishment, from other political parties, from the media who despised Tommy, from the civil liberties
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groups who normally would squawk about such things, from people who claimed to have been concerned
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None of them had any problem when it was San Francisco tech giants like Twitter, Facebook,
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I find that troubling, and I find that as a premonition of what to expect in Canada and
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In fact, you could say that Twitter, Facebook, and those other companies were using Tommy Robinson
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And so far, the answer in the UK is, you bet they could get away with it.
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Well, having a success there, do you doubt that they will come and use those same tactics
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I think the good news is that the national populist spirit is alive and well in the United
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The bad news is the bandwidth of opinion, the Overton window is being shrunk, not by voters,
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but by a handful of opaque bureaucrats and corporate, well, we don't even know who, in Silicon Valley.
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First, it was Alex Jones that they went after in InfoWars, but no one stood up for them because
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How much longer till they come for us at the Rebel?
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Well, I'm here with the man of the hour himself, Tommy Robinson.
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Tommy, not the result that you were hoping for that I thought you would get.
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But I think it comes down to you have been unpersoned.
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There's reasons why the election campaign, there's all these rules and laws to make it
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You can only spend the same as each other, all these rules and regulations.
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But in this campaign, my opposition could use social media.
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They could do paid advertisement, which I couldn't.
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I had organizations doing paid advertisement against me, slandering, lying about me, demonized
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It's a record for an independent candidate for the European Union elections.
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And it was just in the one geographic region of northwest England.
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I have a theory that I heard someone on your campaign team say, is that because Nigel Farage
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was running with a very strong Brexit message, and because the UKIP was still on the ballot,
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and Gerard Batten has been strong on some of the other issues, like the Islamification,
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that maybe some of the Tommy vote dissipated to both of those parties.
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Multiple things like many people wouldn't even have known I was running.
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By the time we found out and got our leaflets printed, by the time we went out, people
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And then to campaign, we couldn't reach people.
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When we tried to use Royal Mail to do leaflets, they prevented and they blocked them, and
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If we lost a fair fight, I'd stand there and swallow it.
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And this should be a message to democracies across the world.
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Once social media giants and big tech are working with your government, it was the government
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And then when I fight in a campaign against them, I'd have the ability to reach people.
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We had a three-hour live stream tonight, and I thought it was very interesting.
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We took a lot of comments from around the world, thousands of comments.
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A lot of people from the United States follow you.
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And I think they're interested in you because you're an interesting person and because they
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But I think you're the canary in the coal mine.
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I've referred to the UK as a dystopian time machine where we can see our unhappy future
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What lessons, what warning would you have for people in America?
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That they will completely, they haven't just deplatformed me.
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I had the biggest, most interactive Facebook page in the country, 1.2 million followers.
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They didn't just remove me, but anyone who mentions my name.
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Any person that mentions my name then gets removed.
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Now, they could do that with anyone in America.
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If no media were allowed to talk about him, which they're not in mine, unless it's negative,
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his ability in his last campaign was that he had his own platform.
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He could use those social media platforms to get his message to the people.
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If they were removed completely and mentioning his name was banned, how would he fight another
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So that should be a warning that they've done it to Alex Jones.
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I've committed no crimes that have resulted in this.
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It should be a warning to every American, every American watching, that they will do
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This is big tech taking back control after watching the Donald Trump election, after
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This is them taking back control completely, limiting what we can say, limiting who can
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I had an election campaign where I had no ability to talk to the people.
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Well, you've been away from home on the campaign trail full tilt for so long, so I'm going
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You seem, other than the fact that you didn't win, you seem in good spirits.
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I remember when you got out of prison last year, they had roughed you up.
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I mean, you look defiant, and I mean, you're obviously not happy, but you seem, of all
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the setbacks in your life, this doesn't seem to have pushed you back because you've achieved
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So let me ask the obvious question that I know so many of our viewers will say.
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For those who don't know, I'm in court on the 4th of July for the same conviction that
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I've already spent three months nearly on solitary confinement for speaking and giving
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The level of censorship in this country is unreal.
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I don't think the establishment would be happy till I'm dead and gone completely, so
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Congratulations on a good run, and we look forward to it.
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We'll be back in London, both Jessica of our staff, and I'll be here in London covering
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your trial on the 4th of July and the 5th of July.
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To your followers, to the people online, to me, everywhere I go, I feel like I've got an
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The last four weeks have been an experience and a learning curve, and everything that happens
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Well, that's my report from here in the United Kingdom.
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It's a scrum that Tommy Robinson had when he walked into the official vote counting room.
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You heard him make some of these points in his interview with me a moment ago, but watch
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as he encounters the BBC and then Channel 4, another news network in the UK.
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We covered this live on our election night show here from Manchester.
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I can assure you that those networks, the BBC and Channel 4, did not cover them live.
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I would be very interested to see what, if any of this, made it to air.
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Um, I'd feel confident if it was a fair campaign.
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The fact that other people have been able to advertise on social media against me, tell
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Every single town and city I've gone into, the local MP has lied in the local newspaper.
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So the reason why people are allowed to spend an equal amount on a campaign is for a fair
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Everyone against me has been able to advertise on social media.
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2.4 million people, they've reached advertising against me.
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I'm de-platformed from all social media because what?
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Because the establishment made them de-platformed.
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The Labour Party contacted YouTube and made them remove me.
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Even when I've tried to talk to people through leaflets, the Royal Mail and their staff and
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If it was a fair campaign, I'd be super confident.
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This has proved that you can't have a fair campaign when the establishment and the government
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interfere and remove any ability you have to talk to the public.
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And not just do that, they then slander you and spread lies across the whole of the North
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And my ability to talk about it, anyone who's watched my campaign, you'd have seen us getting
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You'd have seen hundreds of masked Muslims march to our demonstration to violently attack
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The media spread the story across the whole country that Tommy Robinson clashes at his event,
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They don't tell the story that hundreds of masked balaclava-wearing young Muslims were
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But where were there hundreds of masked balaclava-wearing?
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See, if I had my social media, the whole country would have seen what happened.
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Hundreds of young Muslims chanting al-Aqbar, were marched for two miles, wearing balaclavas,
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telling the police who were walking them there what they're going to do when they get
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They then targeted my families with bricks and rocks.
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And this is all orchestrated and organised, so then the media, all of you lot, you play
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the propaganda machine while you run stories telling the whole country that my supporters
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So trying to combat your lies, all of your lies, along with a corrupt political class
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I'm happy that if I've politicised people from working-class communities.
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I think this whole election is about the Brexit, so Nigel Farge can absolutely smash it.
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But I would be excited about that if the Brexit party would talk about the issues that I feel
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affect most of us in working-class communities.
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They're just another politically correct party, unfortunately.
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What do you think your chances are of winning this super-antime right now?
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I've been talking positively through the campaign.
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When I went up to people and I'm handing out a leaflet, and then they tell me,
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And I hear that they've heard that from campaigns against me.
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If you go on social media and write Tommy Robinson, you get deleted from Facebook.
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But yet, you're not even allowed to mention my name.
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Did you watch on Question Time the other day, where a lady asked them on Question Time?
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Those social media platforms argue that you've broken their rules on inciting hatred,
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and that the language that you spread is Islamophobic.
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Now, Stripe is the processing payment for credit cards.
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Remove my ability to fundraise for this campaign.
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That's a foreign company interfering in the electoral process in this country.
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We either have a fair election campaign, or we don't.
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Everyone can't use social media, or no one can.
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So my ability to fight a fair campaign is gone.
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How can you fight a whole establishment that are funding...
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The union funded 100 billboards of lies against me.
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But, more than anything, every community I've gone to,
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every work in the house of the state I've gone to,
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I've felt more loved in this campaign than I've ever felt in my life.
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this should send a message to the rest of the world,
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It cannot be used in the electoral process when you only let...
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I feel like I've been fighting a fight with my hand
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Because government agencies, governments, politicians,
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all of them are lying on social media about me.
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And my supporters aren't even allowed to mention my name
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Do you recognise it's because some of the language used on your platforms
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What the government don't want is a different opinion
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59 million people watch my videos in four weeks.
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Tom Watson from the Labour Party was the last person
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Because you don't report the facts or the truth.
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is that you can't have a fair campaign currently now
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But like a watchdog that's had a watchdog that's had a laryngectomy,
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Tommy can call out things and all of us can call out problems in the world.
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I'll be back in Canada tomorrow and I'll give you more reports from our own country.
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But as I always say, coming to the United Kingdom,
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it's like a little trip in my own personal dystopian time machine.
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What happens in the United Kingdom today will happen to us in Canada in five years.
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Until next time, on behalf of all of us at The Rebel,