Ezra LeVant is in London for Tommy Robinson's terrorism trial, and tells the story of how he almost got into trouble with the police. He also talks about a strange thing that happened to him on the way to court.
00:00:24.740Oh, hi everybody. I'm in London, about to come back to Toronto. I'll be home in a few hours.
00:00:29.400I want to tell you the story of the last two days. I've been here for Tommy Robinson's terrorism trial.
00:00:35.860That sounds very scary to say. Here, I'll show you the story as it unfolded on the streets of London.
00:00:40.880And I'll tell you one thing, I'm lucky I'm able to go home. Here, take a look.
00:00:45.740Ezra LeVant here. It's just after 11 a.m. As you can see, I'm standing outside the Westminster Magistrates Court.
00:00:52.920There's a bit of a crowd milling around. The court is on a break.
00:00:56.620When we end the break, in about 20 minutes' time, there will be concluding submissions, final submissions, by the lawyers.
00:01:07.500On the side of Tommy Robinson, Alistair Williamson, KC, who says he's going to talk for about an hour.
00:01:13.740And the prosecutor, Joe Morris, who says she'll need less time.
00:01:19.200They also agreed on entering a fact, namely Tommy's passport, that shows he goes back and forth from the U.K. to Spain, where he lives these days.
00:01:28.300That's relevant, and that the police, when they stopped him, claimed that Spain was an exotic place to go.
00:01:34.800Of course, a cursory review of his passport would show that he goes there all the time.
00:01:39.480And I say again, based on the trial evidence yesterday, if there were anyone other than Tommy Robinson, this case would never have been brought in the first place, and they would have dropped it by now.
00:01:54.040In fact, I saw six police vans about a block away, which I think shows how the regime in the U.K. believes its own propaganda, that Tommy Robinson is some violent threat.
00:02:08.020When the people who are gathered outside here are friendly, wouldn't hurt a fly, law-abiding, London itself is full of, it's a crime wave, knife crime, thefts.
00:02:20.860In fact, I'm probably standing too close to the road with my camera.
00:02:24.580People come by and grab iPhones in this town all the time, probably a thousand a day are stolen.
00:02:30.000So yeah, the U.K. government, the city of London have an obsession with Tommy Robinson, they have a vendetta against him, Keir Starmer, the prime minister, and Sadek Khan, the mayor.
00:02:41.920I want to talk to you for a minute about something else that happened this morning, because it happened to me, and I should tell you my side of the story.
00:02:49.220So yesterday, a journalist for the BBC complained to the court that I was tweeting mean things.
00:03:57.280I mean, does the BBC turn in people to the police?
00:04:00.600Do they, if they're doing a news story and they see something they don't like, do they stop and put on their hat of being a policeman or something?
00:04:54.980But I wasn't going to talk back to the judge in his own court, especially when he was in the process of granting me credentials.
00:05:01.000But in my mind, I was saying, hey, judge, do you have similar comments for the BBC or Sky News or The Guardian for when they trash talk Tommy?
00:05:11.780I mean, there's no such thing as a journalistic article in the UK that doesn't say Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defense League,
00:05:20.260or Tommy Robinson, convicted criminal, irrelevant, out of context, factually false in some cases.
00:05:34.380But God forbid you point out how the police and the prosecutor are heavy-handed.
00:05:38.600Well, then it's a whole little kerfuffle.
00:05:42.300I want to be obedient to the judge because it is his courtroom.
00:05:45.760And frankly, I'm a guest in this country.
00:05:47.600And I don't want to be too poorly behaved.
00:05:49.380But it was quite a moment to know that the BBC thinks of their function as snitching on rival journalists to shut them up, both commercially and ideologically.
00:06:01.040Well, the judge actually credentialed me.
00:06:03.320And so now I'm sitting in the courtroom itself.
00:06:15.000I've mentioned it before, but I've never worn it before until today.
00:06:22.880That's my Queen's Jubilee Medal, granted to me, handed to me personally by the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta about a dozen years ago, a little more than that, for advancing freedom of expression.
00:06:45.020And I've never worn it, partly because I don't know where I would wear an award.
00:06:48.340And also another part of me thinks, I don't want to pretend for a second that it's a military award, that I earned it in battle or anything.
00:06:55.720I've just looked at it and thought about it.
00:06:58.120And I keep it with me when I travel to the UK because I always have this fear that I'll be stopped at the border, like Tommy was, arrested and interrogated for helping Tommy.
00:07:10.080And I put it on my lapel for the very first time I've worn the medal when the judge summoned me today to talk about my credentials as a citizen journalist.
00:07:20.240And it was my symbolic way of remembering that no matter what the BBC snitches say, I'm advancing freedom of expression.
00:07:30.320And they're the ones trying to get rival journalists jailed.
00:07:33.960They didn't want to get me jailed today that I know of.
00:07:36.480But in the past, the BBC has actually reported me to police for tweets I've made.
00:07:41.800That's a true story and one I'll tell you another day.
00:09:02.060Well, the judge looked at my credentials from Canada.
00:09:04.480I'm a member of the independent press gallery.
00:09:07.400And frankly, I think the UK needs an independent press gallery because the National Union of Journalists, I'm told, has a bit of a political bias.
00:09:15.380And they do not accredit citizen journalists who don't toe a certain line.
00:10:22.560Do you think, you know, citizen journalism, because Ezra, you're great at organising and I'm not,
00:10:26.180there should be an international citizen journalism recognised awards ceremony.
00:10:30.460So, when you're sitting like this gentleman, you see young Bob, you see all these people in different countries who are rising stars of citizen journalism,
00:10:38.140there should be a recognition system, a worldwide recognition system or some sort of programme,
00:17:53.380Because it's frustrating because what it is, is an attempt to control the media again by a government or by a government journalist.
00:18:01.100A journalist is a person who gathers information in the form of text, audio, pictures, processes into a newsworthy form and decimates it into the public.
00:18:24.560But yeah, it was interesting because what it does is...
00:18:26.940Well, we can see from yesterday's media reporting that if you guys weren't in court, it would have totally...
00:18:32.640They'd have had total control of the narrative.
00:18:34.240If no one would have been able to know what was actually being said on the dock by the officers, the lies, the trip-ups, the purgers, all these different things wouldn't have been able to be seen.
00:18:45.800I don't think the judge liked some of my spicy language, and fair enough.
00:18:49.140But the media, the regime media, uses spicy language for you all the time.
00:18:55.000I mean, it's an anomaly that a police officer or a prosecutor gets criticised.
00:21:38.140So, I'm 4th November, which is a good thing because it means I get to go on a state visit to Israel tomorrow to form friendships and allegiances with a government that actually understands Islamic Jihad.
00:22:24.880So, the judge had said, Ezra, after fighting, recognised, because he had to recognise, that he's a legitimate journalist that's come from Canada.
00:22:35.700Then, when the judge went out of the back room, the staff come in and said to Ezra, you need to get out of here.
00:22:41.020And he said, well, I heard you say, well, the judge has just said I can stay in here.
00:23:32.420And then we can dissect – if we win this case, which I hope we do – we can then dissect the absolute embarrassment of journalism from the entire row of mainstream journalists as well as all the ones online.
00:23:44.240None of them reported any of the unlawful activities of the police officers, which have been proven as unlawful, in court.
00:23:49.900You know, the judge asked me to go easy on the cops and the prosecutors.
00:28:02.280As I mentioned earlier, the judge yesterday asked me to stop live tweeting.
00:28:07.660Because he said I wasn't credentialed in the UK.
00:28:10.520I said I was credentialed in Canada, but I didn't have the paperwork on me to prove it.
00:28:14.760So I stopped my tweeting in the early afternoon.
00:28:17.840Which is too bad, because I had 8.5 million impressions and views on my tweets.
00:28:23.220That's a lot of people preferring my version to the BBC version.
00:28:26.900And the judge did this because the British Broadcasting Corporation, Keir Starmer's state broadcaster, was complaining about me.
00:28:35.080Like, what a weird little snitchy thing to do.
00:28:37.740Anyhow, this morning, first thing, 10 a.m., I presented actually a written letter from the Independent Press Gallery of Canada showing my credentials.
00:30:40.940But, anyway, I hope that the courts modernize because not only are they shutting out a new kind of journalism, it's actually a proxy for ideology.
00:30:50.360Regime journalists who are allowed are typically left-wing.
00:30:54.020Insurgent journalists who are individuals or upstarts are typically more freedom-oriented, in this case more Tommy Robinson-oriented.
00:31:01.380So it is a kind of censorship by content.
00:31:04.940Anyways, I'm going to make my way back to the airport now.