What kind of judge would let accused terrorists out on bail? A Canadian judge, that's what. And I'll tell you why. Today's story comes from the Toronto Sun's Joe Warmington, who reports that a judge granted bail to an accused father and son terrorist duo.
00:14:12.280The police officer who found Al-Rawi's parked Honda Civic in Halifax's South End
00:14:16.680testified that she found an unconscious female passenger in his back seat with her shirt pulled up to her breasts and panties and pants off.
00:14:24.640So the allegation is that he was raping an unconscious woman who was passed out drunk.
00:14:48.700Al-Rawi told Crown Prosecutor Carla Ball that he felt the investigating officer was persecuting him based on the color of his skin and accent
00:14:57.860and that he chose to reserve his right to silence during some of the questioning.
00:15:57.340We're talking about bail of some accused terrorists in Richmond Hill just living at home.
00:16:01.440Now, let me quote from a CBC story about this Halifax rape trial that mentions this fact just in passing.
00:16:07.840Al Rawi, who now lives in Germany, previously told the court his passenger was emotional about running into an ex and at one point kissed him on the cheek after he complimented her.
00:16:21.520That Halifax girl kissed the taxi driver and undressed herself to be ravaged by him in his dirty, smelly cab.
00:16:30.100That's exactly, I'm sure that would explain why she was found unconscious and naked.
00:16:36.420But that one point there, that one point, Al Rawi, who now lives in Germany, he's in Germany, an accused rapist, was just allowed to leave Canada and just move to Germany.
00:17:41.760Well, as you may know, for the last few weeks, we've had a reporter, Jessica S., embedded in the Tommy Robinson campaign in northwest England, covering the election for the European Parliament.
00:17:51.860Now, the U.K. wasn't supposed to even be in this election because they voted to Brexit.
00:17:56.880And that was supposed to happen on March 29th.
00:17:59.040But alas, Theresa May, who just announced her resignation, delayed it as best she could.
00:18:06.040And so interesting candidates are presenting themselves, not just Tommy in northwest England, but others, including some YouTube personalities, including one called Carl Benjamin and another named Mark Meekin, who we like to know as Count Dankula.
00:19:08.760I'm against this sort of deplatforming at any occasion for mere citizens or journalists.
00:19:14.360But when someone like Tommy Robinson or Carl Benjamin or a political leader in the United Kingdom named Anne-Marie Waters, we had her on our show.
00:19:23.100She's the leader of the Four Britain Party.
00:19:25.300When these politicians are deplatformed in the middle of an election campaign, how can that be seen as anything other than election meddling?
00:19:34.180Yes, election meddling from companies in America in San Francisco, to be precise, are now intervening in the politics of a foreign country about which they may not even be super familiar with.
00:19:49.660And the targets of this are, of course, at the moment, right-wing populists like Tommy Robinson and Anne-Marie Waters and Carl Benjamin.
00:19:58.520But, you know, that could easily change in the future.
00:20:01.100You know, the political establishment, the elites who insist they're the ones who are destined to rule Western societies,
00:20:12.440they're just as hostile towards the anti-establishment left as they are towards the anti-establishment right.
00:20:18.360So this is really a threat to everyone who doesn't want the flow of information to be controlled by a small set of unaccountable elites,
00:20:28.060as it was in the pre-internet era when you just had a few cable shows who dominated the discussion.
00:20:33.600And, you know, anyone outside the Overtone window, the range of acceptable ideas was simply kept out of the public eye.
00:20:41.940In the age of the Internet, everyone suddenly had access to a new public square.
00:20:46.420And that has radically changed politics, and elites are desperate to stop it, to put the genie back in the bottle.
00:23:58.840I actually interviewed Carl Benjamin the day before we released that story.
00:24:02.880And we both agreed that there's a fundamental mismatch here.
00:24:10.760When you compare Facebook and social media platforms to other types of businesses.
00:24:14.960So a landlord who rents out a property to you is not allowed to simply evict you for no reason.
00:24:21.540They have to obtain a court order first.
00:24:23.660And that's because you invested time, money into your property.
00:24:27.540A landlord can't just kick you out for any reason.
00:24:29.680Yet Facebook, which in many cases, where in many cases, rather, people have digital properties that are as valuable, if not more valuable, than physical properties.
00:24:40.560They can come and take that away for any reason without warning, without a court order.
00:24:43.900So it's not something we would accept in any other industry.
00:24:47.680Yet somehow it's the case on social media.
00:24:50.920I mean, Tommy Robinson had built up through years of effort and energy and working on his page and working on his reputation and directing people towards Facebook to build up one million followers as he did.
00:25:07.160Companies would pay tens of millions of dollars to have that kind of impact.
00:25:10.640And simply to push a button and no appeal, no explanation, just because you're a hate agent and it's probably some 20-something liberal arts social justice warrior with problem glasses in San Francisco who's just made that determination.
00:25:26.160And you've just destroyed not only the financial value, but a political outlet for, obviously, at least one million people who chose to follow him.
00:25:36.040It's interfering in politics and it's like a gross violation of, I think, business ethics and consumer rights.
00:25:42.040Again, just go back to the landlord example.
00:25:44.820There's this idea going around now, which I think is a very good idea, that social media users should be able to take companies to court to get their account reinstated.
00:25:53.980But even that, a landlord has to go and get a court order before they evict you.
00:25:58.760So, really, if we were applying the same standards as social media companies, they wouldn't be able to just ban their account without going through a legal process first.
00:26:08.400I'm not sure this situation can go on for much longer.
00:26:11.180I don't think consumers or businesses would tolerate it.
00:26:13.340That's a good point because, of course, the courts over the sweep of history have realized there's a power imbalance between a landlord who probably has money, probably has a lawyer, and a tenant who might be very poor.
00:26:27.260And so the idea that the tenant would have to hire the lawyer, the tenant would have to take steps, figure it out, when the tenant, if he or she is evicted, is likely in a crisis now.
00:26:37.680So they invert it, and there's some good rationale for that because you don't want to kick someone off out of their home and make them have to take the steps to get back in, switch the onus.
00:26:49.680I mean, that can swing too far, but I think we're at the same point.
00:26:53.660If you take a political figure, a community figure like Tommy, I'm using Tommy because our viewers understand him, but Carl Benjamin or some of these other, quote, hate agents, it's the same thing.
00:27:03.440It's their entire public reputation, it's their business, their livelihood, it's all their friendships.
00:27:13.680People wouldn't even know how to find you in many cases.
00:27:16.940People wouldn't know how to communicate with you.
00:27:19.180There's a lot of young people, young people, I'm 47, there's a lot of people who only communicate via social media apps.
00:27:26.420They don't pick up the phone and dial a phone number anymore, and if they do, they're relying on the phone number being stored in an app.
00:27:32.680You're literally throwing someone in an isolation tank.
00:27:36.800It's like they're being exiled, banned from the kingdom.
00:27:41.200In many cases, it's worse than losing a physical property because you're not just losing one thing, as you point out.
00:27:46.860You're losing your livelihood, you're losing your political influence, you're losing your friend network, all at the same time, all at once.
00:27:52.920So that's what we're dealing with here.
00:27:54.620And these companies have no standards whatsoever in terms of consumer rights or fair business practices.
00:28:00.760There are some privacy restraints in them now, but absolutely no restraints in terms of who they can ban for whatever reason.
00:28:08.560And just today, actually, we're starting to see businesses, nonpartisan businesses, refusing to tolerate this.
00:28:14.860CrossFit, the fitness company, has pulled all its business from Facebook over what they describe as arbitrary bans policies,
00:28:25.980that are what they said were totally opaque, and they're absolutely right.
00:28:30.200So, you know, we now have not even politicians and political figures refusing to tolerate it, but businesses as well.
00:29:11.980There's no rules of, you know, I want to point out that the Star Chamber, which these days has become a synonym for an unfair political court.
00:29:21.940The Star Chamber at least let you make your case.
00:29:26.180And, in fact, you were, you had to have a lawyer to go there.
00:29:29.400It was some form of a court, even though at the end it became quite a partisan political court.
00:29:36.060But at least there was a process at all.
00:29:38.420There's no process and there's no rules.
00:29:53.860And, you know, as you say, they have, as we wrote in the article, they have level one, what they call signals that they use to determine if someone is a hate agent or not.
00:30:03.980And they're level one, level two, and level three.
00:30:34.400Even if you delete your post history, now these social media companies are saying, well, we're going to ban you for off-platform activity as well.
00:30:42.880It's not just activity you do on Twitter or activity on Facebook.
00:30:46.680If you insult someone on a TV network or use hate speech to rally so-called hate speech, we might ban you for that as well.
00:30:55.860So they're not just regulating your behavior on Facebook.
00:30:57.940They're going to regulate your behavior everywhere, everywhere, anything you do in public or even in private that becomes public.
00:31:03.820They're going to regulate and kind of against you.
00:31:06.380You know, and again, I refer to Orwell's 1984, which was quite prophetic in that the telescreens, as I think they call it, TVs in that book, you watched it, but it watched you.
00:31:36.220You and I have been talking about these problems actually for years now.
00:31:39.260And I think you and I are agreed and maybe some of our viewers, too, and others are waking up to it.
00:31:42.980But I think the only man who could do something about it, the president of the United States, who's a huge social media user, so far has not done a thing.
00:31:52.600And it's just a couple of years till his reelection.
00:31:54.940And I think he's going to be killed by these folks.
00:31:57.240If you can take out Alex Jones today, Tommy Robinson the next day, Anne-Marie Waters the day after that, why couldn't you take out Donald Trump?
00:32:02.800And what's he going to do if he loses?
00:32:05.660Is Donald Trump actually ever going to wake up to this while he can?
00:32:09.440Well, I noticed that yesterday Ivanka Trump, the president's liberal daughter who works in the White House now, won an award from the Internet Association, which is ironically an Internet Freedom Award from the Internet Association.
00:32:25.580Now, the Internet Association is a D.C. lobbying group set up by Google, Facebook and Microsoft and all the big tech companies.
00:32:35.660So it's very, very troubling that members of the president's family are getting so-called Internet Freedom Awards from the very people who are destroying Internet Freedom on a daily basis.
00:32:46.280As you say, Donald Trump will not win in 2020 if he doesn't solve the problem of social media bias.
00:33:04.120What they're going to do about it is another question.
00:33:07.380It's possible that us waiting for the right moment or working out what to do, it is a legitimately complicated issue.
00:33:14.520But one thing the executive could do tomorrow is simply withdraw federal contracts from any tech giant that doesn't respect the First Amendment.
00:33:34.280And I think time is running out for Donald Trump.
00:33:38.040And also time is running out for everyone else.
00:33:39.920We are sleepwalking into totalitarianism here.
00:33:42.660As I said, we're now in a situation that if you don't follow the rules of these companies to the letter, not just on their platform, but in all of your public life and maybe even your private life as well, if you don't follow their rules of behavior, your livelihood will be destroyed.
00:33:58.000You won't be able to use credit cards.
00:33:59.000Sometimes you won't be able to have a voice in the public square.
00:34:02.100If we don't address that, we will arrive in a sort of technological dystopia where all of our behavior is governed by a few god kings in Silicon Valley.