Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ EU declares war on Elon Musk and free speech itself

00:00:00.000 Hello, my friends. One of the smartest people I know is Alan Bakari, and he's been on the tech

00:00:04.660 file for a decade. And by that, I mean, he realized very early that tech would be the

00:00:10.320 political battleground. It's the free speech battleground. It's the freedom battleground.

00:00:14.460 He's been covering it closer than pretty much anyone else. We'll talk to him about so many

00:00:18.960 developments, including the battle between Elon Musk and the European Union. But first,

00:00:23.640 let me invite you to get a subscription of what we call Rebel News Plus. It's the video version

00:00:27.860 of this podcast. Just go to rebelnewsplus.com. It's eight bucks a month, which may not sound like a

00:00:33.220 lot to you, but boy, it adds up for us. That's how we stay independent. And we take no government money,

00:00:37.720 and it shows. Tonight, the latest in the tech wars.

00:00:57.040 Elon Musk versus the European Union, a feature interview with our friend Alan Bakari.

00:01:02.200 It's December 10th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.

00:01:08.400 Shame on you, you censorious bug.

00:01:11.520 Well, the world's most consequential man is Donald Trump, but that expires when his term

00:01:26.420 as president expires. And though there are some who wish and hope that he could find a way to get

00:01:32.320 around the U.S. Constitution's ban on a third term, I don't think he wants to run again. At least he's

00:01:38.160 intimated as much. And so the world's second most consequential man, Elon Musk, I think will be even

00:01:45.340 more important. How will he fare without Donald Trump backing U.S. high technology and U.S. free

00:01:52.820 speech, both of which are important to Elon Musk? And I want to tell you this, because over the last few

00:01:58.480 days, the European Union has made it clear what they would do to Elon Musk if they could. They

00:02:05.740 announced a fine of 120 million euros in Canadian money. That's like 200 million. Here's a clip of

00:02:14.800 them just so proud of themselves fining the United States' leading social media platform. Take a look.

00:02:21.440 Today, the Commission has issued a fine of 120 million euros to X for breaching the Digital Services

00:02:29.740 Act. This is the first ever fine under the DSA. X has indeed breached its transparency obligation

00:02:36.540 under the DSA. This includes X's blue check mark. It deceives users. Anyone can pay to obtain the

00:02:45.580 verified status. And X does not meaningfully verify who is behind it. It also includes X's advertising

00:02:54.560 repository, which does not work properly. And X doesn't provide effective data access for researchers.

00:03:03.400 Failure to comply with the non-compliance decision may lead to periodic penalty payments on top of today's

00:03:10.360 fine. At the same time, we have adopted today and accepted TikTok's commitments to make its own

00:03:18.940 advertising repository work. What does this show? Our objective is not a fine. If you engage constructively

00:03:27.480 with the Commission, we settle cases. If you do not, we take action. You know, I saw a chart that showed

00:03:34.640 the amount of money that all European tech companies pay in taxes is smaller than what the European Union

00:03:44.720 charges American tech companies in terms of fines, whether it's Apple, Google, Meta, or Elon Musk X,

00:03:53.900 formerly called Twitter. The European Union doesn't really have a tech industry of its own, but it certainly

00:03:59.500 extracts wealth from America. This, of course, is causing a bit of a showdown. Various Americans,

00:04:05.680 including ambassadors to the European Union, have said they will fight this. How's that going to go?

00:04:12.500 And when Donald Trump leaves in three years, what will happen then? Joining us to talk about these

00:04:17.140 and other important issues is one of our favorite guys who was really the first to cover the importance

00:04:22.740 of the political side of the tech beat. You know, I'm talking about my friend Alan Bocari, who's the

00:04:27.740 Managing Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. And he joins us now via Zoom. I'm great

00:04:32.820 to see you again. You knew before everyone else that tech was going to be the political theme of the

00:04:39.480 decade. I remember when you were the senior tech editor at Breitbart.com, I somehow thought tech,

00:04:44.760 that's sort of boring. Boring. It's the opposite of boring. It's the heart of all debates, isn't it?

00:04:48.900 It certainly is. And that's becoming more the case. You saw that in the 2024 election as well,

00:04:56.760 when podcasts started to play a massive, massive role for the first time ever. They've almost

00:05:01.580 displaced the mainstream legacy media now. People go to X for their news. It's the number one news

00:05:07.980 app in almost every country at the moment. So it's no wonder that bureaucrats in the European Union would

00:05:14.400 like to control it and would like to use their vast regulatory powers to get to grips with this

00:05:19.760 platform. Because, you know, the political establishment was used in a very comfortable

00:05:25.000 multi-decade period where they had a very pliant, compliant mainstream media, legacy media that

00:05:31.860 controlled the bounds of acceptable debate. And now social media has just thrown a debate open to

00:05:38.500 every perspective you can imagine. And it's, you know, it's not something that bureaucrats can easily

00:05:45.480 control. And the purpose of the European Union's Digital Services Act is to restore that control that

00:05:52.240 political elites feel they've lost because of the online media displacing legacy media.

00:05:57.840 Some of your most blockbuster stories were back in 2016, 2017, when tech was one of the tools used

00:06:05.200 by an insurgent populist right to support Donald Trump. And I don't think Silicon Valley saw it

00:06:10.480 coming. We saw, and I think it was your scoop, when you got a hold of an internal town hall meeting,

00:06:16.920 I think it was at Google YouTube, if I recall, where senior executives were basically having a

00:06:22.140 struggle session confessing that they didn't do enough to stop people and that they'll do better.

00:06:27.760 And that's when the great tech censorship wave really began in earnest after Trump's first win

00:06:33.320 in 2016. They were more, much more successful in, in regulating the internet, I think, for 2020.

00:06:41.100 After 2024, the pendulum has started to move back towards freedom. Talk a little bit about that.

00:06:47.180 And then I want to dig more into this 120 million euro fine, but the pendulum's been swinging, isn't it?

00:06:52.320 Even some of these Silicon Valley tycoons who were extremely critical of Trump personally,

00:06:57.940 some of them have actually embraced him and they sound like fans.

00:07:00.600 Yes, that's certainly been a massive change compared to 2016. I think 2016 was just a huge shock to the

00:07:07.380 establishment, both the political establishment in places like Washington, D.C., but also the business

00:07:13.120 corporate establishment and the tech establishment in Silicon Valley. Up until that point, you know,

00:07:18.880 the tech industry had been very buddy-buddy with the Democratic Party, with Barack Obama.

00:07:24.620 Zuckerberg and Obama had that whole bromance in 2012, if you remember that.

00:07:28.680 So, you know, there was the idea that tech would have to deal with, you know, this very new,

00:07:34.820 very populist Republican administration was a massive shock. You've got to remember,

00:07:38.440 most people in Silicon Valley, especially at that time, were quite left-leaning. It was a very

00:07:42.540 left-leaning culture. That chain really changed over. So you had really, just quickly, you had

00:07:49.100 tech and the deep state in Washington, D.C., and the legacy media all on the same side for 2016.

00:07:56.480 They were all basically on the same side, that populism needs to be contained. And they all sort

00:08:02.000 of agreed that a big reason for this was, you know, unregulated social media. And this is when

00:08:08.080 U.S. government agencies, who were completely not cooperating with the first Trump administration,

00:08:13.400 there was sort of a law unto themselves. This is when you start to see hundreds of millions of U.S.

00:08:18.820 taxpayer dollars being poured into these disinformation research institutes. This is the first time we start

00:08:24.960 hearing about words like disinformation and misinformation entered the mainstream. That's

00:08:30.300 after the 2016 election. That's when it all starts. And Silicon Valley broadly cooperates with this

00:08:36.100 right up until the 2020 election. But after Biden gets in, in 2021, you know, the U.S. government

00:08:44.520 and governments around the world continue putting on the pressure on Silicon Valley.

00:08:48.440 And it looks increasingly like governments are bullying Silicon Valley companies and trying to

00:08:55.540 almost trying to destroy them because they're so committed to restoring the power of the legacy

00:09:01.140 media. There was even a bill in 2022, 2023 called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. I think

00:09:08.340 I've talked to you about it before. That would have forced Silicon Valley companies to give billions of

00:09:13.620 dollars in ad revenue to legacy media companies just for the privilege of linking to their content.

00:09:20.860 And, you know, I believe Canada has a similar law. So you had all these things happening

00:09:24.180 after after Biden wins, after Trump one goes away. And I think this gradually turns people in

00:09:31.260 Silicon Valley gradually understand that political elites want them under their thumb. And I think

00:09:35.760 that's why they're a lot friendlier to Trump right now. Yeah. And I think some of his policies

00:09:40.760 towards them are friendlier from a business point of view. And I think he's taking them seriously

00:09:45.780 as a strategic competitive advantage. I think that's how it looks like to me. I'm not an insider

00:09:52.040 like yourself. I mean, talk a little bit, if you would, about after this announcement that Elon Musk

00:09:57.960 and TikTok on Twitter were being hit with a massive fine. There was a whole constellation of U.S.

00:10:05.900 diplomats, diplomats and other senior members of the administration who were saying very tough

00:10:11.500 things about the European Union. So, I mean, and it looked organized and it looked like it was green

00:10:17.760 lit, perhaps by the White House. Maybe you can give us a minute on that, because it wasn't just Elon

00:10:22.820 Musk saying this is outrageous. It was like the entire United States. I don't think Trump himself spoke

00:10:28.500 to it, but really at the highest levels, people were saying this will not stand if America has its

00:10:34.780 way. Give me a minute on that. Yeah. So my foundation, the Foundation for Freedom Online,

00:10:39.780 has been writing for a long time about the Digital Services Act. We actually started looking at it

00:10:43.800 before this administration came into office. So while Biden was still in office, because that's

00:10:48.960 when the building blocks of the Digital Services Act were really put into place. And it actually came

00:10:54.240 into effect before Trump took office. So we've known for a long time that this was going to be a huge,

00:10:58.820 huge risk to online free speech, because, you know, even American companies can't ignore

00:11:04.600 a market as big as the EU and its regulatory power, unless they want to exit the continent

00:11:10.400 altogether, like some US tech companies have exited China. It's something, you know, I don't

00:11:16.660 think it's extremely possible, but it's certainly a possibility at this point. So we've been looking

00:11:20.560 at it for a long time, and we've always been clear it's a massive censorship threat. And I think

00:11:23.800 the present administration has also understood this for a long time, because you go back to when

00:11:28.840 Elon Musk first took over Twitter, almost immediately, you start to see threats from European

00:11:35.320 bureaucrats and European commissioners. So they're very clear from the outset, they're going to use

00:11:39.760 every tool in their arsenal to go after Elon Musk, to go after X, if it restored free speech, which of

00:11:47.140 course it did. And that's why X has become, I think, it has actually become the first tech company to be

00:11:56.140 fined under the Digital Services Act. And I think that was very obvious for a long time. And I think

00:12:00.540 that's why the current administration has been, you know, turning up the heat on Brussels, even before

00:12:08.980 this announcement.

00:12:10.260 You know, I saw that one of the things that the European Union announced at the same time they're going

00:12:15.900 after Twitter, or X is now called, they specifically said, we're not going to find TikTok, which as of

00:12:22.820 today, if I'm not mistaken, it's still owned by communist China, that the handover to an American

00:12:27.360 owner has not yet been completed, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think that happens until the new

00:12:32.080 year. So you have a Chinese run, Chinese managed, Chinese censored, Chinese propaganda, Chinese algorithm,

00:12:38.860 I think, I think that's fair to say, I mean, TikTok is a Chinese company, specifically given a

00:12:45.860 pass by the EU. They praise it, saying, well, TikTok will talk to us and show us respect.

00:12:52.400 That's why we're not finding TikTok. So even as they condemn and censor Elon Musk, they toot

00:12:59.860 their horn to the fact that they're cooperating with the Communist Party of China. That's got to,

00:13:06.420 they got to know that that's going to be a provocation to Donald Trump. And they've got to

00:13:10.400 know that shows that they're hypocritical. I guess they just don't care.

00:13:13.160 Well, let's step into the shoes of a European bureaucrat or European political elite.

00:13:20.040 From their perspective, China is not nearly as big of a threat to them and their political power and

00:13:25.880 their political project in the European Union as a whole, as the populist right is. You look at

00:13:32.180 Germany, AFD is now opening up a massive lead over every other party in Germany. You look at France,

00:13:37.680 Jordan Bardella and the national rally are the favorites to win the next election. You look at

00:13:43.420 the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders had the biggest party for a long, still has the biggest

00:13:47.820 party, I think. And, you know, it's the same all across the European continent. And what's really

00:13:53.980 troubling, I think, to European political elites is that most of the support for populism,

00:13:58.420 their biggest supporters, their largest base of support actually comes from young people around

00:14:02.100 the continent. So time is not on their side. It's not the case. It's not like the US where young

00:14:09.060 people tend to lean left and Canada and the UK where young people also tend to lean left on the

00:14:14.720 European continent and places like France, Germany and across the European Union. Actually, young

00:14:19.360 people are flocking to the populist right. So this is why controlling platforms like X, where the

00:14:27.060 populist right congregate, is so important to European elites because they know they're on borrowed time.

00:14:31.920 And they know that the more access young people get to social media, the more public opinion will

00:14:37.940 turn against them, not just in the short term, but in the long term with future generations.

00:14:42.700 And they also know that TikTok is not promoting a right wing agenda. TikTok is fine with censorship

00:14:50.320 too, by the way. I think they appreciate dealing with China. They have a similar authoritarian edge to

00:14:56.520 them. Now, there was one US diplomat, I forget her name right now. I think she was the diplomat,

00:15:00.360 the ambassador to the EU. She did a little video and she said, here are things I can say as an

00:15:05.700 American that I could not say if I was a European. And let me play the clip. It was a bit audacious.

00:15:12.680 Like she even said some words that I would say were not particularly polite. But I think that's the

00:15:17.300 point. Because we're allowed to say things that may be impolite. There's a difference between being

00:15:23.540 impolite and being illegal. And that's one of the things that Elon Musk has repeatedly said about X.

00:15:27.740 He said, we're going to enforce the law, the law against, you know, uttering threats,

00:15:32.960 the law against terrorism. There are some speech crimes that I think many of us who are even free

00:15:37.980 speechers would agree. That's an, that's a crime. But Elon Musk is saying we're not going further

00:15:42.820 than that to, to regulate politeness. Here, take a look at this video.

00:15:47.240 I got off my European train and checked into my European hotel and noticed that a member of European

00:15:52.360 parliament called Helmut Bronstetter tweeted, quote, there's no censorship in Europe. Everyone has to

00:15:58.340 follow our rules. Well, I'm traveling here on a diplomatic passport. So I thought I'd take this

00:16:03.460 opportunity to say a few things that ordinary Europeans can't by revisiting some remarks for

00:16:08.900 which people in Europe and also the UK have been investigated or arrested or jailed by their

00:16:13.440 governments over the past few years. So as I tweeted a few moments ago, a German woman notoriously

00:16:19.080 received a harsher jail sentence than a convicted rapist after the woman called the rapist, quote,

00:16:24.940 a disgraceful pig. This was after he participated along with several other disgraceful pigs in the

00:16:30.760 gang rape of a 15 year old girl in a public park. Similarly, a British woman was dragged out of her

00:16:37.100 bath by 11 police officers after she referred in a private text message to a man who allegedly

00:16:42.700 violently assaulted her as, quote, a faggot. And victims of violent crime aren't the only people who

00:16:48.900 lack free speech rights in Europe. In Sweden, an activist called Rasmus Paladin was jailed after

00:16:54.840 he burned a Koran and referred to Islam as gay Islam. Finally, in Germany, a man faced a criminal

00:17:02.480 investigation for referring to Green Party leader Riccardo Lange as, quote, fat. There are many more.

00:17:09.640 I could go on. But it's important to note that the European censorship bureaucracy often postures as

00:17:15.220 populist fighting against big tech. Yet none of the people I listed as a large tech company.

00:17:21.140 These are ordinary Europeans and one Brit who were punished by their governments for saying what

00:17:25.600 they thought was true or just what they felt like saying. In a free society, that shouldn't happen.

00:17:31.540 So which is it, Mr. Bronstetter? Is there no censorship in Europe or do we all have to follow your rules?

00:17:38.200 So that's Sarah Rogers. What was the reaction to her? Because that was provocative. And you know

00:17:44.260 that a career diplomat like her would never have done anything so provocative without clearance

00:17:49.480 from the top. Like diplomats, one thing you can say about diplomats is they're diplomatic.

00:17:54.540 That was a very undiplomatic diplomat. So she was obviously given the green light on that.

00:17:59.980 Do you know what the reaction has been in Brussels to that, you know, tough-talking American lass?

00:18:04.680 Yes, that's Sarah Rogers, one of the Trump administration's best appointments, in my opinion.

00:18:10.400 The State Department has really been exemplary, I think, in this administration. They've really

00:18:17.120 made free speech a priority. And it's clearly becoming a priority now for American public diplomacy,

00:18:23.920 which is a massive sea change to previous administrations. We actually just have a report

00:18:28.140 out of the Foundation for Freedom Online showing how under the previous administration,

00:18:32.200 the US government actually fully cooperated and supported the establishment of the Digital

00:18:37.920 Services Act, which is now being used to target American companies. The current administration,

00:18:42.920 Sarah Rogers, Marco Rubio, the State Department, they have completely turned the page on that and

00:18:48.220 are now actually putting pressure on US partners to actually not just support, not just not infringe

00:18:55.480 the free speech rights of Americans, which laws like the Digital Services Act threatened to do,

00:19:00.360 and laws like the Online Safety Act in the UK. They threatened to infringe the rights of Americans

00:19:04.360 by targeting American companies and forcing American companies to re-establish the censorship

00:19:09.580 regimes that they've been dismantling over the last few years. But they're also saying, one of the things

00:19:14.000 Sarah Rogers has said, is that this is also bad for the free speech of their own people in Europe,

00:19:18.140 in the UK. And obviously, these are American allies. America wants its allies to have a culture of free

00:19:25.180 speech, like America has a culture of free speech. Unfortunately, no, some Americans, especially in

00:19:30.620 the Democratic Party, actually would prefer a more European system of tight speech controls. And you can

00:19:35.820 see that very clearly in our latest report. But I think this is now official policy at the State

00:19:42.220 Department and official policy at the administration. And it's great to see that the US will go out around

00:19:46.940 the world to its allies, to all countries, really, and actually promote free speech and promote free

00:19:52.140 speech for the people in those countries. Yeah, it's sort of interesting to watch the Europeans try and

00:19:56.580 push back. They're not used to fighting with Americans. They're not used to fighting on Twitter in short

00:20:00.880 soundbites. They're used to doing blah, blah, blah speeches in the European Union that no one actually

00:20:05.580 pays attention to. Let me just say one more thing about the Twitter fine before we move on. There were three, I

00:20:10.340 think, main beefs that the European Union had with Elon Musk. One of them was that he was giving away,

00:20:15.200 there's a little thing on Twitter or X, it's a blue checkmark that it's sort of a badge that you're

00:20:20.760 official, that you're a somebody. Now in the past, it was very ambiguous how you got them. You had to,

00:20:28.040 it was like you were tapped on the shoulder and were bestowed this blue checkmark by a friend in

00:20:33.400 the company. Some people secretly paid 15 grand, one news story reported, to get the blue checkmark.

00:20:40.660 It was basically, are you cool with the cool kids? It was very snobby. One of the things Elon Musk did is

00:20:46.520 he let anyone buy a blue checkmark. This was something that enraged the Europeans. It was

00:20:51.940 specifically something they said they were fining him for. One more thing I thought was odd, they

00:20:56.880 demanded access to internal statistics. They wanted the right to study Elon Musk's X or Twitter. Neither

00:21:06.060 of these things seem appropriate. They seem invasive. One of them seems, well, how dare you let

00:21:14.040 anybody get the cool kids checkmark? And the other seems quite, you know, snooping around. Why is that?

00:21:19.800 I thought that the actual reasons sounded like BS. What do you make of those reasons? Are they real?

00:21:28.100 So this is actually very, very important. I think a lot of people are aware that the EU is doing this

00:21:34.100 because they want more censorship on X, but they don't really understand the mechanism of censorship.

00:21:38.780 So if you look at the three things in that announcement, the three things that the EU says

00:21:43.180 they're fining X for, it's like you said, it's the blue checkmarks, number one. Number two, it's not giving

00:21:49.000 researchers access to Twitter's ad repository. Number three, not giving researchers access to data

00:21:55.140 more widely, data from Twitter's API. Now here's why those three things, here's how those three things

00:22:01.400 directly relate to online censorship. Number one, subscribers. By opening up the verification system

00:22:10.000 to everybody, Twitter has created a stream of revenue that is independent of advertisers.

00:22:16.560 That makes the company more resilient to advertiser boycotts. And people who support online censorship

00:22:23.760 don't like that. So what the EU says is completely false. What they say is the current system,

00:22:31.300 doesn't actually verify users. That's a nonsense allegation, because if you want to be verified,

00:22:35.460 you actually have to give your ID, you have to give a form of ID to Twitter, they can verify

00:22:39.520 that you're a real person. It's absolutely a valid form of verification. What the EU, I think,

00:22:44.720 is actually concerned about is that subscriber revenue will become a greater and greater share

00:22:50.640 of excess revenue, which will make them less and less dependent on advertisers, and thus almost

00:22:55.440 immune to outside pressure. And that goes to the second thing that they find them for,

00:22:59.740 not opening up the ad repository to so-called independent researchers.

00:23:06.080 Right.

00:23:06.460 Now, they'll always say this, you know, independent researchers, they use words like civil society

00:23:10.320 researchers, universities, disinformation researchers. And, you know, what this is,

00:23:16.200 these are the same sorts of people I mentioned earlier in this show, that the previous administration

00:23:23.080 and the U.S. deep state funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer

00:23:27.380 money to create this sort of global anti-disinformation network. All that money goes to so-called researchers.

00:23:35.960 And what they do is they compile lists of disfavored speech, of disfavored users. They compile these

00:23:42.040 vast databases. They essentially function like a third-party private sector Stasi.

00:23:46.360 Right.

00:23:46.840 Now, if you imagine if the U.S. actually, or governments actually tasked a government agency

00:23:55.000 with doing this, it would get called the Stasi. It'd be a massive scandal. Like government

00:23:59.240 bureaucrats directly employed in monitoring online speech. That's why it's much easier to farm it out

00:24:05.320 to independent researchers with grants and awards. That's how they've been doing it for the last 10 years.

00:24:11.080 It gives them much more plausible deniability. And it lets them say, oh, they're just independent

00:24:16.440 researchers. They're just innocent academics. They're not innocent academics and researchers.

00:24:20.120 What they're doing is they're building hit lists of users to get them banned by trust and safety

00:24:25.000 departments. It's exactly what they did in 2020. There was an organization, I'm sure you're familiar

00:24:30.360 with it, called the Election Integrity Partnership. And it's exactly the kind of, you know, allegedly academic

00:24:35.960 researchers that the EU wants to open up X to. What they did is they built a database of millions

00:24:42.120 and millions of tweets, thousands of users, and almost every prominent pro-Trump commentator.

00:24:49.000 And then they then passed this list on to content moderation departments to get them banned. And that

00:24:55.400 organization was set up with the full cooperation. It was actually an idea hatched in the Department of

00:25:00.280 Homeland Security. This came from the government. Right.

00:25:03.880 And this is the case with every disinformation researcher. So that's why the second point that

00:25:08.520 the EU makes against X, that the ad repositories aren't open to researchers. They want researchers,

00:25:15.160 these third party STASI offices, to be able to go into the ad, to see exactly who is advertising on X,

00:25:22.120 so that they can then pressure them to boycott X if they need to. If they can't see who the advertisers

00:25:27.240 are advertising on X, they can't do that. That's why it's so important to them. And then the third point,

00:25:32.040 the third point is opening them up to data in general. That just allows researchers to build

00:25:37.640 these databases of what's trending, who's talking about what, what forbidden topics are being

00:25:42.040 discussed, and who's discussing them. What are the big users, the big accounts that are discussing

00:25:48.680 these forbidden topics? Basically, if their researchers don't have access to this data,

00:25:55.160 then the entire global censorship machine is blind. So that's why it's so important to them.

00:26:00.040 You know, and everything you've listed, the fake blue checkmark controversy, the ad info, the general

00:26:08.440 data, none of these things actually go to some, you know, turpitude. There's, there's nothing wrong.

00:26:15.320 There's nothing that Twitter X is doing that needs to be stopped. It's just the EU wants to be nosy.

00:26:23.160 They want to poke around for, but none of that has anything to do with breaking a law or Twitter is

00:26:28.760 responsible for some harm. It's just, hey, they're not letting us over-regulate them like our,

00:26:36.040 our scant European tech companies allow. I think that's very interesting. I'd say one more thing

00:26:42.360 about the, go ahead. And I'll just, I'll just add here, like we're talking about the EU, right?

00:26:47.800 But as our latest report at foundationfreedomonline.com shows,

00:26:52.120 the previous administration completely collaborated with the EU. They shape the same,

00:26:56.840 this digital services, like the US shaped it through the, uh, they use the International

00:27:01.720 Trade Administration at the Department of Commerce, the previous administration,

00:27:05.160 and the US Trade Representative at the White House. They had something that was called,

00:27:09.400 it was called the E, the US-EU Trade and Technology Council. And we've published all of their,

00:27:15.080 all of their materials on our site. You'll see year after year, since between 2021 and 2024,

00:27:20.120 they put up, put out publication after publication, where the US and the EU governments both say,

00:27:25.960 both reiterate again and again, the importance of tech companies giving access to civil society

00:27:33.000 researchers. So the exact same thing that the EU is now fining X for, uh, the US government and the

00:27:39.320 previous administration completely supported that. And they supported it through the trade offices.

00:27:44.440 These are offices that are supposed to stand up for American companies and American economic interests.

00:27:49.320 But you'll see in these documents, they're actually shaping a law in the European Union

00:27:54.200 that is now targeting American companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's because

00:27:59.480 the previous administration, the US deep state more generally, uh, was just as committed to online

00:28:05.080 censorship at whatever cost, no matter the cost to American companies as the EU is now. And it's

00:28:10.280 only this current administration that's really changed that. Yeah. You know, another benefit to

00:28:15.320 the sensors of outsourcing this dirty work to Europe is it's beyond the reach of access to

00:28:21.400 information or freedom of information requests, because that's a private company or, or not a entity

00:28:29.080 that's governed by disclosure. So they could hide what they were doing. It's in another country,

00:28:33.960 the plausible deniability. There's all sorts of reasons they outsourced it to Europe. Now,

00:28:38.440 one of the interesting things that the Trump administration has started to do is actually

00:28:42.840 deny visas or bring in some other very targeted, I'll call them sanctions against the worst of the

00:28:48.440 worst. There was one Brit who was, I think, over in America mucking around and they sent him home

00:28:54.280 because he was a censor. I forget his name right now, but he was prominent. There was this UK think

00:28:58.600 tank that was sort of campaigning against Trump in 2024. I think he was part of it. And now the Trump,

00:29:03.560 uh, administration is looking to deny visas to actual individual fact checkers, individuals.

00:29:11.080 I think that's such a wonderful idea. And I think it should be expanded. Like that bureaucrat who made

00:29:15.560 the announcement of targeting the ex, he should be banned from going to America too. I'm not saying

00:29:21.000 freeze his bank account. I'm not going full Trudeau like that. But you ban a guy like that from going

00:29:27.240 to America. It's going to sting because however much they hate, say they hate America, everyone

00:29:32.360 in the world loves America, especially elite, wealthy jet setters. They all want to take their

00:29:37.640 kids to Disneyland. They all want to go to Broadway. They want to like, if you want to

00:29:42.920 prick at what's important to these Europeans, it's their cosmopolitan jet setting ways. You ban them from

00:29:49.160 entering the United States and you hurt them morally. I don't know. I would like to see so much

00:29:54.520 more of that. What, what news do you have on that front? Yeah. It's one of the biggest paradoxes

00:29:59.640 of politics, isn't it? That, you know, people who are affluent and well-educated and live in affluent

00:30:03.960 areas often, uh, vote for and support the very same political course, uh, causes that would

00:30:09.880 eventually destroy that affluence and the civilization that maintains it. Um, I, I, yeah, that's one of the

00:30:15.480 many, the visa bans is one of the many sources of pressure that, uh, the Trump administration is

00:30:20.360 putting on worldwide sensors. Um, and that's because the, uh, the architects of online censorship

00:30:26.600 around the world, whether they're in the Europe, uh, European union, whether they're in the UK

00:30:31.000 or Brazil, they're kind of still marching to the tune of the previous administration

00:30:35.640 and the U S deep state, not the current administration there. I think they still,

00:30:40.600 they're all, you can also almost say that there are governments in exile for the Biden administration's

00:30:46.520 censorship state. That's certainly how they're behaving. And I believe that, uh, that person,

00:30:51.320 that individual you identified, he's from the center for countering digital hate.

00:30:54.520 That's the one, that's the one. Yeah. Yeah. And they're a, they're a very nefarious organization.

00:30:59.080 They actually, they were founded in the UK, but they also have an office in the U S that ceaselessly

00:31:04.520 lobbied the previous administration, ceaselessly lobbies people on Capitol Hill to, uh, to make online

00:31:11.160 censorship easier. And that, that organization was actually, uh, responsible for the so-called

00:31:16.840 disinformation dozen during COVID. Right. And they put our junior at the top of it. They

00:31:21.800 put one of Trump's cabinet ministers before he was in cabinet. I remember that document. That

00:31:26.520 was such a brutal attempt at a political assassination in a nonviolent way. I mean, wasn't it?

00:31:33.320 Yeah. Yeah. And of course, Biden, uh, Biden personally amplified that report,

00:31:37.240 but that, that report came from a UK organization, not just any UK organization.

00:31:41.480 This is an organization that was founded by a man called Morgan McSweeney,

00:31:45.560 who is actually Keir Starmer's top Lieutenant. He's his top aide, his top advisor has been his top

00:31:51.080 advisor since before Starmer was even prime minister. So that, that is where the organization

00:31:56.440 comes from and actually cut is actually tied to the present government of the UK. And they were

00:32:01.080 involved in censoring, uh, someone who, as you said, is now, uh, HHS secretary. So that's not far,

00:32:06.600 you know, there's all these worries about foreign interference. That sounds like foreign interference

00:32:10.600 to me. You've been very generous with your time. Um, folks can get a copy of your new study

00:32:16.520 at foundationforfreedomonline.com. Is that the right website?

00:32:19.960 That is correct. Excellent. Well, we'll take a look at that. It's just out very recently. I want to

00:32:25.320 come back just for one more second to the idea of personalizing the pushback. That's sort of a left-wing

00:32:30.840 radical idea, rules for radicals written by Saul Alinsky, personalized the problem,

00:32:35.960 go after a particular bureaucrat. They're not used to it. They're not used to playing defense.

00:32:40.920 Um, they get flustered. There's a lot of reasons Alinsky did that as a communist tactic.

00:32:45.560 And the left does that. And by the way, the United States, both parties, Republican and Democrat,

00:32:49.880 have done that against Russia, uh, in their sanctions in respect to the Ukraine invasion.

00:32:56.040 And I have no connection to Russia, but I can imagine that if you're an oligarch and you like

00:33:01.240 to jet around and you have a yacht and you have holdings and property, being put on the naughty

00:33:06.360 list is a terrible thing. Even if you were not planning to go to America, all of a sudden your

00:33:11.480 wings are clipped, all the things you like, and you probably think a lot about it. And you probably are

00:33:15.720 trying to convince Putin to wrap it up. I'm not talking about seizing bank accounts or real estate,

00:33:20.760 but if you, if just like they had their dirty dozen, if the U S administration had a list of

00:33:28.840 censors and, and just because they're trying to censor Americans, not, it's not a vindictiveness.

00:33:34.600 It's just a tip for tat. It's a consequence. It's a reaction. It's a peaceful reaction. It's not

00:33:39.880 seizing property or money. Yes. You can't come to America anymore because you're hostile to one of

00:33:45.640 the foundational ideas. I think if you put anyone who voted for this, any bureaucrat who touched it,

00:33:51.800 any scholar, any student, you started making it like a tar baby where you touched it and it sticks

00:33:57.640 to your hand and you can't wash it off. Boy, that would concentrate the mind in a way that

00:34:03.320 very few other things would, because it would be personal and you would be worried personally. I don't

00:34:07.800 know. I'm just so in love with the idea of, of denying visas to these outsourced censors who think

00:34:15.320 that they can trash America on Monday, but then visit it and go, go to Broadway on Tuesday. I don't

00:34:21.080 know. Is there, is there any chance that that'll be taken to a wider scale? Like how many Russian

00:34:25.560 oligarchs are on the sanction list? It's probably dozens, maybe hundreds. Why not do the same to the,

00:34:30.840 uh, censorship industry? I think they should, because the censorship industry has a much more

00:34:36.120 direct impact on American citizens. It's resulted in probably hundreds of thousands of Americans being

00:34:41.880 banned on social media platforms. So directly impacts Americans far more than any Russian

00:34:46.040 oligarch does. And, you know, it's, it's almost like self-defense. It's almost like us or them,

00:34:51.160 because these are the same people who would be happy to cut Americans or Europeans or their own

00:34:57.320 citizens off from bank accounts, from, uh, from online platforms. They'd be happy to bankrupt them,

00:35:04.520 uh, simply because of speech and political opinions that they don't like. So it's, it's perfectly

00:35:10.040 reasonable for these same people who want to impose so many consequences on their own citizens

00:35:15.080 just for engaging in political speech and on American citizens, frankly, as well as perfectly

00:35:19.880 acceptable to impose some level of consequence on those same people. I'll let you go with one last

00:35:25.880 question. Who is the point person in the Trump administration who is on this anti-censorship beat,

00:35:33.880 especially as regards foreign countries? I would like to follow that person more closely,

00:35:38.440 and I might even look to see if that person is attentive to Canada, because we're going in the

00:35:42.840 wrong direction. Just today, Canada announced a partnership with the EU on independent media.

00:35:48.520 That's terrifying to me. That means censorship to come. Who is the man or woman in the Trump

00:35:53.480 administration who's the key person on this stuff? Well, there are, there are multiple ones,

00:35:58.680 actually. There are, there's a lot of great people inside the Trump administration. Sarah Rogers,

00:36:02.440 as you mentioned, is a fantastic, a fantastic example. She's been on a roll recently, exposing

00:36:08.920 the censorship in these foreign regimes. Darren Beatty over at the US Institute of Peace is another

00:36:15.560 great example. And of course, JD Vance, frankly, JD Vance has been, has been very vocal on all of these

00:36:22.520 issues and all of these foreign censorship laws. I think he really gets it. But really, there are two,

00:36:27.000 there are too many to list. And this administration has actually been quite impressive at making this

00:36:31.640 a priority. I do think that if there's any, any, any part of the administration that requires a bit

00:36:39.720 more pressure on this, it is the trade element of it, like the trade, the trade administration,

00:36:43.560 the trade representative, because trade policy is how the previous administration

00:36:50.440 collaborated with the EU to create this censorship regime in the first place. And trade policy is

00:36:55.640 also how you dismantle it. But it actually has to be a, it has to be a red line in trade negotiations.

00:37:03.000 And I'm not sure it is yet. We'll have to talk another day about Ireland, which is sort of a fault

00:37:08.520 line in this censorship debate, because it's so connected to the European Union. But there's so many

00:37:13.560 American tech companies that are there for tax reasons. And there are free speech battles. Elon Musk has

00:37:18.920 recently lost in court there. So I'm very concerned about free speech in that little island nation.

00:37:24.840 We'll come back to that another day. Boy, I tell you, Alan, I'm so glad to catch up with you. And

00:37:29.240 thanks for giving us so much of your time and your expertise. Folks, if you want to get a copy of that

00:37:33.320 new study that Alan's referring to, go to foundationforfreedomonline.com. Alan, keep up the

00:37:39.480 fight. You're doing such great things. Thanks, Ezra. Great to be on as always. All right. There he is,

00:37:45.080 Alan Bokhari, one of the freedom fighters. Since the very early days, he could see the problem

00:37:49.480 with tech. Well, that's our show for today. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at

00:37:53.880 Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night, and keep fighting for freedom.

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00:38:27.800 of Mark Carney's election, to the anti-Semitic crime wave across Canada, to the ostrich battle,

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Rebel News Podcast - December 11, 2025

EZRA LEVANT ｜ EU declares war on Elon Musk and free speech itself

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