EZRA LEVANT ｜ Did you know there are still 423 people in Toronto city government alone working on the Covid file？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
165.80095
Summary
There are still 423 people in Toronto working on the Pandemic pandemic response to the Global Flu Pandemic. That's more than double the number of people in any other city in the whole country, and it's coming from one city in particular.
Transcript
00:00:00.320
Hello, my friends. A couple of things I want to tell you about today, including the number
00:00:05.400
of bureaucrats still working on the COVID-19 file in governments across this country.
00:00:10.840
Thousands. What are they doing, by the way? I'll tell you the news out of Toronto.
00:00:16.500
I'll also talk to my friend Alan Bokhari about Elon Musk on Twitter. That's ahead,
00:00:22.120
but first let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus. That's the paywall version
00:00:26.620
of this program because it's the video version. So this audio podcast is free, but we make a video
00:00:33.040
version and we put it behind a paywall for eight bucks a month. Now you get this weeknight show.
00:00:39.340
So that's 20 episodes a month. Plus we have four weekly shows. So you add it all up. That's 36
00:00:44.440
episodes of five different programs every month for eight bucks. You get the video production.
00:00:51.180
And the reason I'd like you to consider doing that is because we need that $8 because we don't take
00:00:55.720
any money from Trudeau. So we rely 100% on viewers like that. But like you, please consider doing
00:01:01.060
that. Go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month. It'll be a real favor to me
00:01:06.340
because we've got to make payroll around here. All right, here's today's show.
00:01:09.180
Tonight, did you know there are still 423 people in Toronto city government alone
00:01:30.640
working on the COVID file? It's November 3rd and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:35.820
I shouldn't be surprised by things anymore. I mean, I'm half a century old and is there really
00:01:56.720
anything new under the sun? I mean, come on. But this story surprised me. Toronto Public Health
00:02:03.400
wants to cut $9 million, 423 jobs from COVID-19 response. So that's just the city of Toronto.
00:02:12.800
One city in this whole country. And it's just Toronto Public Health. That's a public health
00:02:17.780
agency. That's not a hospital or a clinic. It's just bureaucrats. The busybodies, the city level
00:02:24.720
Theresa Tams and Anthony Fauci's. Every city in Canada has a public health agency and a public
00:02:30.740
health officer. And every province does and every regional health authority or whatever it's called
00:02:35.400
in your province. It's incredible, the number. Oh, and they are handsomely paid. I should remind you,
00:02:42.140
Theresa Tam alone makes a third of a million dollars a year. She doesn't have any patients.
00:02:47.920
She does not do medicine. It makes me laugh when people like her are called top doctors.
00:02:53.380
How are they the top doctor? Maybe in salary, but maybe in political power, but they're not actual
00:03:01.860
top doctors. The powerful, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, that's for sure. They were never
00:03:08.580
elected to do anything. They have uniformly exceeded their legal authority. And Toronto alone had 423 of
00:03:15.820
them. But how are they in the top in anything? They're not the best in their field. Still, to this day,
00:03:21.300
there's 423 of these COVID bureaucrats, actually to be, to be more precise, that's just the number
00:03:28.400
that they're proposing to cut back. They're not cutting back to zero. Here, I'll read from the
00:03:34.100
actual story. Toronto Public Health wants to cut more than $9 million from its COVID-19 funding
00:03:39.660
and over 400 jobs next year as it transitions away from its heightened response at the peak of the
00:03:45.640
pandemic. Yeah, that's been over for a couple of years, folks. The city's health agency submitted its
00:03:50.860
2023 operating budget to the Board of Health Committee for consideration last week and is
00:03:55.500
proposing an overall budget of over $369 million and 2,309.9 positions. The budget is an overall
00:04:06.520
decrease of $1.2 million and 423.9 positions lower than the 2022 approved operating budget. So they still
00:04:15.440
have 2,309.9 positions. I'm not sure what the 0.9 position means, but still more than 2,300. These
00:04:23.600
are not doctors actually doing doctoring. They're bureaucrats. They're just cutting a small slice of
00:04:29.880
them. This line made me chuckle. It is not clear what the reduction in COVID-19 funding will impact.
00:04:38.100
Exactly. I mean, you know that even the professional scaremongers are no longer pretending that we're in a
00:04:44.520
pandemic, right? I mean, you know that, right? The chief grifter, Teresa Tam, she switched to global warming
00:04:50.480
fear-mongering months ago. This is back in April, I think. Climate change is affecting our health today
00:04:57.280
and will continue to do so in the future. Its impacts are broad and can range from heat waves to disruptions
00:05:03.140
to our food systems. Together, let's take daily actionable steps and invest in our planet, Earth Day.
00:05:09.200
She knows that no one believes the pandemic hype anymore other than the 2,309.9 people in Toronto
00:05:16.820
who are paid to gin up fear. So there's obviously no shortage of money. A third of a billion dollars
00:05:23.160
for bureaucrats at the city level in Toronto alone. Imagine what the total number is across Canada. But
00:05:28.100
let me show you another story about public health. What's the difference between public health, by the
00:05:33.040
way, and between actual medicine? Well, public health is another way of saying health politics.
00:05:39.440
Medicine is about helping a particular patient. It's private. It's between a doctor and a patient,
00:05:44.180
and no one else is involved. It's individualized care tailored to that person, their whole situation,
00:05:51.880
including mental and physical and their history. You get to know your doctor. He knows your story.
00:05:57.440
Public health is the opposite. It treats us all as interchangeable, like ants in an ant colony.
00:06:02.560
There's no privacy. You must disclose your information to the government. No personalized
00:06:07.620
care. You must all take the jab, no matter what. No freedom of choice. You could lose your job or
00:06:13.240
access to public life if you refuse to obey. What a disgrace it is. You know, look at this next story,
00:06:19.820
because it really, it's similar, and I'll explain the overlap. Canadian doctors encouraged to bring up
00:06:29.160
medically assisted death before their patients do. Oh, really? A guidance document produced by Canada's
00:06:37.160
providers of medically assisted death states that doctors have a professional obligation to bring up
00:06:43.340
made. Made. They use that word because it hides the meaning of what they're up to. Made.
00:06:48.540
Even spelling it out is politics. It's assisted suicide. It's euthanasia. It's culling the weak,
00:06:54.360
the old, the sick. It's not medicine. It's anti-medicine. It's anti-healthcare. It's public
00:07:00.080
health, not medicine. It's eugenics. It's the kind of thing that the Nazis did getting rid of
00:07:05.200
undesirables. I refer to the Nazis specifically and on purpose and not in an overheated way because it was
00:07:11.380
the Nazis who dressed up their radical racial and eugenics policies as public health. There were plenty
00:07:19.120
of doctors involved in their final solution. And after the Second World War, after the Holocaust,
00:07:24.260
there were the doctor's trials, the Nazi doctor trials, from which the West developed what was
00:07:28.960
called the Nuremberg Code, which were rules that limited what doctors could do to patients.
00:07:34.760
It involved informed consent. It was the moral and legal bulwark against the kind of atrocities
00:07:39.660
the Nazis had committed. It was expanding on the Hippocratic oath, do no harm. Do no harm.
00:07:45.020
That's the motto of doctors. Of course, we just detonated the Nuremberg Code and the concept of
00:07:51.480
informed consent during the pandemic, didn't we, with forced vaccines. Like I say, there's a big
00:07:55.520
difference between public health and actual medical care. I'll read some more from this latest story.
00:08:02.460
In most jurisdictions in the world with legalized euthanasia, doctors are explicitly prohibited or
00:08:08.460
strongly discouraged from raising assisted dying with a patient. The request must come from the
00:08:14.780
person. But a guidance document produced by Canada's providers of medically assisted death
00:08:20.980
states that doctors have a professional obligation to bring up MAID as an option when it's, quote,
00:08:26.540
medically relevant, and the person is likely eligible as part of the informed consent process.
00:08:31.800
But of course, just like Orwell called the propaganda ministry in the book of 1984, the ministry of
00:08:38.120
truth, and the war department was called the ministry of peace. You now have deaf doctors promoting
00:08:43.080
suicide in the name of public health. Who's promoting this? Who's behind this? I don't know.
00:08:49.060
Maybe it's one of the usual suspects like this guy.
00:08:51.620
It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And somehow we have to make changes
00:08:57.400
that will bring that down to zero. It's been constantly going up. It's only various economic
00:09:05.320
changes that have even flattened it at all. So we have to go from rapidly rising to falling and falling
00:09:11.840
all the way to zero. This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication. So you've got a thing
00:09:18.580
on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero. And that's going to be based on the number of people,
00:09:23.900
the services each person's using on average, the energy on average for each service, and the CO2
00:09:31.980
being put out per unit of energy. So let's look at each one of these and see how we can get this
00:09:39.200
down to zero. Probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero.
00:09:44.840
That's back from high school algebra. But let's take a look. First, we've got population.
00:09:51.000
Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about 9 billion. Now, if we do
00:09:57.300
a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that
00:10:04.080
by perhaps 10 or 15 percent. Could be. He's always banging on about how there are too many people in
00:10:09.420
the world. We have to get rid of maybe a billion of them. Here's the chief eugenicist promoting this
00:10:15.380
suicide. Dr. Konia Trouton is a physician based on Vancouver Island. She has been involved in social
00:10:22.460
justice aspects of health care since medical school. Dr. Trouton is a founding member of the
00:10:28.360
Canadian Association of Maid Assessors and Providers and can used to be an active board member
00:10:33.840
promoting education to medical assistants in dying in Canada.
00:10:38.300
She would have fit right in in Germany in the 1930s. So many people needed coaxing towards
00:10:45.280
suicide, didn't they? Look at this logical pretzel. Not providing information about MAID in a timely
00:10:53.340
manner to someone who might be eligible can create harm, Trouton's group said. You see, it's positively
00:11:00.340
immoral not to tell someone they could kill themselves. And this is not theoretical. It is happening right
00:11:06.260
now. And why? Ideology, like anti-human extremists like Bill Gates. But of course, money. I mean,
00:11:13.560
treating someone who is sick, giving them actual medical care, especially if they're old, well,
00:11:17.380
that's just too costly. We need that money to hire more public health bureaucrats to tell us about
00:11:22.800
global warming or COVID-19, even though it's no longer 19, it's 2022. Look at this story just recently.
00:11:32.560
Another case of a sick Canadian offered death instead of treatment. This time, a veteran,
00:11:39.800
a veteran seeking help with PTSD and traumatic brain injury, was instead offered the prospect
00:11:46.560
of assisted death. Yeah, you bet. I mean, he's just a military veteran and you know how they are.
00:11:53.940
I was prepared to be killed in action. What I wasn't prepared for, Mr. Prime Minister,
00:12:08.860
So which veteran was it that you were talking about?
00:12:14.420
Thank you, sir. Thank you for your passion and your strength and being here today to share this
00:12:20.760
justifiable frustration and anger with me and with all of us here. Thank you for having the
00:12:27.640
courage to stand here and thank you for listening to my answer. On a couple of elements you brought
00:12:33.780
up. First of all, why are we still fighting against certain veterans groups in court? Because
00:12:41.620
they are asking for more than we are able to give right now. They are asking for more than we,
00:12:48.300
well, no. Hang on. You're asking. I think these two stories are linked. The public health 423 COVID
00:12:58.960
agents in Toronto and telling seniors and veterans just to kill themselves. I think they're linked.
00:13:05.680
I think it's because the government and the state is in charge of your medical care, not you and your
00:13:09.640
doctor anymore. Doctors were silenced during the pandemic. Anyone who dissented from big government
00:13:14.300
or big pharma was suspended if they were a doctor. Doctors are now agents of the state now. And
00:13:20.520
by the way, so is your body. They'll tell you what you can do with yourself and what you can't. And
00:13:25.920
they'll also helpfully tell you when they think it's more convenient and certainly more cost effective
00:13:31.680
for you just to kill yourself. I mean, it would be positively immoral and unethical for them not to.
00:13:54.260
Well, I'm addicted to Twitter, partly because it is the lifeblood of our company. Rebel News is a news
00:14:00.000
organization. Twitter is very useful for people in the news business. It's got a great search engine.
00:14:05.180
It's live status updates from around the world. It's also useful for politics and for sports and
00:14:11.200
for entertainment and even just for keeping in touch with your friends. But it has taken on
00:14:15.420
tremendous importance, which I think is why it is valued at more than $40 billion. The value is it can
00:14:23.660
shape and turn the national, international conversations, and it can move elections. We saw
00:14:31.200
that in 2020 when Twitter made the shocking decision to ban the New York Post, one of the oldest
00:14:36.740
newspapers in the United States, from tweeting about Hunter Biden's found laptop and the scandals
00:14:43.660
therein. Twitter put its thumb on the scale, and we later learned that through polling that a lot of
00:14:49.140
Americans would have voted differently in 2020 had they known. Well, Twitter is now out of the hands of its
00:14:55.100
former board, which curiously included a lot of people from the State Department and other
00:14:59.800
international politicians, which suggests they knew its true value was not financial, but rather
00:15:05.320
political. And it's now in the hands of Elon Musk, a man who is quirky, has some libertarian beliefs,
00:15:12.300
but also is exposed to communist China through his other company, Tesla. What will Elon Musk do? He says he
00:15:19.460
wants to make it more politically balanced, more politically diverse. He has said that he wants to
00:15:24.400
replace a woke ideology, which he calls a mind virus, with a set of censorship that is more in
00:15:31.280
accord with the law as opposed to radical PhD activists. So what is going to happen with Twitter?
00:15:38.460
I'm curious, because I care about the public query, and joining us now is someone who knows more than
00:15:42.880
most about this subject, our dear friend Alan Bocari, the senior tech editor at Breitbart.com. Alan,
00:15:47.920
great to see you. I didn't think it would happen. I thought for some way the deal would be scuppered,
00:15:53.680
but Elon Musk is now the chief twit, as he calls himself, of Twitter. I think it's incredible. I'm
00:16:00.380
very excited. Yeah, it happened very, very quickly, and there were so many ups and downs throughout the
00:16:05.660
process. You really couldn't know what was going to happen. You know, first Elon Musk made the offer
00:16:09.320
for Twitter, then he tried to withdraw it, and there was the court case, and then it all suddenly came to a
00:16:14.700
head at the end of last month. Sorry, go ahead.
00:16:21.060
So what he said is that he wants Twitter to go back to, he's compared, so his vision for content
00:16:29.080
moderation, he's compared it to movie ratings. You know, you can choose whether you want a mature
00:16:33.500
movie or a PG-13 movie, and that's really the way content moderation used to be done in Silicon
00:16:40.640
Valley with optional content filters like Google Safe Search with block buttons, all the choices in
00:16:47.860
the hands of users. And that only really changed after, in the mid-2010s, especially after the 2016
00:16:54.040
election. So what's being suggested is not particularly radical. It's just going back to
00:17:00.740
Yeah, and that's a great point. I mean, if you don't want to see a movie with sex and violence,
00:17:04.760
don't go to an R-rated movie or even an X-rated movie, it's almost moot these days because you
00:17:10.800
can truly find anything on the internet. I think there's some sense to Elon Musk when he says,
00:17:17.420
why should we be more censorious than the law of the land? I mean, why are these unnamed woke bureaucrats
00:17:26.060
at Twitter on their trust and safety department? Why are they wiser than the legislatures or the
00:17:33.380
police about what can or can't be said? I think there's something to that. But I see that Elon Musk
00:17:38.360
met with all these woke civil rights activists. I hate to even use that term because I don't think
00:17:43.720
they're about that anymore. And I'm worried that he's going to bend the knee to them. I'm worried that
00:17:49.040
he thinks if he doesn't play the game, they might try and destroy Twitter. They might try to have a
00:17:55.200
boycott of Twitter, an advertising boycott. They might try and get a ban from the Apple store or
00:18:01.580
the Android store. I think that Twitter is enormous and Elon Musk is clever, but it's not bigger than
00:18:08.600
the Borg. It's not bigger than the entire deep state, the entire big tech ecosystem. And he does
00:18:14.760
have to play by their rules to an extent, doesn't he? Yeah, that is the real challenge. There are lots
00:18:20.260
of pain points that can be used against Twitter. You mentioned advertisers. You know, that's a big
00:18:26.300
one. Almost all of Twitter's revenue comes from advertising. And I know, you know, there are plans
00:18:32.500
to, you know, Twitter did have this Twitter blue subscription service, but they didn't bring in much
00:18:37.900
revenue. And there's also plans to make the verified checkmark a paid service. You can pay to get
00:18:44.400
verified. Musk has been doing $20 and $8. But that will take a while. And then, you know, it's
00:18:51.560
questionable whether it would ever replace advertising revenue. And if it doesn't, then
00:18:55.580
that's going to be a way to pressure Twitter by having advertisers do their boycotts. The more
00:19:00.560
worrying thing you also mentioned is the app store censorship. Google and Apple control 99% of all
00:19:06.220
smartphone operating systems worldwide. So it's very easy for them to effectively exclude an app from
00:19:11.540
people's smartphones. And, you know, finally, there's, of course, web hosting, which, you know,
00:19:17.440
Amazon Web Services, Google, they control most of the web hosting market. And that's what got
00:19:23.360
Parler kicked offline. So there are many ways that you could take down Twitter.
00:19:27.700
Huh. I mean, Elon Musk was the world's richest man. I'm not sure if that's the case at this moment,
00:19:32.940
given the Tesla stock price. He has a certain charisma, or you could say anti-charisma to him. I mean,
00:19:39.780
he's, he's, he engages with people directly on Twitter, which is sort of startling for such a
00:19:44.680
public figure. I mean, he certainly is, is one in a billion. It, how much of this is sort of
00:19:54.220
performance art from a guy who, who has a quirky sense of humor? How much is a business plan, a guy
00:20:01.000
trying to get rich? And how much is someone trying to change the world? Like, I think there's elements
00:20:06.180
of all of them. Like, he's a quirky guy, and I love it. He obviously likes making money, even though
00:20:11.160
he, he personally doesn't live a lavish lifestyle, I don't think. And how much is his sort of utopian
00:20:17.400
belief in a place where everyone in the world can come to connect with each other? What, what do you
00:20:23.300
think is motivating him? Do you, do you know him at all? Have you ever met him?
00:20:27.200
Uh, no, I haven't. I've met people in his, in his orbit. I know people who have met him.
00:20:31.200
Uh, you know, that's, you know, that's, that's difficult to say. I mean, I'd say he keeps his
00:20:35.820
motivation pretty close to his chest. Uh, you know, even when he's talking to people, he trusts.
00:20:40.540
Um, but, uh, you know, one, one thing to consider is that a lot of, much of the, uh, the Musk empire
00:20:46.600
depends on retail investors. And, you know, he's really been at the forefront of this sort of retail
00:20:51.560
investing revolution, you know, the, the meme, the meme stocks, the, uh, uh, you know, Doe coin and all of
00:20:58.460
that. And, you know, that, that's, that's kind of like, uh, you know, we saw during the whole,
00:21:02.800
uh, um, uh, GameStop, AMC, Hullabaloo, uh, back in 2021, that, uh, uh, this is pretty
00:21:11.800
radically disrupted the system to have, you know, lots of people coming together to like, uh, to,
00:21:16.860
you know, do retail investing. And, you know, that's something that's been really beneficial
00:21:21.220
to Tesla. So I wonder if, you know, being in charge of a social media platform, you know,
00:21:24.800
there's a, there's a rational calculation behind that, that, uh, you know, much, if much of your
00:21:31.220
stock, your, uh, value depends on these retail investors and you might want to have a big social
00:21:35.840
media platform, but there's also the case that, you know, he did join the Republican party and
00:21:40.720
it's so obvious that social media is rigged in favor of the Democrats. So that might also be driving
00:21:46.940
it, uh, too. Yeah. Well, it, to, to see the outrage directed at him by the legacy media is quite
00:21:54.660
incredible. I mean, especially from the Washington post, which is owned by his tech rival, Jeff
00:22:00.260
Bezos. Like, it's just quite something to see these legacy media that are all owned by their
00:22:04.640
own oligarchs, whether it's Carlos Sleeman, the New York times or Jeff Bezos at the Washington
00:22:09.560
post to complain about a billionaire owning Twitter. It's, it's a bit rich. Um, what do you
00:22:17.580
make of what I said earlier about, uh, to use that phrase, the military industrial complex or the deep
00:22:23.060
state? When I looked at the old board of Twitter, I was shocked by the lack of tech experts, but the
00:22:30.820
ubiquity of former state department types, former CIA types. And I'm not saying this in a conspiracy
00:22:37.480
theory, speculative way. Like that's who they were. The people who were running Twitter, at least on the
00:22:43.280
board of Twitter had an expertise in geopolitics and military affairs. And, and I can't help but think
00:22:51.160
that that is really one of the real values of Twitter. That's certainly the, the subtext of
00:22:57.940
people who are complaining about Musk. Elon Musk is a skeptic on the war in Ukraine, for example. He
00:23:03.060
said that there ought to be a diplomatic solution, not just endless war that I think that should be a
00:23:08.920
mainstream position, but he was pilloried by the entire foreign policy establishment, including by
00:23:14.360
senior officials in Ukraine. Um, I, I really think that for a lot of important, powerful and rich
00:23:21.180
people, Twitter was about shaping attitudes around the world politically. And frankly, I think it was
00:23:27.500
an intelligence asset because just imagine tracking who said what to whom, who's going where it's got
00:23:35.240
GPS in it. So if you have, if you know the Twitter account of a political figure, you can physically
00:23:42.620
follow them. You can see what they look at. You can see their direct messages. Like it is a walking,
00:23:49.180
talking, moving intelligence agency. I think that's probably half the value of the thing, not just the
00:23:55.980
game, the source of news, the ad revenues. I think it's, I think it's a, a spy app of sort, just like
00:24:03.080
TikTok is for the Chinese. What do you think of that theory? A hundred percent. Social media
00:24:07.240
companies are intelligence assets for their, uh, for the country that the countries that produce
00:24:12.320
them. And social media companies have been an arm of American influence. That's why lots of, uh,
00:24:17.880
uh, nations that, you know, try and resist being in the American or NATO orbit often ban social media
00:24:23.880
companies, American social media companies. I know, uh, Russia has many other countries in the
00:24:29.200
Middle East have as well. Obviously China has too, because they see it as this, this arm of American
00:24:34.440
influence. I actually used to have a source at the state department on, in the Trump administration.
00:24:39.580
He said, uh, the deep state loved social media, free speech when it was helping them regime change,
00:24:45.920
say Libya or Egypt or helping, you know, whip up activism in Iran. But as soon as, uh, you know,
00:24:53.540
20, 25, as soon as Brexit and Donald Trump happened, they started to worry that free speech on social
00:24:58.680
media could mean, uh, they get regime changed. Um, and yeah, that's where you see that turning
00:25:04.400
point. Social media shifting from a, uh, user-led system of content moderation with block buttons
00:25:11.080
and optional, uh, maturity filters to this top down model where there's, where, uh, content filters
00:25:17.620
are imposed on everyone without any, uh, without any choice to opt out. Um, and again, like you said,
00:25:23.120
this is not really a conspiracy. There was a report recently in the intercept, mostly based on, uh,
00:25:30.880
public information, including some documents from lawsuits that showed the department of Homeland
00:25:35.200
Security did have regular meetings with Twitter and Facebook, uh, executives. Uh, they even had a
00:25:42.560
special portal that Facebook built for them that allowed them to flag content to be taken down or
00:25:48.200
labeled. So, uh, you know, Homeland Security, the anti-terrorism agency was working up with the
00:25:55.560
social media companies. And it gets even more sinister when you look at the kind of topics they
00:26:00.800
were focused on. They were, uh, you know, it wasn't just, uh, the things you'd expect. It was things like
00:26:07.460
racial justice, uh, topics like the Afghanistan withdrawal, like the Ukraine war. This, these were the
00:26:14.560
areas where they were looking to so-called misinformation. Mm-hmm. You know, it's funny
00:26:20.060
because, uh, you know, I go to the search bar of Twitter when I like to search things and they have
00:26:25.180
a list of suggested items, trending items. And every single time for me, one of them is the latest on
00:26:32.140
the war in Ukraine. I, I mean, I, I am somewhat interested in it, but it, but I think those are either
00:26:38.500
hand curated or they're sold as ads. And I keep thinking, who is selling me? Who's advertising the war
00:26:44.280
in Ukraine to me? Because literally every, no matter what else is trending, that war, and I'm,
00:26:50.300
I'm in Canada, you know, I, I really don't have a connection to Ukraine. I don't think Canada
00:26:54.660
does other than, you know, you know, Trudeau has the same narrative that other NATO leaders have,
00:27:00.980
but I, like, it's not close to Canada. It's not our neighbor. There are some Ukrainian Canadians,
00:27:05.880
of course, and so there's some historical ethnic ties, but it's very far away. And the fact that that
00:27:13.740
is pitched to me as hot news every single day, I feel like that war is being sold to me in an ad.
00:27:21.300
And I keep thinking bad is Twitter. It is a mind shaping machine that Elon Musk himself talks about
00:27:30.660
mind viruses. I think they're a thing. And I think that's Twitter's true value. It's not,
00:27:35.360
you know, the eight bucks a month or whatever it can make selling premium services. It's the people
00:27:41.960
for sale. I think that's what social media always has been. If you're not paying for it,
00:27:46.060
it's because you yourself are what's for sale. I mean, that's the obvious.
00:27:53.020
To, you know, newspapers and TV stations where they could just go to them and, you know, make them put,
00:28:00.340
you know, Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi on the head, on the front page every single day,
00:28:05.720
that people would actually care what's going on in these far-flung countries that don't have much to do
00:28:09.520
with America. And, you know, the modern day equivalent to that is the Facebook trending
00:28:15.200
topics. It is the Twitter trending topics. And, you know, we can remember, you know, it didn't
00:28:20.320
used to be the case. It used to be the case that what was in the trending bar on Twitter was hashtags,
00:28:26.080
what's popular on Twitter. And you just see slowly over time, they've replaced this with this top
00:28:31.680
down model where they're just feeding everyone the same kind of content, the stuff they want you to
00:28:37.420
care about, the stuff they want you to see. And, you know, like the number one thing right now is
00:28:43.760
I want to ask you one more question. I appreciate your time, Alma. It's great to see you again.
00:28:48.380
One of the founders of Twitter, his name is Jack Dorsey, and he's an interesting character,
00:28:53.500
a little quirky, too. I think you have to be quirky or you become quirky when you're at that level
00:28:58.340
of life. He has a libertarian streak to him. And his successors certainly did not.
00:29:07.580
He justified, he tried to explain Twitter's decision to ban that Hunter Biden laptop story,
00:29:15.340
which I think really moved the 2020 election. He engaged with Elon Musk. I think he encouraged
00:29:23.400
Elon Musk to buy the company. I think he he doesn't like the way the company is going and he
00:29:28.380
had some vision to fix it. What what's his role? Is he going to be involved in the new Twitter? Does
00:29:35.240
he have another rival project? What do you think about Jack Dorsey? Do you think he's still relevant?
00:29:42.940
Well, I know he rolled over his stake into Twitter, so he still owns part of the company,
00:29:47.100
even though it's private under masks, as far as I know. He also just came out with what he's been
00:29:53.940
talking about for a very long time, even while he was at Twitter, he was working on this, which is
00:29:57.660
Blue Sky. Blue Sky is a decentralized protocol for social media. It essentially what it essentially
00:30:04.440
does is it allows, you know, it separates content from from clients. So, you know, it it gives
00:30:14.700
theoretically it gives users control over their content so they can take all of their, you know,
00:30:20.480
tweets, for example, if, you know, Twitter were to be using Blue Sky, you'd be able to take all of
00:30:24.700
your tweets and all your account info and just port it to another platform, if you like. And
00:30:29.180
that's something Dorsey has been talking about for a long time. I do think he generally believes
00:30:34.460
in decentralization. He generally believes in in free speech, who is just, you know, obviously a
00:30:40.560
total failure as CEO of Twitter in making sure in, you know, championing those principles. You know,
00:30:47.420
I know from sources inside the company, he tried to hold back the worst instincts of the trust and
00:30:52.860
safety department, trust and safety department being the the one that has always pushed censorship,
00:30:57.640
especially on the Vijaya Gad, who was head of trust and safety and is now gone. She was the first
00:31:03.280
people to be fired on the mask. But yeah, Dorsey does seem to believe in this stuff. He just wasn't
00:31:09.280
very good, I think, as CEO at actually implementing it. Well, I'm very interested in it, not just because
00:31:16.440
I'm an addict of Twitter, but and because it is the lifeblood of Rebel News, but because I see it as a
00:31:22.540
larger force affecting us. I mean, it tells you what is happening in the world. But but through their
00:31:29.280
own lens, and I think it shapes more minds than we care to think. Last word to you. Do you think
00:31:37.700
do you think that Twitter can become this this place that Elon Musk talks about where you do more
00:31:45.140
commerce, where everyone can find like like he has this utopian vision where it can be a home for
00:31:51.460
everyone and a real commercial hub to he compared it to the Chinese app WeChat, which I think he clearly
00:31:58.580
believes is superior. I think it probably is. Do you think he's going to succeed on the tech side,
00:32:03.360
I guess? Do you think what do you think this is going to work is what I'm saying?
00:32:07.940
Well, I know he's brought in dozens of people from from Tesla to help out with Twitter. That's a good
00:32:13.020
sign. It suggests they're going to be radical product overhauls, which is what Twitter really
00:32:17.240
needs. I mean, Twitter's product needs to be overhauled. It needs to be less dependent on advertising
00:32:22.600
revenue. And just needs to get better at generating revenue. And you know, which WeChat is a good
00:32:29.720
example of a successful app. I know he's talked about building the everything app. So you know,
00:32:35.860
maybe we'll see things like video as well. Certainly, there's something with
00:32:41.720
Facebook option, Facebook has a chat option, move beyond simply having a timeline of posts.
00:32:50.740
So maybe we'll see Twitter move in that direction, as well. The real thing I think will be, you know,
00:32:55.620
can you can you replace that ad revenue model that it's been dependent on for so long? That's
00:33:00.620
always been the main pressure point against social media platforms that that to attach to free speech.
00:33:07.440
Great to chat with you, my friend. Thanks very much. And keep up the great work at Breitbart.
00:33:12.000
Good to be on. All right, there you have it. Alan Bocari, senior tech editor. Stay with us more ahead.
00:33:28.600
Well, that's the show for today. You know, I was thinking to myself here, if you're not on Twitter,
00:33:32.300
you probably don't understand what all the kerfuffle is about. But Twitter really is the real
00:33:37.580
time national international conversation about a lot of things, sports and comedy and entertainment
00:33:44.940
for sure. But its value is on politics and geopolitics. And, you know, Facebook is fun for
00:33:50.900
sharing photos of your family with friends and getting updates. But Twitter is where all the
00:33:55.620
political leaders, the political staff, the journalists, the military goes to shape the world
00:34:01.140
and to have your own mind to be shaped. And I think that's the real battle. Elon Musk has taken
00:34:08.200
that away from the deep state and they either want him to bend the knee to them or they probably want
00:34:13.440
to destroy it. It'll be interesting to see how that goes. That's our show for today. I'm going to be in
00:34:18.560
Calgary in Lethbridge tomorrow doing a special report on a terrible prosecution of peaceful truckers from
00:34:26.660
the Coutts blockade. It's astonishing to me that they're still prosecuting these things. But I'll
00:34:31.460
tell you the details tomorrow. Until then, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters,
00:34:35.940
to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.
00:34:41.720
Bill C-11, the law concerning internet censorship, is coming to us faster than we think. And the
00:34:49.560
crackdown on people speaking their mind is already happening like the story I'm about to tell you.
00:34:55.960
To help us, visit stopthecensorship.ca and sign the petition. Elon Musk officially became
00:35:06.520
Twitter new owner on October 27th, a $44 billion acquisition. Many people were pleased to learn that
00:35:17.180
Twitter will become a platform for free speech. Despite this, there was concern by other people
00:35:25.180
that have benefit from all that censorship that Twitter will be fluted with misinformation and
00:35:33.880
disinformation. Well, Deirdre, there's growing concern about misinformation and hate speech on
00:35:39.780
Twitter since Elon Musk took over after reports of a spike in racist posts on the platform. On Sunday,
00:35:46.660
Musk himself spread misinformation. He tweeted out a link to an anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the
00:35:54.020
attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband. He deleted the post, which fact-checkers called fake and defamatory,
00:36:00.100
but after it had drawn more than 86,000 likes and 24,000 retweets on the platform.
00:36:06.260
Early Friday morning, October 28th, 82 years old, Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi,
00:36:15.620
the Democratic head of Congress in the United States, was attacked on his property in San Francisco
00:36:23.780
with a hammer. The presumed suspect in this instance is David DePape. This tragedy has been the subject of
00:36:34.980
several Twitter interactions. First, in a tweet, Elon Musk replied to Hillary Clinton that
00:36:42.340
there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meet the eyes. He linked a Santa
00:36:52.260
Monica Observer article which he withdrew. Many people then shouted at misinformation and conspiracy
00:37:01.620
theory. Matthew Goetz, in a series of 16 Twitter posts, described the situation of a far-right controversy,
00:37:12.980
spreading misinformation about this story. In response to Matthew Goetz, YouTuber Viva Fray made a
00:37:22.260
number of a number of points. One of the main publications say, a 16-tweet thread with himself
00:37:30.020
explaining everything that happened before police released body cam footage or disclosed where they
00:37:37.940
found the pap clothing. And Matthew Goetz accused others of conspiracy theory disinformation massive event
00:37:47.700
will generate massive discussion period. For this post, Viva Fray has received a warning of violating
00:37:55.940
Twitter rule. The platform request to remove the tweet and in addition, it was locked out of his
00:38:04.340
Twitter account for an indefinite period of time. Of course, Viva Fray refused to delete the post because
00:38:12.420
he proved the platform right, which he mistakenly believed. Viva Fray got back his account after 24 hours without
00:38:22.980
deleting the tweet and no explanation. But the question remained. Shutting down people who question the main story,
00:38:32.180
who make people think for themselves about the situation, can only raise concern about the legitimacy of the
00:38:41.780
the story by people. To learn more, let's join Viva Fray. Can you just explain a little
00:38:49.700
bit for the people who don't know what happened, what happened to you? Yeah, absolutely. So I presume
00:38:55.220
everybody knows what happened to Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House,
00:39:01.220
third in line to the presidency of the United States of America. Her husband was, I won't say allegedly
00:39:08.260
attacked by all accounts, attacked by an intruder at two in the morning, Friday night. Apparently,
00:39:13.860
the intruder broke in at two o'clock in the morning. Unclear if he was in his underwear when he broke in
00:39:20.180
or if he got into his underwear after having allegedly broken in all sorts of questions. It's
00:39:25.460
been making the news left, right and center. I have been tweeting about it. I mean, I've been looking into it,
00:39:30.980
talking about it, covering it, trying to get the info. And yesterday, I respond to the tweet of an
00:39:37.620
individual named Matt Gertz, who works with Media Matters, which I didn't really appreciate at the
00:39:44.740
time. It's a left wing, I forget what that's called, a watchdog. It's called a watchdog. He put
00:39:49.940
out a tweet talking about Elon Musk's tweet, because Elon Musk is like high school gossip. Hillary Clinton
00:39:56.580
tweeted out, this attack on Paul Pelosi is the direct result of right wing extremism,
00:40:02.180
political rhetoric that motivates crazies to carry out their political retribution. Elon Musk,
00:40:09.300
in response to her tweet, says, it's not clear if it was a joke, if it was serious. He says,
00:40:14.260
there might be a tiny bit more to the story, and links to an article in a publication called the
00:40:19.620
Santa Monica Observer, which published an article written by, I forget the guy's name,
00:40:25.540
that this was a gay hookup gone wrong at two in the morning, that Nancy Pelosi's husband is known to be
00:40:34.180
of a certain nightlife, and that this was a hookup gone wrong. Then Elon Musk deletes the tweet and the
00:40:41.380
referenced article. It's not clear if Elon Musk knew that the author of that article and that publication,
00:40:47.700
yeah, they published conspiracy theories or fantasy or fan fiction. In 2016, the same author of that
00:40:53.540
article wrote a piece that Hillary Clinton died on September 11th, I don't know what date,
00:41:00.180
and that it's a body double in her place. So that type of news. So it's not clear if he was joking,
00:41:05.540
if he did it as a troll, or if he accidentally believed that Santa Monica Observer was a legit
00:41:11.300
source, but he deletes the tweet. And then this guy, Matt Gertz from Media Matters comes out in a 16
00:41:16.900
tweet thread with himself, and says, now there's going to be a ton of right wing conservatives that
00:41:22.180
are going to believe this baseless conspiracy, because Elon Musk tweeted it out. And then he goes
00:41:27.140
through like, it's a rant with himself. And so I responded to one of his tweets. And I said, yeah,
00:41:34.100
a total lefty in quotes. But yet you guys are blaming it on the right. Don't let facts get in the
00:41:40.020
way of a good narrative, because the guy by all accounts, is either left, right, total wacko,
00:41:44.100
who knows. I retweet one of his tweets, and then I retweet a third tweet. And this is the one that
00:41:49.940
got me locked out. And it basically says, an individual engages in a 16 tweet thread with
00:41:57.300
himself. What did I say? You know, presumes to know all the answers. And I, you know, before the
00:42:04.660
evidence is in before we've seen the body cam footage before we know what happened to the
00:42:08.020
attacker's clothing. And he calls other people conspiracy theorists. Within 30 seconds to a
00:42:13.700
minute of that tweet, I'm locked out of my Twitter accounts, as I have, what time is it now, almost
00:42:18.740
for 24 hours. So I don't know what it was about the tweet, because it's an innocuous, factually
00:42:24.580
correct, nothing of a tweet. I don't know what happened. You know, I get the email from Twitter saying,
00:42:31.300
delete it, if you want to get back in, but deleting it is an acknowledgement that you broke the
00:42:36.100
rules. And I'm like, F you, you didn't even tell me what rule I broke yet. So I've contested it.
00:42:41.380
We'll see what happens. No news yet. But I hear hashtag free Viva Fry might be, you know,
00:42:46.900
on Twitter somewhere. Well, I'll tell them this. If that got flagged, that tweet, because it promoted
00:42:52.660
misinformation and conspiracy theories, it didn't. But whatever. Well, what do you think silencing a
00:42:59.540
voice? And I will say I'm a reasonable voice. What does anyone think silencing a voice is going
00:43:06.020
to do? It's going to make people question this even more. You know, there's a thing called the
00:43:09.620
Streisand effect. If they didn't hear about it, I mean, I don't know who has not heard about the
00:43:13.940
Streisand effect in modern day social media. That tweet didn't get me in trouble. It was only the one,
00:43:20.500
you might be able to find it, but it was only the one where I referred to the 16 tweet thread
00:43:24.340
with himself. But it's nuts. It's just weird. You know, you said Elon Musk took over the company,
00:43:31.540
so there should be less censorship. He specified last week, nothing has changed. So it's not like
00:43:37.140
they've implemented or changed the algorithm. It's still the same old system. He hasn't made
00:43:43.620
any material changes yet. He hasn't brought back the banned accounts yet. So it's the same old Twitter,
00:43:50.100
just under new management until he implements changes. But, you know, I suspect that this tweet
00:43:56.660
was locked or got flagged. So there was a brigade and I don't know, 100, 200 people flagged the tweet.
00:44:02.660
Twitter does what it does like, oh, this tweet is generating a spike. We don't know what it is.
00:44:06.820
We're going to, we're going to lock the account and see. I suspect that's what happened, but I don't
00:44:10.500
know yet. As of the time of this interview, I haven't gotten a word from Twitter, you know, just,
00:44:16.260
but this is just going to make more people aware of the problem. It's going to make more people aware
00:44:20.820
of my Twitter feed. They're going to undo this because there's nothing in the tweet that can
00:44:24.660
possibly justify it. And in, in having done what they've done, they're going to have amplified
00:44:30.260
everything, everything that they wanted presumably to suppress through this action. People create the
00:44:35.700
conspiracy theories because this is one of three things within variations, a random attack on Paul
00:44:42.020
Pelosi, a politically motivated attack on Paul Pelosi, in which case you still have to figure
00:44:46.660
out from which side it came, if any, or a personal thing with Paul Pelosi, but the immediate reflexive
00:44:53.860
attempt to politicize it and, and equate it or, or draw analogies, link it to January 6th. That's when
00:45:00.420
you get people saying, whoa, we haven't even seen the body cam footage from the cops. We don't know where
00:45:05.700
David DePop's clothing is. And yet people are definitively claiming this is right-wing radical rhetoric that
00:45:11.540
it motivated it and linking it to January 6th. That's going to cause people to become very,
00:45:15.620
very suspicious and think that somebody is maliciously politically weaponizing what might
00:45:22.180
otherwise have a, a political or even a personal matter explanation as relates to Paul Pelosi,
00:45:28.820
Nancy Pelosi and their lifestyle, but whatever. All that to say, the more people politicize it,
00:45:33.220
the more suspicious people are going to get, and the more, uh, conspiratorial they're going to get.