The censorship machine is coming to Canada a lot faster than I thought, and it's coming from a woman named Karina Gould. She's just as extreme as Catherine McKenna, but less irritating, so she's more effective. I show you the, quote, "Digital Election Charter" she's brought in. It's actually a terrifying document.
00:00:00.000Hello, my Rebels. Today, I show you how the censorship we saw in the United Kingdom
00:00:03.860is coming to Canada a lot faster than I thought. It's from Karina Gould, who's just as extreme
00:00:11.240as Catherine McKenna, but less irritating, so she's more effective. I show you the, quote,
00:00:16.840digital election charter she's brought in. It's actually a terrifying document.
00:00:22.400Hey, before you get to that, can you please consider becoming a premium subscriber to
00:00:25.500the Rebel? Go to the rebel.media class shows, and for $8 a month or $80 for the year, you get to be
00:00:31.500a premium subscriber. You get to see the videos, and I show a video clip today of some Brit who,
00:00:37.340for some weird reason, was asking questions in our parliament. I don't get it. Demanding censorship.
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00:00:50.640so I appreciate that. All right. Without further ado, here's today's show.
00:00:54.240You're listening to a Rebel Media Podcast.
00:00:58.460Tonight, the liberals make their move against Canadian citizens who dare to speak out on Facebook.
00:01:03.640It's May 28th, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:08.320Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:01:12.040There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
00:01:15.680The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
00:01:24.240The last piece of the censorship machine fell into place in Canada yesterday.
00:01:31.960Karina Gould is Justin Trudeau's point man on the file.
00:01:35.120Her official title is Minister of Democratic Institutions, but that's quite Orwellian,
00:01:39.640since the bulk of her work seems to be to weaken Democratic institutions and make them subject to political meddling.
00:01:45.180Yesterday, she announced that she managed to persuade high-tech companies to censor the Internet in the upcoming federal election.
00:01:52.680She announced this Declaration of Electoral Integrity, but of course it has nothing to do with electoral integrity.
00:02:00.160There's nothing in there, for example, about demanding proof for voters that they're Canadian citizens.
00:02:05.220You don't even have to show ID anymore to vote in Canada.
00:02:08.020There's nothing in there about stopping third-party interest groups from meddling,
00:02:12.760as more than 100 did in the last election, including foreign-based Soros front group Avaz.org.
00:02:20.300There's nothing in there about Unifor, the conservative-hating union being in charge of doling out $600 million to Canadian reporters in the bailout.
00:02:27.880No, it's all about cracking down on what they call disinformation and fake news,
00:02:32.420but of course that's a matter of political opinion.
00:02:34.740That's the essence of political opinion, actually.
00:02:37.040Two people can look at the same fact and disagree about it.
00:02:39.920It's called politics. Two people can hear the same speech, and one is convinced, but the other is unconvinced.
00:02:47.160An election is when each of us are given the power to choose who's fake and who's real.
00:02:52.580It's not for one of the politicians in a contest to make that decision for us, but that's just exactly what happened.
00:02:58.780Gould is just as extremist as Catherine McKenna is.
00:03:02.380Here's a tweet from her, for example, that she recently deleted, where she calls for British Columbia to illegally block Alberta's oil sands pipeline,
00:03:12.720saying it should be landlocked and left in the ground.
00:03:15.520That's just as kooky as Catherine McKenna, but it's a rare stylistic departure for Karina Gould.
00:03:21.760See, Catherine McKenna is shouting all the time, and she has this childish affectation.
00:03:26.120She talks like a Kardashian for some reason. I don't know. It's not an accent.
00:03:30.640It's like a version of baby talk. You ever meet people who talk like that?
00:15:41.820However, these platforms have also been used to spread disinformation in an attempt to undermine free and fair elections and core democratic institutions and aggravate existing societal tensions.
00:15:55.980So, the government is now telling Facebook and Google that they have to eliminate fake news, even though sometimes they're calling something fake news is fake.
00:16:04.640And they're not allowed to publish anything that might cause societal tension, which is just another way of saying a vigorous debate in which we're all allowed to vigorously disagree.
00:16:15.480Now, an election is how we resolve tensions.
00:16:18.260We vote on things, and that's how we resolve disputes.
00:16:21.040But Karina Gould is worried about that.
00:16:23.540She doesn't want there to be any tensions out there, any fake news out there, especially about her boss.
00:16:28.560There's too much tension about her boss.
00:16:32.900Well, platforms, that's what they call the social media companies, and the government of Canada will work with civil society, educational institutions, and or other institutions to support efforts aimed at improving critical thinking, digital literacy, and cybersecurity practices to promote digital resilience across society.
00:16:51.020Do you think that Justin Trudeau and his partisan government will actually help you improve your critical thinking?
00:17:29.240No one can win if they're silenced by big tech these days.
00:17:33.060Tommy used to have one of the biggest Facebook pages in the whole of the UK next only to Theresa May, the disgraced prime minister, and Jeremy Corbyn, the disgraced leader of the opposition and the head of the Labour Party.
00:17:59.400They just made him disappear like he was a rumor, like he never existed.
00:18:02.400I don't think this was done by the big tech companies on their own.
00:18:05.640I think this was specifically done at the demand of the British political class, including that nitwit you just saw earlier.
00:18:11.060Here's the deputy leader of the Labour Party in the UK, Tom Watson, specifically writing a letter to YouTube demanding that Tommy Robinson be silenced.
00:18:23.480It wasn't just the Labour Party, by the way, though they led the charge.
00:18:26.360The Conservatives hate Tommy Robinson, too, because he talks about uncomfortable subjects that they'd rather leave alone.
00:18:31.800Just watch for a couple of minutes this parliamentary committee in the UK where MPs of every party take terms screeching at YouTube for not banning him
00:18:40.380and, spoiler alert, not too long after this, they did, in fact, ban him in the manner I described above.
00:18:46.500Despite the fact that videos of Tommy Robinson were cited as part of the online radicalization of Darren Osborne in the Finsbury Park Court case,
00:18:56.840YouTube continues to promote them videos.
00:19:01.640We are working to make sure that videos that promote hate or promote violence, if they violate our policies, are removed from the platform.
00:19:08.680If they walk right up to the line, we have also, at the encouragement of this committee, developed a new enforcement mechanism to limit the features that these have.
00:19:18.200They should not be appearing in our recommendation engine.
00:19:21.200If they are, I will take this back to our team and see what the problem is.
00:19:27.760They are in my recommended timeline at the moment.
00:19:30.500So, because I've been searching on my iPad for national action videos, I, as a result, have the first two videos recommended to me by YouTube.
00:19:41.920When I just click on, as I've just done with this afternoon, I click on to YouTube, the first two recommendations are Tommy Robinson videos.
00:19:50.500So, the Tommy Robinson that was identified as part of the Finsbury Park online radicalization process, that's what YouTube's recommended.
00:20:03.060Doesn't that cause you some serious alarm?
00:20:06.060See, they're stupid because they're saying censor him, censor him, censor him in public.
00:20:11.040Karina Gould, like I say, is slightly less stupid than Trudeau or Catherine McKenna.
00:20:15.000So, she does her censor him, censor him, censor him when the cameras aren't running.
00:20:20.800So, yeah, imagine a political candidate like Tommy Robinson who's banned from Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Google and financial instruments, too, like PayPal and Stripe.
00:24:08.560And he is the clear victor of the election results.
00:24:12.140I was over there in Manchester, as you know.
00:24:13.720Well, my focus was primarily on our personal friend, Tommy Robinson, who is also a free speech advocate and a warner of the risks of Islamification.
00:24:23.520But there are other points of view as well, including, well, what does this possibly mean for the United States?
00:24:29.800And in particular, for Nigel Farage's personal friend, Donald Trump, joining us now from the Los Angeles area,
00:24:36.680is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor at large at Breitbart.com.
00:25:39.840More than that, the foreign policy of the United States is pro-Brexit in the sense that the Trump administration welcomes Britain's separation from the European Union, arguing that EU trade rules are unfair.
00:25:53.500And Trump has essentially promised Britain that once it leaves the European Union, the United States will seek a free trade deal with Britain.
00:26:05.000But it's also a win because the revolt of the British electorate in the elections last week shows that there's a political price to be paid by parties that don't fulfill the mandates of their voters.
00:26:18.200And Trump was elected on specific policies that Republicans continue to oppose.
00:26:23.480That's that is to say, Republicans in Washington, Republican establishment leaders in Washington, the wall on the southern border with Mexico and trade improvement in trade through diplomatic means, through pressure, through trade tariffs and things like that.
00:26:41.240But essentially a reworking of America's trade relations with the rest of the world.
00:26:44.700So these two issues, trade and immigration, have fueled Trump's political rise.
00:26:49.980And yet the Republican establishment in Washington is very reluctant to implement those policies, particularly on immigration.
00:26:55.700And the Brexit vote is a reminder that even a party as strong as the conservatives in Britain can be laid low, essentially, if they fail to implement the populist agenda that they are charged with carrying out.
00:27:10.600So Theresa May saw her party fall to fifth place, its worst result in almost 200 years, because she basically tried everything she could do not to implement Brexit.
00:27:21.200In much the same way that Senate leaders and before them, the House Republican leaders who have now been ousted, they tried everything they could do not to implement Trump's policies.
00:27:32.440Now, some policies they agreed with, like tax cuts, that's come along very nicely.
00:27:36.320But on enforcing immigration law and building a border wall and reworking American trade policy, they have not been very enthusiastic.
00:27:46.880And some of the Trump supporters argued that's why Republicans lost Congress in 2018.
00:27:51.360So it's a reminder that the Trump agenda is the agenda that the American electorate wants to see implemented.
00:28:00.760Now, there's the other half of the electorate who doesn't want to see that implemented.
00:28:04.520They're also frustrated with standard Democratic Party politics.
00:28:07.860That's why they're moving so far to the left and embracing democratic socialism, essentially, in much the same way that the Remain position has become the opposition in the UK, so much so that the second place party in the European parliamentary elections was the Liberal Democratic Party, which is a small, fringe third party.
00:28:27.020Now the second biggest party in Britain, at least on the strength of its result last week.
00:28:31.640And they had a platform that was focused on the Remain position in the EU.
00:28:37.940It was beaten by the Brexit position, but essentially they told Remain voters, we are the party that will represent your interests.
00:28:44.160So you're seeing a polarization, not so much because Americans are becoming more radical in one direction or another, but because the political establishment on both sides is reluctant to implement the will of the people.
00:28:54.580There's a rebellion in both countries against the establishment.
00:28:57.400That's what Trump represents, and that's why the Brexit victory in the UK a few days ago is a big plus for Trump going into 2020.
00:29:06.900He can say, this is the agenda I'm running on because this is what I was elected to do.
00:29:13.200You need to elect more leaders who will come with me to Washington and finish the job.
00:29:16.640Yeah. You make one other point in your article that I thought was good, is that in all of these populist, nationalists versus the elites battles, the conventional wisdom seems to get it wrong.
00:29:29.140Got it wrong with Brexit three years ago. Got it wrong with Trump three years ago.
00:29:33.240Got it wrong just in recent weeks with Netanyahu in Israel, with Scott Morrison in Australia.
00:29:37.740I think I'm probably missing an election in there somewhere, but, well, even in the UK on Brexit, I think that here in Canada, people say, oh, we're immune to this kind of national populism.
00:29:52.020But no, I think that people are sick of these elites revising what we're allowed to talk about.
00:29:58.000And in the UK, they went further than that. They defied the will of voters.
00:30:03.920It was one thing to legitimately argue to remain in the UK and not Brexit. Fine.
00:30:10.740But when you lose an election, as they did in the referendum 2016, to then play games with it and delay and find ways to not live out the mandate given to you by the people.
00:30:23.120That's that feels like the analogy in America, Joel, is to impeach Trump.
00:30:28.200Look, you lost the election. That's fine. But if you want to try and deligenize Trump and impeach Trump and have a Mueller investigation into Trump, you're really not going after Trump.
00:30:37.020You're going after the democracy itself. And I think that's what happened in the UK last week is a voter smacked back fake leavers who were obfuscating and smacked back remainers as undemocratic.
00:30:49.640I think there was an anger there because elites were trying to undo the will of the people.
00:30:56.160Right. I think that's true. You see the never Trump faction represented by formerly respected, widely respected commentators like Bill Kristol saying they prefer the deep state to democracy.
00:31:07.960And that's exactly right. They're basically doing the same as Theresa May's faction of the conservatives was doing.
00:31:14.740That is to say, trying to stay in power without implementing the agenda that brought conservatives to power.
00:31:19.500They want power for themselves. They don't necessarily want it for the people.
00:31:23.620And look, the same exists on the left. I think labor voters are fed up with Jeremy Corbyn and labor.
00:31:29.500However, the ongoing scandal of Jeremy Corbyn's anti-Semitism is something that makes Labor Party voters feel dirty when it comes to election time.
00:31:40.560They would prefer a cleaner version of left wing politics.
00:31:45.480And the liberal Democrats are giving that to them because they're not as tainted by sort of anti-Israel hatred becoming anti-Semitism as you've seen with Jeremy Corbyn and some of his allies.
00:31:55.520So there's really a search for parties that will be responsive to people.
00:32:02.100I'm not sure that the Democrats in the United States have come up with that yet because they're still pitching their ideas to, if you want to call them this, the liberal gentry.
00:32:12.520In other words, kind of elite progressive opinion that has actually hurt working class Americans.
00:32:18.760There was a great article recently in National Review which pointed out that Seattle's new progressive policies basically defend the privileged and largely white elite of the city at the expense of the working class and black parts of the city.
00:32:34.920But these same Democrats who favor these policies think of themselves as such great non-racists and such great progressive crusaders for racial justice.
00:32:43.520They might have a Black Lives Matter sign on their front lawn, for example, but they've made charter schools more difficult for black people to gain access to.
00:32:51.780And they've made the cost of buying property almost impossible for working class black residents to achieve.
00:32:57.240So there's this pattern still of Democrats pitching themselves to an elite.
00:33:02.300Now, some people say they might as well embrace that.
00:33:04.020I mean, if you're going to defend some of these elitist policies, then go for it.
00:33:09.220That was one of the conclusions after the Brexit vote last week.
00:33:12.880One of the strategists for Remain said, Labour may as well become a Remain party.
00:33:17.260You know, forget about trying to appeal to the working class voters who like Brexit.
00:33:40.560And the policies they're implementing might make them feel better about themselves, but would actually halt the economic growth, stop the job creation and stop the upward mobility of Americans who benefited from Trump's economy.
00:33:51.160So there's a realignment starting to happen, not yet as fully on the Democratic side in the United States.
00:34:23.280Joel, I agree with your analysis of the EU, of the election and the different parties over there.
00:34:29.800But one of the things that I focused on, because we were interested in the candidacy of one of our former employees, Tommy Robinson, and he was attacked with milkshakes.
00:35:05.360So the normalization and the celebration of the milkshake assaults by the media party was a real phenomenon in this election.
00:35:13.780And then, especially in the case of our friend Tommy, the censorship.
00:35:17.940Facebook and Twitter deleted Tommy's platform of a million followers.
00:35:22.320Halfway through the campaign, Tommy Robinson's credit card processor of his campaign announced that they were cutting him off in the middle of the campaign.
00:35:34.420These kind of deplatforming of social media and the normalization of violence, I see them in the U.K. targeting the nationalist populist parties.
00:35:44.660Do you see any worry about that coming to America in the 2020 election?
00:35:51.260I mean, the deplatforming going on at social media companies, the way that big tech companies are changing their algorithms to suppress conservative news or suppress articles shared by conservatives, it could end up being the decisive factor in 2020.
00:36:06.920And it's something of massive concern.
00:36:10.080For example, the Charlottesville controversy over the president's comments in 2017, the false version of his comments is everywhere and everybody believes it and you can share it and complain about it, talk about it on social media.
00:36:25.160If you try to correct the fake news in the media, your post won't be shared.
00:36:34.120There's definitely an uneven playing field on social media because the social media companies were blamed for Trump winning in the first place, which is ridiculous.
00:36:40.740But they've been blamed for allowing fake news and Russian bots and whatever.
00:36:44.400And so they're determined to make sure he doesn't win.
00:36:47.160Also, many of their employees are hardcore left wing, as we saw from the leaked Google videos, where basically senior executives of this publicly traded company were consoling their employees on Trump's win.
00:36:57.000They are determined to see a Democrat take the White House for personal ideological reasons, and they are going to make sure that their work assists in that effort.
00:37:07.800I think it's impossible to trust these companies, and there are many signs that what they're doing is essentially rigging the election for Democrats in 2020.
00:37:16.460Now, that could be stopped, perhaps, and it's worth noting that despite the ongoing efforts to do this, conservative parties have continued to win around the world.
00:37:27.320So maybe they're not that powerful, but in the United States, certainly they have a big role to play in our politics.
00:37:33.080And we see that happening, and we see this sort of legitimation of assaults on conservatives.
00:37:38.960I think some CBS News anchors were laughing about the milkshake phenomenon you described.
00:37:43.040So we definitely have a lot of work to do in this country before we understand what fair journalism is about, what a level playing field is about, and what the role of social media companies really ought to be.
00:37:55.600My monologue today was about a new censorship plan announced just yesterday by Canada's Minister of Democratic Institutions.
00:38:04.540Of course, that's her title, but she's undermining those democratic institutions.
00:38:11.600She has twisted the arm of social media companies to delete what she calls fake news, and the idea that government, a party, would direct Facebook on what to delete and whatnot is deeply worrying.
00:38:25.860I believe that in English Canada, in Quebec, they have a bit of a different phenomenon.
00:38:29.740But I believe, Joel, that in English Canada, the rebel is who they have in mind.
00:38:33.960We're really the only conservative outlet.
00:42:39.800I'm sitting here, you know, with my Jewish head covering here, my kippah, my yarmulke on my head.
00:42:44.660I write about how Jews should arm themselves and take advantage of the Second Amendment.
00:42:48.900I write articles about shooting targets of Hitler.
00:42:51.900And somehow I'm supposed to be inspiring anti-Semitism by essentially encouraging Jews to make sure that the next anti-Semitic who enters a synagogue has his head blown off.
00:43:45.920And it's not because the government is coming after you.
00:43:47.880But it is because these large tech companies and the large mainstream media organizations essentially function like governments in how they can control the flow of information.
00:43:58.160They have massive power that government really has never had before.
00:44:12.560You notice when I talked about Charlottesville, I didn't mention certain words because my worry is that if I say certain words on this broadcast, your broadcast will be demonetized on YouTube because that's what they're doing now.
00:44:23.840Now, friends who've discussed this particular Charlottesville incident have found that once they say certain words, the video is demonetized.
00:44:33.400I don't say political things on Facebook anymore.
00:44:36.000That's partly because I don't want to offend my friends and relatives, not all of whom agree with me on politics, but also because Facebook does try to suppress conservative political speech.
00:44:44.880So I say my political views on Twitter.
00:44:46.520But when I do say them on Twitter, I don't swear.
00:44:50.920But if I were as strident in my views, if I were as openly strident in public as sometimes I feel privately, I'd get kicked off of Twitter, no problem, very quickly, because they are suppressing even ordinary views that are scientific.
00:45:05.080I mean, there was a leading psychologist who'd done research into transgenderism.
00:45:09.500He was kicked off of Twitter for reporting some scientific conclusions he had made.
00:45:13.500On Instagram, I just follow people who post beautiful images, and I post images of flowers and food and things like that.
00:45:20.100You have to almost specialize in terms of your social media output.
00:45:23.680You really can't be political on all these platforms because they do suppress political speech in some ways.
00:45:31.900So it is something we'll struggle with.
00:45:35.000But in the meantime, we have to be careful so that we don't get demonetized or silenced in advance of the, I suppose, coming battle, which hopefully will decide the future of this media.
00:45:44.020You know, just give me 30 seconds to give you this anecdote.
00:45:48.120We've published over 12,000 videos since we started four and a half years ago.
00:45:52.280And the four words that I detect demonetize our videos in various combinations are Trudeau, feminist, ISIS or terrorist, and transgender.
00:46:12.800I mean, so if you could, if there was a story about Trudeau saying he's a feminist in the face of a transsexual ISIS terrorist, you're not going to make a penny off that.
00:47:44.940It's time to regulate a level playing field for all social media.
00:47:49.640You know, I think there's some truth there.
00:47:51.440It's hard to believe that in a few short years, less than a decade, so much of our lives are connected that way, and to simply erase a person's entire history.
00:48:04.260Like I say, if you type Tommy Robinson into the YouTube search engine, he's there, but you will not find it unless you know the exact precise URL.