Why aren't Commonwealth countries defending civil liberties？
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Summary
Why are the Commonwealth countries, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, doing so poorly at standing up for our civil liberties in the face of the pandemic lockdown? I ll give you some crazy examples too, including a new video out of Melbourne, Australia that will make you sick.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. In today's podcast, I ask a question. Why are the Commonwealth countries,
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Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, doing so poorly at standing up for our civil liberties in
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the face of the pandemic lockdown? I don't get it. I'll give you some crazy examples too,
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including a new video out of Melbourne, Australia that will make you sick. I wish you could see the
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video so you'll hear it and you'll understand it. But seeing is believing with these home invasions.
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I mean, I won't tell you what you're in for, but basically cops busting into a private house
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with a search warrant because someone didn't like the lockdown. I'd like it if you could see the
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videos here, and you can by becoming a premium subscriber. It's what we call Rebel News Plus.
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helps us pay for our independent journalism. Okay, here's today's podcast.
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Tonight, why are the Commonwealth countries doing so poorly defending civil liberties?
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It's September 2nd, 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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We're not as free as the Americans, a country born in revolution where freedom was the central issue.
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You really should read the Declaration of Independence.
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
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that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
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that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
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that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,
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deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
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that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends,
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it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.
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I mean, if that's the recipe for dissolving an old country and building a new country,
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If you think that's good, well, you've got to read their Bill of Rights, too.
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First Amendment for free speech, Second Amendment for the right to bear arms.
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It's a pretty serious place when it comes to freedom.
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But, you know, here in Canada, we're supposed to be pretty free, too.
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Canada got our independence through negotiation and legislation, not revolution.
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Same with Australia, New Zealand, pretty much the whole Commonwealth.
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But you'd think we'd still have kept the best of British freedom, the Magna Carta,
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the evolution of British liberty as enshrined in both laws passed by Parliament,
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but also centuries of common law, court rulings.
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And then there's just the culture, the literature, the arguments.
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This book, published in 1644 by John Milton, with the Greek name Areopagitica,
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350 years ago, the British Parliament wanted to pass an order
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that you had to have a license before you could print a book.
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You couldn't even publish and then be censored.
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There's laws, then there's the history, the customs, like John Milton.
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For centuries, freedom was the thing in the United Kingdom, in the British Empire.
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But I point out that while there have been some absurd violations of civil liberties in the United States,
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such as California's satanic rules that ban churches from opening,
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I suppose partly it's because there are 50 different United States,
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and governors can only be a tyrant in their territory.
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well, most of America is saner and has more checks and balances
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The Constitution of the United States applies across the country.
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America's done pretty well, all things considered.
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In Canada and Australia and New Zealand and the UK itself,
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But terrible on the civil liberties side, I mean.
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and then they basically stopped all air travel.
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And of course, because their prime minister is a woman,
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well, you had countless stories about how it was because she was a woman
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You know, that's obviously a scientific explanation.
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Yeah, well, New Zealand cut itself off, but not 100%.
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They actually postponed their parliamentary elections for a month.
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They put 1,200 New Zealand soldiers on the street
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And listen to Ardern cackle about how she locks people up
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and keeps them locked up until they take some medical tests.
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You know, what do we do if someone refuses to be tested?
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If someone refuses in our facilities to be tested,
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You either get your tests done and make sure you're cleared,
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So I think most people will look at that and say,
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But she's just one person in a commonwealth democracy.
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She's the prime minister in a parliamentary system
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Australia, or at least the state of Victoria in the Southeast,
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I think I showed this to you in my daytime show the other day.
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She has her son with her and she's done nothing wrong.
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That was so important to stop that you traumatised that kid for life.
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And look at this new video from yesterday in Melbourne.
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You can show me your search warrant before you go through my house.
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Now what I want to explain to you is if you want to listen, you've got your phone going.
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Now you're under arrest in relation to incitement.
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You're not obliged to say I do anything, but anything you say I do may be given in evidence.
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It's in relation to a Facebook post, in relation to a lockdown protest you put on for Saturday.
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Yeah, and I wasn't breaking any laws by doing that.
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That's why I'm arresting you, in relation to incitement.
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You also have the right to communicate with or to communicate with a legal practitioner.
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A woman in her own house, pregnant, on her way to an ultrasound exam,
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police barge in, search warrant, arresting her for a Facebook post for incitement.
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No, in this case, it means disagreeing with the government's politics.
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She was promoting a lawful protest, a protest that actually complies with mask laws,
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busting into her house, arresting her in front of her family.
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How do the jailers take in such a woman on these charges?
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How does anyone in the entire system, from the justice minister to the judges,
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all the way on down, from the prime minister on down,
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And in the United Kingdom, too, Pierce Corbyn, as the name suggests,
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the brother of former labor leader Jeremy Corbyn,
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an activist in his own right, more conservative in some ways than his brother.
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and it won't surprise you now to learn he's a leading pandemic lockdown skeptic.
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He organized a peaceful demonstration, not a Black Lives Matter riot.
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the crowdfunding company deleted his campaign immediately.
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And Australia and the UK don't have the excuse of being run by a socialist politician.
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Yesterday, I interviewed Rocco Galati about his lawsuit.
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By his own self-description, he's a rebel, a dissident, a gadfly.
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Where are the fancy people, the establishment people, even the vultures?
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You know, the class action lawyers motivated by money alone.
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Why has everyone, the media, the courts, the culture, the professors, everyone being so silent?
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Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi was caught getting a private hair salon visit in California.
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Someone leaked the closed-circuit security footage of it.
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But the bigger point is, this is all while hair salons across California are locked down.
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For the little people, not for the Speaker of the House, this was a huge scoop.
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It proves the elite doesn't believe their own spin about the pandemic.
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Here's what a reporter at Politico wrote in reply.
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Have to ask, upon seeing this, is it legal in California, a two-party consent state,
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to videotape someone in a private home or business without their consent?
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You don't think it's interesting that the top Democrat in Congress is breaking her own rules?
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Rather, you'd like to cook up some kooky theory that even reporting on this huge news is illegal?
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But this is a reporter, not just acting as an enforcer for lockdowns and mask laws,
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but acting as an enforcer for a Democrat caught cheating?
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It's bad there in California, but most Canadian provinces are worse than your average American state.
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You can't even travel from Canada to the United States, where you can travel in,
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but you can't get back without a 14-day quarantine.
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It's part of Trudeau's attempt to help the Democrats hurt Trump and the American economy in the next four months,
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to denormalize things, to destabilize Trump, I'm sure of it.
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I see that Canada is opening up direct flights with China again,
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but not with the United States in the same manner.
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And as bad as Canada is, we're nothing compared to our other five-eyes allies in New Zealand and Australia.
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How is it that our freedoms in the British Commonwealth and in the U.K. itself were stood for centuries?
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World wars, the Great Depression, a hundred other menaces,
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including genuinely huge pandemics like the Spanish flu a hundred years ago.
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But that now, all of a sudden, we're lost it all so quickly and so stupidly.
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I know this is probably not the most joyous TGIF we have had.
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You know, it's been an extraordinarily stressful time, I'm sure, for many of you.
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You know, the outcome, you know, in a two-party system with a lot of polarization in the country,
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it's a deeply divided country, and you have a binary outcome, right?
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It was a shock to all of us, the results of the election.
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It was a fair and democratic process, and we honor that.
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That was the first moment I really felt like we were going to lose.
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And it was this massive, like, kick in the gut that we were going to lose.
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That shocking, emotional, personal display of corporate solidarity with the Democratic Party,
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matched with a juvenile, personal, emotional rejection of the voters' will,
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that was a Google leadership town hall meeting the week that Donald Trump won his election in 2016.
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There was no separating line between Google and the Democrat campaign and Hillary Clinton.
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Their loss was the same loss as Hillary Clinton's.
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And ever since, for four years, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter,
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all of them have vowed they would never again allow social media or the Internet to be used by their enemies,
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which is their mindset towards anyone conservative.
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It's one of the reasons why we here at Rebel News in Canada were demonetized.
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That was one of the first moves by YouTube to demonetize conservative media.
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Well, we learned about that town hall video from Alam Bokhari, the senior tech correspondent at Breitbart.com.
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And over the past four years, you've gotten to know Alam well.
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He's the most important journalist covering tech in America these days because he focuses on tech's political goals.
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And I am so delighted to say that just in the nick of time, Alam has published a new book on the subject called
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Deleted, Big Tech's Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.
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Will it, in fact, be shipped and published by Amazon?
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My own book was censored by Amazon for two months.
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Do you know if this book will be censored or will it even be allowed to be published on Amazon?
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Well, this is the question that all political authors have to ask themselves with big tech dominating publishing,
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whether it's news publishing or book publishing in so many ways.
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They also censored Alex Berenson, who wrote a book critiquing the coronavirus panic.
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So it's something that Amazon is doing more and more often.
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So I suppose we'll see that we'll see what happens there.
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That's also available, I'm happy to say, on Barnes & Noble and various other more traditional book retailers.
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So if it does go down on Amazon, there will be some alternatives.
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I guess we'll see what happens if they ding me for hate speech or something like that.
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Maybe criticizing the tech companies is going to be redefined as hate speech soon.
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And they don't even engage you in a conversation.
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When they ban my own book, and I don't want to talk about my own book,
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but I just know that when Amazon banned my book called China Virus,
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they refused to give any explanation other than it contradicted, quote, official sources.
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I can only imagine what they would do with your book, because at least I was criticizing China.
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You are actually criticizing the tech companies themselves.
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I'm worried that even your book will be censored on Facebook, on YouTube, and other places.
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I mean, that certainly wouldn't be the first time that, you know, I have to be fair to them,
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but it wouldn't be the first time that big tech has tried to censor a Breitbart reporter.
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You know, they've censored Breitbart stories before on Facebook.
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It wouldn't be the first time that big tech has censored reporting that's critical of them.
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I remember them censoring videos from James O'Keefe at Project Veritas exposing the tech giants.
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The thing is, these tech companies, there's no law regulating them.
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There's no oversight preventing them from interfering with journalism, from interfering with politics.
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And this is something that's going to be a huge, huge problem in the next election, I think.
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The Four-Year Plot to Undermine the Trump Movement and Steal the Election to Avoid a Repeat of 2016.
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That's been the absolute imperative for so many people inside Silicon Valley over the past four years.
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And we're going to see how that's going to impact the next election for the first time, actually,
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They're going to be using every tool in their arsenal to avoid a similar outcome.
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And by the way, Ezra, this doesn't just come from me.
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This comes from all of my sources inside these companies that have informed the book and informed my journalism.
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People inside Google, inside Facebook, inside Twitter, who have just been watching this hysteria erupt across the industry.
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And, of course, they're unable to say anything because if you challenge the political narratives,
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you'll get set upon and fired and hounded out of the company by your colleagues,
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much like James Damore was when he critiqued the narratives.
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But all of these sources, they say the same thing, that there was a complete panic inside every single major big tech company
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And afterwards, what happened was this outgrowth of all these new words they invented,
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misinformation, hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories.
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All of these words that give them plausible deniability but have basically served as a way to ban Trump supporters from their platforms over the past four years.
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Not just ban them overtly, which you can see, but also suppress them covertly in the algorithms.
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Yeah. You know, something that I think has changed since watching that tearful town hall that Google had with their senior managers and staff felt a little bit naive.
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Their reaction was childish, but they were stunned.
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I don't think they're babes in the woods anymore.
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I think they're much more aggressive and much more partisan.
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For example, I note that one of Kamala Harris's senior staffers went directly from her presidential campaign to a senior censorship position at Twitter.
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We see a revolving door between Justin Trudeau in Canada and tech companies.
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The Obama administration and the overlap with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Netflix,
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they're really, you don't know where one ends and the other begins.
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I think that that kind of naivete in 2016 has been replaced with really a professional campaign political class like you would see in a super PAC.
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And even when Silicon Valley doesn't want to censor, on the rare occasions where it stands up to pressure from, say, the Democrats or from the mainstream media to censor political viewpoints,
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they're immediately faced with, you know, advertiser boycotts, threats from Democrats to regulate them.
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And all of this just adds to the sense that they have to do something.
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They have to crack down on these opinions of the establishment hate.
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I think recently, actually, Facebook introduced a new rule saying that if there's a regulatory—I can't remember the exact phrasing,
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but the general gist is if there's a potential regulatory threat to Facebook from content on its platform,
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it gives itself the right to remove that content.
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So, essentially, this means that as Democrats and other politicians ramp up the threat of regulation of these companies,
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And you mentioned Kamala Harris's former employee working for Twitter.
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We also did a story recently at Breitbart exposing a Facebook team member who works in their misinformation department
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who, first of all, used to work for the CIA under John Brennan and also had a Black Lives Matter banner picture on her LinkedIn profile.
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So, these companies are just full of left-wing Democrat partisans, especially Google, which was so deeply tied to the Obama administration.
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I mean, there was essentially a revolving door between Google and the Obama White House employees going from one to the other
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and back again during that whole administration.
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We know Eric Schmidt worked pretty much directly for the Clinton campaign, was at Clinton's election night party,
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was very open about campaigning for her and trying to help her win.
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While he was still at Google, by the way, he was like one of the senior people there.
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So, they're not even trying to conceal their sympathies at this point.
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The only question is, how is the vast amount of power that they have over the control of, over the flow of information,
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over everything we see online, how is that going to impact the 2020 election?
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And can the Trump movement somehow win despite this vast mobilization of technological power?
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We're talking with Alan Bokhari, the author of the new book, Deleted Big Tech's Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.
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Alan, we recently interviewed Ryan Hartwig, who for more than a year was a contractor working for a company called Cognizant,
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He said there were 1,500 employees at the Phoenix office alone.
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They were working three shifts a day, and they were censoring up to 200 posts per day each.
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My math tells me that's 300,000 little acts of censorship per day just from that office.
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I found it interesting that they had a specific Canadian election censorship manual,
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and that's what I focused on with my discussions with him.
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But if they were so brazen at censoring Canadian elections,
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which I don't know if that's that important a deal for Facebook.
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I can only imagine how many contractors have been employed and tasked with censoring the American election,
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This, you've hit on something truly terrifying,
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which is that these tech companies aren't simply going to interfere in the election in America,
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but they can now interfere in elections all around the world.
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targeting WhatsApp groups that supported Brazil's President Bolsonaro.
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Facebook also banned thousands of Le Pen supporters before the French elections.
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I believe they've targeted populace in Italy as well.
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This is all around the world that this is happening.
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And by the way, one of their senior people at Facebook is Nick Clegg,
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who was pretty open about wanting to overturn the result of the Brexit referendum in Britain.
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He was the leader of the most pro-Brexit party in the country.
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Facebook's also advised by the Atlantic Council,
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which is essentially a neocon globalist think tank
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filled with people who spent their entire careers interfering in other countries.
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And there's, again, there's no oversight stopping them from interfering in elections.
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I think the scariest thing I heard from that censor contractor
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was that these 300,000 censorship actions per day
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were training the AI, the artificial intelligence.
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those millions, maybe a billion acts of censorship,
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they were teaching the computer how to automatically censor.
00:29:14.060
I mean, you and I have just been bantering about this general issue.
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Tell me some of the themes you get into the book,
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because I know you and I talk about current events in this subject,
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but are there any things in the book that might surprise people,
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but tell me why we should go out and get the book right now,
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But give me some teasers about what's actually in the book.
00:29:41.380
Well, you've just hit on one of the most important things,
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because we're all aware of the prominent conservatives
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But the future of censorship is going to be these intelligent machines
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decide whether our posts will be seen in people's feeds
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or just get completely buried in the algorithm.
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All algorithms are is something that essentially takes up,
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which is, of course, determined by leftists in Silicon Valley.
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whether your post is going to be suppressed or not.
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across these platforms to everything automatically.
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And my sources have explained how this is going to happen
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and how Silicon Valley has essentially created a system
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are just moving further and further to the left
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and they shut down conferences and conventions.
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So one of my chapters focuses on the connections
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that Silicon Valley has made to Washington, D.C.
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If you ever see a conservative think tank saying,
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well, we have to leave the tech companies alone
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that person is being funded by Google or Facebook.
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legal immunities that Congress passed for them.
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that Trump's election is essential to stop this.
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of how powerful these tech companies actually are.
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He certainly has quite a bit of momentum at the moment,
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So I think it's going to be a lot tougher this time.
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I'm not going to make one prediction either way
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and the reason why Americans need to be informed
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who are going to be cheating with mail-in ballots.
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There was an article in the New York Post recently
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So the tech companies will be doing everything they can