EZRA LEVANT ｜ Optimism returns to Big Tech as Trump ushers in a new era
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
164.28867
Summary
When was the last time you felt great about Big Tech? Well, I'm feeling that way now, and I'll tell you why. Alan Bokhari, the senior Breitbart editor for Big Tech, now works fighting for freedom online.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, my friends. One of my favorite people, one of the smartest people I know,
00:00:04.220
one of the clearest thinkers I know, and I love his accent too, is my friend Alan Bokhari. I used
00:00:09.920
to know him as the senior Breitbart editor for Big Tech. Now he works fighting for freedom online.
00:00:17.860
Alan Bokhari is our guest today. But before I get to that, let me invite you to become a subscriber
00:00:22.840
of what we call Rebel News Plus. That's the video version of this podcast. Just go to rebelnewsplus.com,
00:00:28.480
click subscribe. Bob's your uncle. You get the video contact and you support Rebel News because
00:00:34.360
we don't get government money and it shows. Hey, one more thing. The last time you sat down with
00:00:39.620
your financial advisor, did you have a real conversation? Did they allow you to express
00:00:44.000
all your concerns or did they dismiss them out of hand and give you the head office talking points?
00:00:50.020
When it comes to your family's wealth, you need to work with people you can have a real conversation
00:00:54.080
with. People who share your values and won't view you as a fringe minority for believing things that
00:01:00.300
are plainly true. Work with our friends at Rocklink Investment Partners. They're a proudly Canadian,
00:01:05.460
conservative, and independent. They adhere to the time-tested principles of wealth creation
00:01:09.980
and preservation. They'll work with you to build a financial plan for your future.
00:01:14.840
Call Rocklink and get your investments on track. Call them at 905-631-5462.
00:01:21.340
Or email them at info at rocklink.com. That's Rocklink with a C, info at rocklink.com. All right,
00:01:44.000
Tonight, when was the last time you felt great about big tech? Well, I'm feeling that way now.
00:01:50.060
I'll tell you why. It's February 11th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:02:08.380
Oh, hi there. Have you ever heard the phraseology, blue pill or red pill? It comes from the
00:02:15.060
sort of sci-fi, deep thinking movie of a couple decades ago called The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves.
00:02:23.220
And you're inside The Matrix, and it's a very strange, half psychological, half computer place.
00:02:29.860
And you can take the blue pill and go back to your blissful ignorance, sort of like the before you were
00:02:36.700
cast out of the Garden of Eden, before you ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Or take the red pill,
00:02:42.920
which would wake you up to the harsh realities of the world, but at least you would be conscious
00:02:47.420
rather than unconscious. That was from the movie. But the kids invented two more different pills.
00:02:55.740
Black pill is when you're just, you've given up. Everything is so desperate. There's no hope.
00:03:02.220
Blue pill is you're numb. Red pill is you're alive and fighting. Black pill is we're all doomed. But
00:03:08.400
white pill, white pill, say the kids, is when suddenly you're full of hope and your troubles have
00:03:15.660
washed away. And let me tell you that our special guest for today's podcast has personally taken me
00:03:22.400
through all four pills. He's the one who helped red pill me back in the day about the big technology
00:03:29.620
censorship, the war on dissident ideas, especially if you were pro-Trump or pro-freedom. He's the one
00:03:37.060
whose books and investigative reports made me black pilled, thinking there's no way out of this. It's
00:03:43.700
only going to get worse. Censorship and big tech control are like a ratchet. They only get one way.
00:03:50.840
But in recent weeks, he has, along with me, become white pilled. The amazing hope that big tech might
00:03:58.320
actually become free again. And we're both marveling at what Elon Musk is personally doing.
00:04:04.520
So those are the four pills that I've gone through, all four of them, with our guest,
00:04:08.580
Alan Bokhari, who sat down with me yesterday for a feature interview. Here's an interview now.
00:04:16.120
Well, every day I can hardly wait to wake up and roll over in bed, turn on my phone,
00:04:21.540
and check Twitter to see the next chapter in an unfolding story, the battle between Doge,
00:04:29.800
the Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk and his hand-picked wizards,
00:04:36.580
versus the deep state. It's incredible to see. He's got this team of young guys. They're all
00:04:42.920
in their 20s or even their teens. They all have fun nicknames. One of them goes by the name
00:04:49.820
Big Balls, and I ain't afraid to say it. These are coding geniuses who are working their way
00:04:56.300
through various government spending databases. They went through USAID, which is a massive 40
00:05:03.980
billion plus slush fund for every crazy woke scheme around the world. They did so much revealing
00:05:10.700
that President Trump just abolished the whole department. Now they're moving on to the Department
00:05:15.380
of Education, and soon they'll be unleashed on the Pentagon itself, nearly a trillion dollars a
00:05:23.100
year. Well, this isn't sitting well with the Democrats, who are invariably the beneficiaries
00:05:28.840
of all this. Let me show you a beautiful moment, and this is worth it in itself, a security guard
00:05:35.960
standing in front of the doors and just not moving when a gaggle of entitled Democrat congressmen
00:05:44.120
demanded him to. And just the forlorn look on his face, give this guy a prize. Take a look at this
00:05:51.420
wonderful exchange. That's Maxime Waters, a fossilized Democrat, entitled maniac. Take a look.
00:05:58.740
Are you prepared to stand here all night if we decide to stay? I guess, yeah. All right,
00:06:03.280
well, you just stay right there. You just stay and stay. Why are you letting us go to that desk
00:06:07.680
like we were able to do last year? No, he's not. He's not a U.S. employee. I don't know who he is.
00:06:13.980
Look them in the eye. Come on, hold your face up. Look at him. Let him see you. This is him. Look at it. What's your name? Tell us your name. Give me that I.D. again.
00:06:30.100
Give me the I.D. again. So what? I showed you the I.D. You do what? I showed you the I.D.
00:06:36.280
Won't you let me see the I.D. again? Huh? No. No? Will someone else ask him for the I.D.? Will you ask him for it? He won't let me see it again.
00:06:46.520
You didn't see it. I haven't seen it. You didn't see it. They didn't see it.
00:06:49.980
Well, he held the line just like big balls is holding the line every day. They're trying to
00:06:55.560
dox these kids and get them fired. By the way, yesterday, Donald Trump was asked aboard Air Force One
00:07:01.420
if he trusts Elon Musk. He almost laughed it off as a ridiculous question. Here's Trump's answer to
00:07:07.360
that. And I've had a great help with Elon Musk, who's been terrific.
00:07:11.940
Bottom line, you say you trust him. Trust Elon? Oh, he's not gaining anything. In fact,
00:07:17.220
I wonder how he can devote the time to it. He's so into it. But I told him do that. Then I'm going to
00:07:22.040
tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education. He's going to find
00:07:29.080
the same thing. Then I'm going to go go to the military. Let's check the military. We're going
00:07:33.100
to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse. And, you know,
00:07:38.900
the people elected me on that. It's clear the regime media is trying to drive a wedge
00:07:43.600
between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Here's the cover of Time magazine. The president was asked
00:07:48.740
about that, too, and his answer was classic. He didn't even know Time was still around. Did you?
00:07:54.340
Mr. President, do you have a reaction to the new Time magazine cover that has Elon Musk
00:07:59.020
sitting behind your resolute desk? Is Time magazine still in business? I didn't even know
00:08:05.720
that. It's incredible to see the shoe on the other foot. You will recall that for a better
00:08:12.580
part of a decade, Democrat politicians had riveted themselves straight into Silicon Valley. And it
00:08:19.340
was the political deep state that was telling the Twitters of the world what to do. It's incredible
00:08:24.420
to see the tables turned. And now Twitter is not just telling the Democrats what to do,
00:08:30.420
just cutting off their slush funds by the billions. Joining us now to talk about this
00:08:34.840
is someone who has been tracking big tech for, well, really since the beginning of social media
00:08:42.320
and its interface with the political system. Our friend, Alan Bokhari, who is the managing director
00:08:47.560
of the Foundation for Freedom Online. Alan, great to see you again. We got to get you a nickname,
00:08:57.100
You know what? I love saying it because it's so silly. And you can just get this sort of a dorm
00:09:02.460
room frat boy aura to these guys. But I think sometimes frat boy phraseology is for jocks who
00:09:11.580
don't study, who just fool around. These guys are super smart brainiacs, sort of in the mold of
00:09:19.440
Elon Musk himself. In fact, several of them were his former interns. And they have that banter. They
00:09:25.920
have that self-deprecating humor. But they bring the big smarts there. They have managed to do more
00:09:33.300
auditing of the government in the last week than I dare say any auditor general has done in the last
00:09:41.000
decade. Fill in some blanks for our viewers. What's really going on?
00:09:45.620
Well, it's been truly incredible to see. Just over the past week, we saw an entire
00:09:49.820
U.S. government agency, U.S. agencies for international development, USAID, with a $40
00:09:56.940
billion budget just get completely dismantled because the Doge boys exposed that it was what
00:10:04.760
we've been tracking at the Foundation for Freedom Online as well, that USAID really became a slush
00:10:10.720
fund for far-left NGOs, for foreign influence operations that were geared towards advancing
00:10:20.120
online censorship and really geared towards undermining the domestic political opponents
00:10:26.720
of the blob in Washington, D.C. And that's just one example. They're also going to now look into the
00:10:33.340
Pentagon as well, which the Pentagon is supposed to be for national defense. In the Biden administration,
00:10:39.320
in the Biden years, the Pentagon was funding organizations like NewsGuard, which is a private
00:10:45.640
for-hire censorship shop that builds blacklists of disfavored news outlets. The Pentagon gave them,
00:10:51.000
I believe, over $700,000 under Biden. So you see, you know, across so many government agencies,
00:10:57.940
you just see the censorship industry being bankrolled. You see partisan NGOs and non-profits
00:11:03.640
being bankrolled. And you see agencies just going way, way beyond what they were founded to do.
00:11:10.680
You know, it's, I understand foreign aid and I understand some of it can be charitable,
00:11:16.520
but I think much of it is designed to promote a country's national interests. But it seems like it
00:11:22.200
was sort of this private crypto government on the side. I mean, truly a deep state that had its own will.
00:11:27.880
Here's a tweet that the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, put up. And he was saying that all these
00:11:35.800
NGOs and civil society groups had opposed a certain measure. I think it was a mining measure. But without
00:11:43.080
the USAID money and manpower to gin up the street protests, he posted a photo from overhead showing a few
00:11:52.200
dozen people. And you saw Victor Orbán of Hungary saying similar things. And you've seen people in
00:12:00.200
Ireland saying similar things. That USAID was financing color revolutions around the world. That it was
00:12:09.160
ginning up opposition to conservative populist leaders. And that without that money, this whole left-wing
00:12:17.480
movement, political movement that faked being grassroots is just gone. It was an American
00:12:25.000
astroturf, as they say, not real grassroots, but fake grass, astroturf. And it was run by Samantha
00:12:32.120
Power, if I got her name right, who was a hardcore, lifelong Democrat. I can't believe she was allowed
00:12:40.440
Yeah. I mean, so here's the thing. To really understand this, you've got to take a big step back
00:12:45.320
into history and look at when these organizations were founded, and for what purpose they were
00:12:50.760
founded. So USAID and other organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, which,
00:12:58.520
similarly to USAID, gives out all of these grants around the world, millions and millions of dollars,
00:13:06.680
nothing compared to USAID, which had a $40 billion budget. But they were all Cold War assets. So their
00:13:14.920
purpose, their original purpose was to spread US soft power and build movements to undermine
00:13:22.360
international communism and the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union's assets. And they were very,
00:13:27.960
very successful at this, don't get me wrong. You go back to the 1990s and you'll see articles
00:13:33.560
in the Washington Post, in the New York Times, praising organizations like the National Endowment for
00:13:39.320
Democracy for Democracy, for doing out in the open what the CIA used to do covertly in terms of regime
00:13:47.160
change. And that's, I think, pretty much a direct quote from the Washington Post's David Ignatius in 1991,
00:13:55.800
when he's describing the National Endowment for Democracy. USAID performs a very similar function.
00:14:01.480
But while it's initial, what we're dealing with here is you have this huge global apparatus of
00:14:09.000
soft power, which had a purpose during the Cold War, fighting communism, fighting America's global
00:14:15.880
enemy, the great global enemy, the Soviet Union, that then becomes purposeless after the Berlin Wall
00:14:22.760
falls and rediscovers its purpose after 2016. It gets turned around, weaponized, turned on the
00:14:29.400
American people, turned on the global populist movement, because the deep state decides that
00:14:34.520
its number one enemy in the absence of the Soviet Union is Donald Trump and the populist movement.
00:14:40.280
And that's what we're dealing with. You are so right. You know, I remember,
00:14:43.960
I used to work a long time ago for the great John O'Sullivan, who was an attache to Margaret Thatcher
00:14:51.720
when she was PM. And then he was, I believe, with the Daily Telegraph in the UK.
00:14:57.720
And he was really part of the, he was attached to the period of time where the Berlin Wall fell. In fact,
00:15:07.880
O'Sullivan wrote a book about Thatcher, Reagan, and Pope John Paul II, and how they sort of together
00:15:13.320
helped bring down the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War. And when the Solidarity Movement in Poland, in that
00:15:21.720
Polish shipyard of Gdansk started mobilizing, there was a ton of Western actors and helpers, whether it's
00:15:31.720
fax machines they were giving or, or just advice. Absolutely. And, and that was, they, in doing so, Alan,
00:15:42.280
they probably saved, God forbid, a war would have, a hot war would have happened during the Cold War.
00:15:47.720
They would have saved millions of lives. And to have a peaceful collapse of the Soviet bloc,
00:15:54.600
you can't even measure that in trillions of dollars, because all the blood saved.
00:15:59.880
So give credit where it's due, that there were some State Department and, and CIA operatives who
00:16:07.960
helped bring an end to the Soviet empire peacefully. But you're so right, we've got this massive deep
00:16:14.200
state permanent military industrial complex, that's like a shark, it's got to keep moving forward, it's got
00:16:19.560
to keep eating, or it dies. And, and it's decided to eat not just political, uh, allies, like Hungary and, and El
00:16:30.120
Salvador, but turn on Americans itself. You mentioned the News Guard, that's a censorship organization, paid by the
00:16:37.480
U.S. Air Force to attack North American media. I think you might know that a few years ago, there was a military
00:16:44.760
contractor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, that was hired by the U.S. Naval Intelligence,
00:16:51.000
to do a workup on Rebel, on Rebel News. What have we got? First of all, I'm not even a good swimmer.
00:16:58.440
So why is the Navy coming after me, Al? I mean, on a more serious note, like what on earth are they doing? Is,
00:17:05.320
is it just about giving contracts to their friends and making everybody rich? Why would they take on Rebel News?
00:17:12.520
Maybe it's because we were really the only outfit in Canada that was pro-Trump, but that is not a
00:17:18.440
legitimate expenditure. And if Elon Musk and big balls and the rest of those lads wind up cutting
00:17:26.120
tens of billions or even a trillion dollars, or I think two trillion was their goal, um,
00:17:33.000
I don't think America's going to be any weaker. In fact, I think it'll be stronger, like when Elon Musk cut
00:17:38.120
Twitter by 80% and the product got better. It's, it's just a miracle to behold. And it's just,
00:17:44.600
it's just amazing. Yeah. Well, well, you mentioned fax machines in Gdansk and, uh, you know,
00:17:50.840
you can see the same thing, uh, in the modern era where, uh, during the Arab spring, you know,
00:17:55.880
the state department was trying to keep, keep social media platforms alive across the Arab world and make
00:18:01.480
sure, you know, the, the, you know, the forces of destabilization in the region against its enemies
00:18:06.680
had access to Twitter, had access to Facebook. And this, you know, this, this ties into why they
00:18:12.520
became so concerned with online censorship and controlling social media, because what was,
00:18:17.560
what they saw as an asset during the Arab spring, they saw as undermining their own power in, uh, in
00:18:23.800
their own countries, the power of the establishment, the power of the blob. When, uh, when Donald Trump
00:18:29.640
won the election, when Brexit happened in the UK, they, they suddenly realized, oh no, social media
00:18:35.320
is going to undermine, you know, this, this system that they had in place for decades where, you know,
00:18:40.680
that have a very friendly mainstream media that controlled the public's access to information.
00:18:46.440
Suddenly social media broke that, which is why, you know, we've done this at the foundation for freedom
00:18:51.640
online. You track all the government funding to all of its soft power assets around the world. So much
00:18:57.720
of it has been spent on combating so-called disinformation, which is, you know, the pretext
00:19:03.480
that these organizations use to advance social media censorship, to encourage governments around
00:19:08.840
the world, actually, to regulate American tech companies. It doesn't sound like it's in America's
00:19:14.520
interests for foreign governments to be fining and regulating and banning American tech platforms.
00:19:19.320
But the establishment, the blob, uh, including the foreign policy blob sees it as very much in their
00:19:25.240
interests to stop social media's encroachment on the legacy media, uh, stop it, stop it from weakening
00:19:32.200
its stranglehold over the flow of information. And I think, you know, the past election shows that they
00:19:38.040
really did fail. And that's why that blob is now being, uh, now being dismantled because what
00:19:44.680
essentially happened is, uh, yes, I mean, the foreign policy blob did a great job during the
00:19:49.480
Cold War. No, no question about it. They won the Cold War without really firing a shot.
00:19:54.520
But, you know, what happened, and you see the same thing happening throughout history,
00:19:58.200
you know, whether it's Roman Praetorians or Turkish Janissaries, the people who were entrusted with
00:20:04.840
defending the United States, defending the West, decided that the Western public itself had become a
00:20:10.600
threat. And, you know, the West needed to be defended from itself. And they were the people
00:20:15.080
to do it through this vast censorship apparatus. And, you know, now that's being dismantled.
00:20:20.920
You know, it's like every single bad guy, if they, if they were out of office,
00:20:26.280
they could count on a safety net being there through USAID or one of these other programs. I mean,
00:20:33.640
all around the world, I was just, I just forgot his name now, the former Australian prime minister,
00:20:39.080
who is now, I think, the ambassador from Canberra to Washington. I've just read Rudd or something.
00:20:47.720
Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, like Politico, a left tilting news organization,
00:20:53.640
eight million dollars worth of subscriptions. That's, that's insane. I think the New York Times itself
00:20:58.680
got was a 40 million dollars worth of subscriptions from, I think it was AID or, or, or that may be
00:21:05.480
another government department. How do you even, like, there's not enough people, like, did they buy
00:21:10.760
literally every bureaucrat a subscription just to, just to launder money to their friends? Like,
00:21:19.240
it's so gross and it's so ubiquitous. Like, it's, it's as bad as anyone ever claimed it would be. Again,
00:21:26.600
Alex Jones level conspiracy theories are not enough to take in what actually happened. This is
00:21:34.360
another one of those Alex Jones was right moments. Yep. And another example, just in the past few
00:21:41.480
days, we published a new report at the foundation for freedom online.com on the, the use of us money
00:21:49.640
in Europe funding European NGOs and journalists. And, you know, we found over nine million dollars
00:21:56.600
in subscriptions to just one, one media company in, in Europe, France's AFP, one of the largest
00:22:02.680
news agencies in the world, nine million dollars in subscriptions together with funding for 21 other
00:22:09.400
organizations in Europe, all of which are either enforcers or signatories to the EU's code of practice
00:22:16.120
on disinformation, which has become the Digital Services Act, which, you know, is being used to
00:22:22.520
go after Elon Musk's ex, being used to go after American tech platforms that are deemed by European
00:22:29.560
bureaucrats to be insufficiently committed to censoring hate speech or disinformation that is supported with
00:22:35.880
US government money spread across all of these NGOs and news organizations in Europe. So it's a perfect
00:22:42.280
example of what I was just talking about, which is, you know, the soft power apparatus,
00:22:46.840
which was built for the Cold War, now being turned around to censor Americans and undermine American
00:22:52.360
tech platforms. This podcast is brought to you by Rebel News. That's right. So if you want to support us,
00:22:59.720
why not do it in a win-win fashion? By shopping for yourself, one of my favorite things to do,
00:23:05.800
head to rebelnewsstore.com to pick the patriotic gear that pleases your heart. And while you're there,
00:23:13.480
use coupon code DREA10 to save while you do. You know, there's something else that's going on
00:23:19.400
that's just incredible. And I think we all noticed it the very first day, January 20th, which is Trump's
00:23:27.720
pace is unprecedented. He, you know, people used to talk about the first 100 days of administration.
00:23:37.560
I think the first 100 hours of this administration is even too long a period of time, because the
00:23:45.560
number of executive orders and changes, like they started deporting illegals the same day. They started,
00:23:52.440
they made moves the same day as he was inaugurated. And even just yesterday, so Donald Trump goes to
00:23:59.640
the Super Bowl. But even in his journey, he's signing executive orders. Sometimes they're trivial,
00:24:06.280
like getting rid of the penny, which he announced yesterday. You know, the penny cost two cents to
00:24:12.920
make. He put out a tweet saying so, bringing back plastic straws, stopping the rules for those awful
00:24:18.360
paper straws. Some of it is trivial. Some of it is taunting or amusing, like renaming the Gulf of
00:24:25.640
Mexico, the Gulf of America. But is it really funny? Because how many things does the left
00:24:30.600
rename? How many historical traditions do they tear down and rename? You know, in Canada,
00:24:37.880
some of our great founding fathers, so to speak, have had streets and subway stations named after them,
00:24:45.640
renamed some woke name? Why can't Trump rename things? But what I'm getting at is the speed,
00:24:51.560
the momentum. He's keeping his enemies on the back foot. He's moving so fast. They're still
00:24:57.880
reacting to what he did a week ago, but he's done six more things since then. This, it's a kind of
00:25:03.560
blitzkrieg, pardon the analogy, of executive actions. I don't even think there's been any votes in
00:25:12.680
in Congress on any substantive bills or anything. It's just Trump moving with every lever of power
00:25:19.000
that he has. And it's awesome. What do you make of the pace of it? And, you know, on two counts,
00:25:25.640
I think Democrats and the establishment that opposed Donald Trump have themselves to blame on this
00:25:31.160
because they spent so, so many years, decades even, building up executive power. And, you know,
00:25:37.320
now that executive power is being used in ways they don't like, finally, in ways that it certainly
00:25:43.480
wasn't used during the first Trump administration. And that's another way in which the establishment
00:25:48.760
and, you know, its allies in the blob and its soft power apparatus and its allies in the media sort of
00:25:55.320
undermine themselves because they used all of their energy, used so many dirty tricks during the first
00:26:01.320
Trump administration, so much censorship to make sure he lost in 2020. They co-opted Silicon Valley
00:26:08.440
platforms. They destroyed free speech on those platforms, which was part of the founding DNA of
00:26:13.240
those companies. They expended all that effort. And the only effect they had was to give Trump four
00:26:20.040
years to prepare for his new term. I think if he won in 2020, he wouldn't have had all that time to
00:26:25.400
prepare. He wouldn't have had time to put everything in place. I think it was sort of a silver lining for
00:26:30.040
Trump that he was out of office for four years and could prepare, you know, this frimsy of activity
00:26:35.800
that we're now seeing play out. I see a couple of judges, local, I think they're called district
00:26:42.520
judges. I'm not familiar with the court system in the U.S. to understand the difference. But I
00:26:47.320
understand that sometimes a district judge will in one locality say, I'm now going to make a ruling
00:26:53.640
that applies to the entire United States of America. And those often get slapped down. But
00:27:01.720
in one case, a judge said, you can't simply en masse stop all these payments. And I think he was
00:27:10.280
referring to the USAID, if I'm remembering the case correctly. And they're coming up with judges who
00:27:18.360
are often partisan. Like, I mean, every judge is appointed by some president. But these are some
00:27:24.440
particularly activist judges. I suppose that's the empire strikes back, isn't it? I mean, I suppose
00:27:33.160
everyone knew Trump was going to take some steps. And they were going to lean on the the Democrats
00:27:38.920
strength of activist judges and activist lawyers. I don't know if that's going to work. I mean,
00:27:44.520
I suppose some of it is how quickly Trump can get a superior court to knock those down.
00:27:51.880
And I suppose in some ways, Trump might literally just not listen. I mean, Joe Biden didn't listen
00:27:57.320
when the court said his student loan forgiveness was unlawful. I mean, what are you going to do,
00:28:02.360
arrest him? I think that the courts, by overreaching, by prosecuting the lawfare against Trump for the
00:28:10.680
last four years, have sort of burnt up their moral authority, is what I'm saying. I think
00:28:15.880
conservatives are generally very law-abiding and respectful of legal authority. But when you spend
00:28:21.880
four years bending the laws to get Trump, there's not a lot of respect left in at least the Republican
00:28:30.520
side of the populace to say, hey, Trump, you better slow down. This judge might have a point. I think
00:28:36.520
those activist judges torched the reputation of all judges in a bit. What do you think?
00:28:42.840
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think when you had, like you said, four years of lawfare,
00:28:47.560
what is it, 400 indictments against Trump already, a completely weaponized judicial system,
00:28:52.840
really, combined with, you know, Soros-funded DAs letting violent criminals out onto the streets. I
00:29:00.040
think a lot of Americans know that, you know, just because someone's a judge or a DA doesn't
00:29:05.560
necessarily mean they're not a partisan political operative. And I think many of these judges who
00:29:10.360
are now, you know, coming out with rulings against Trump fall into that category. I think a lot of
00:29:15.880
this will end up at the Supreme Court. A lot of it will end up at higher courts. And we'll see what
00:29:21.240
happens there. But certainly, with the Democrats, you know, not in control of the House, not in control
00:29:26.200
of the Senate, not in control of the White House, and, you know, not in control of the bureaucracy.
00:29:31.080
They were arguably, the establishment was still in control of the bureaucracy, arguably, during the
00:29:37.400
first Trump term. That's clearly not happening this time around. So they really, their only option,
00:29:42.760
really, is to, number one, fall back on the courts, on the judicial system. And number two, I think,
00:29:48.840
fall back on their foreign allies. There's a lot of hopes, particularly in the censorship industry,
00:29:55.720
you know, the vast network of disinformation researchers and private companies like NewsGuard
00:30:01.080
that support online censorship, that the European Union, with its Digital Services Act, can somehow
00:30:06.360
bring Silicon Valley to heel. But the Trump administration has a weapon against that, too,
00:30:13.880
in the form of tariffs. You could argue that the DSA, with its massive fines on American tech companies,
00:30:20.920
is a tariff in all but name on the tech sector. And, you know, Trump and the American government
00:30:26.280
is perfectly within their rights to respond to that with their own trade measures.
00:30:31.880
You know, I remember when Mark Zuckerberg had his, you know, conversion on the road to Damascus,
00:30:38.440
when he renounced, and we talked about this before, he even used the language of the right in jettisoning
00:30:46.760
transgenderism and things of that sort. To me, by far the most important thing in Zuckerberg's comments
00:30:53.320
were when he alluded to the fact that the State Department would help Facebook liberalize its
00:31:01.080
approach to free speech in foreign countries. And to me, and you, and I think we agreed on this,
00:31:06.680
that's code for, the State Department would push back on any government that said to Zuckerberg,
00:31:13.160
no, no, no, you've got to keep doing our bidding, whether it's in Brazil or in the UK.
00:31:19.240
And just this morning, it looks like Rumble, the free speech platform, is back in Brazil. So
00:31:25.080
something must have moved there, which is surprising. Yeah, I think something did. I think
00:31:29.960
that something was the USAID going away. You have to, it's important to remember here that
00:31:34.520
it's not so much the current State Department and the current US government pressuring these foreign
00:31:40.280
countries. It's more a case of them undoing the damage that they had already done over the past,
00:31:46.680
you know, half decade or more. Because, you know, as we've shown our latest report in Europe,
00:31:51.960
and also, frankly, in Brazil, there was millions and millions of US government money flowing into these
00:31:59.080
places into Brazil, into Europe, into NGOs that were across these countries across the continent of
00:32:04.680
Europe, whose sole purpose was to create a panic around disinformation, and to encourage regulators
00:32:11.160
in those countries to go after American tech companies. So really, you know, if Trump pushes
00:32:16.920
back on that with with what Mike Benz calls free speech diplomacy, if they push back on that with tariffs,
00:32:22.360
or with a new direction from the State Department, that's really undoing the damage that the foreign
00:32:26.760
policy blob had done in promoting online censorship around the world.
00:32:31.000
It's so interesting. You know, I, I'm not sure if you know this, but a few months ago, when Brazil
00:32:36.120
banned Twitter in general, in Brazil, because there was an activist judge, Alexandre de Morege,
00:32:42.920
who was ordering Twitter to silence certain critics of the regime, but for Twitter to stay silent about
00:32:48.760
it. They were basically saying, censor this guy, but don't tell anyone we told you to do it.
00:32:53.480
And Elon Musk and Twitter said, we're not playing by those rules. So this de Morege banned the whole
00:32:57.960
app. We went down there for a day, because we heard there was going to be a rally in support of
00:33:02.200
Twitter. I thought, I got to see this. And it was huge. I've heard, you know, 100,000, 200,000. It was that
00:33:09.880
big. Half of Sao Paulo's downtown was shut down. And everyone really was there to talk about freedom.
00:33:16.760
It was the most astonishing rally. It was the largest rally I've ever been in my life,
00:33:21.080
by far. And I could just imagine operators on the street, you know, what, what USAID would have had
00:33:29.960
on the other side to that. I mean, I just, when you're in a hot third world country, I don't know
00:33:35.240
if Brazil's third world, that's the kind of place where the CIA and USAID, I suppose they operate.
00:33:41.080
And maybe they were one of the reasons, as you say, maybe they were one of the reasons
00:33:46.520
Twitter was banned and Rumble was banned. Rumble's back. I see the White House has announced they're
00:33:51.000
having a Rumble platform account, like they do with YouTube. I don't know. I'm just a little bit
00:33:57.240
hopeful that freedom's on the march. And it's fun to me, because I follow the news in other countries.
00:34:01.880
I follow the news in Ireland for some reason. I'm sort of hooked on that. And that's a country with
00:34:07.080
tens of thousands of NGOs. It's almost a joke that there's an NGO, there's actually an NGO
00:34:14.200
for every 100 Irishmen. Like, I'm not exaggerating. That's not a rounding error. There's about 40 or
00:34:21.640
50,000 NGOs in a country of 5 million people. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. So when USAID
00:34:28.520
shut down, that immediately devastated the left wing in Ireland. And there was like some $70,000
00:34:37.960
grant for a play. And all these Irish are saying, which play was it? Like all of a sudden, everyone
00:34:44.120
realized they were living in this artificial world funded by the U.S. deep state. It's amazing how,
00:34:52.440
and I'm sure it was heavy duty in Israel, where USAID would have been against Netanyahu. Absolutely. I
00:34:58.760
mean, and I'm just trying to think of other countries where, I mean, Hungary, obviously,
00:35:04.680
probably Italy with probably Germany to shut down the AFD, probably France to go after Marine Le Pen.
00:35:12.520
Like, I think that the whole world has had a burden lifted off them that they didn't even know was
00:35:18.120
American. I mean, it's $40 billion worth of propaganda a year. That's a lot of, that's a
00:35:24.920
lot of nudging, isn't it? It's a lot of nudging. And when you consider the wealth disparity between
00:35:29.720
the United States and most of the rest of the world, you can really see how this $40 billion budget can
00:35:34.760
just overwhelm domestic political opposition in some of these countries. You know, there's just so much
00:35:40.200
money available that domestic political forces just don't have, especially in the developing world.
00:35:45.400
So it's very easy for this self-power apparatus to gain this much influence, which again, served
00:35:50.520
a purpose during the Cold War. It would still serve a purpose if you're fighting, actually fighting
00:35:54.520
America's adversaries like China. The problem is it was used, it was used in this global crusade
00:35:59.880
against populism because the foreign policy establishment, along with the rest of the
00:36:05.240
establishment in DC, decided that Donald Trump was their number one enemy and not, you know,
00:36:09.480
say a country like China. Let me ask you one last question and sort of how I started. I mean,
00:36:14.360
Elon Musk is a unique human. He's one in a billion, I'd say. The combination of smarts and
00:36:22.520
his style of getting people to do things his way, you know, who else could have built SpaceX, Tesla,
00:36:30.920
against all odds. His hands-on approach and the way he deals with subordinates is rather unique.
00:36:39.480
He spent a quarter billion dollars on Trump's campaign. He personally campaigned in Pennsylvania,
00:36:46.280
a key state. And he is the alpha dog everywhere he goes. He's the boss of everywhere he goes.
00:36:53.720
Either he owns a company outright or he controls the dominant shareholder interest or he has the total
00:37:02.440
respect. So the man isn't like a president. He's more like a king in his own companies. He issues a
00:37:10.760
decree and it happens. There's no official opposition at Tesla. There's no official opposition at SpaceX.
00:37:18.680
So you got a man with a bigger than life personality, the largest following on Twitter, if I'm not mistaken,
00:37:25.080
loves to comment and chirp on everything. And then you got Trump. Larger than life, big ego, likes to comment
00:37:33.560
on everything. But he's actually the one who won the election. He's actually the one who wields the power.
00:37:38.600
You can see the left is trying to pit these men against each other and have a falling out.
00:37:44.760
Is that how this is going to end? Or do you think those two men know that this is the most
00:37:50.280
politically profitable partnership in recent times? Maybe since JFK and RFK were president and
00:37:57.480
attorney general together and there was the bonds of blood between them, the two brothers. I mean, I'm trying to think of a
00:38:04.120
of a duo. And Elon Musk is elected by nobody, but this is such an important partnership. In fact,
00:38:12.120
I don't think anyone else in the world could do what Elon Musk is doing with Doge right now.
00:38:17.960
Ken, is this a stable molecule or are these two atoms going to spin apart?
00:38:24.360
That's certainly what the press would like to happen. I see no signs of it happening right now.
00:38:28.680
I think the only way they'd succeed is if they somehow managed to completely nuke Elon Musk's
00:38:35.320
popularity with the American people. Obviously, people on the left are going to hate him naturally.
00:38:41.800
I think it's very hard to get a majority of the public to hate someone who successfully sends
00:38:47.400
rockets into space and brings them back down again. All these technological achievements.
00:38:52.280
You know, it's hard to say that Musk and his companies and the talent that he attracts to
00:38:57.320
his companies who are now going to work on the federal government aren't just enormously capable
00:39:02.280
and enormously competent. And, you know, when it comes to Trump, I think Trump has always respected
00:39:07.800
winners. And, you know, there are a few bigger winners than Musk and his companies. And I think
00:39:14.040
you look at how much has been accomplished already with the USAID, I don't think anyone in DC or in
00:39:22.360
the legacy media can keep up with these guys. Because, you know, I was reading this funny story
00:39:29.240
I saw on X, actually, about how, you know, a lot of people in DC don't know how to deal with people
00:39:34.200
who want to work on Fridays, who want to work on the weekends, just completely an alien attitude to the
00:39:39.320
bureaucracy. And I think a lot of people in America, a lot of people in the public realize
00:39:45.240
it's been a long time coming for this bloated blob that's been in charge of the country for so long.
00:39:51.320
Hey, let me show you a quick clip of one of my favorite commentators. He's on CNN,
00:39:55.320
which makes him even more remarkable. I think you know who I'm talking about. Scott Jennings is his
00:39:59.640
name. And he's such a good talker. And I really think he's a good thinker. Here he is talking about how
00:40:04.360
Trump is good at the 80-20. And what he means by that is he finds an issue where 80% of people
00:40:11.240
are on one side and 20% on the other, like men in women's sports or like Doge cutting through the fat.
00:40:18.360
Trump takes the 80% side. But because so many Democrats are reflexively anti-Trump,
00:40:23.960
they choose the losing side. Here's Scott Jennings saying it a lot more poetically than that.
00:40:28.040
He's describing what is currently the dumbest strategy in politics, which is Democrats taking the 20
00:40:34.280
percent side of every 80-20 issue in America. USAID, people want this pared down. They want
00:40:40.680
to streamline. They want to know where the money is going. Democrats have a meltdown today. Donald
00:40:44.680
Trump signs executive order on keeping boys out of girls sports. Democrats take the 20 side of that
00:40:50.520
issue as well. All these issues. This is like Trump's superpower finding a bunch of 80-20 issues,
00:40:55.240
getting on the 80 and everybody who sort of reflexively against him gets on the 20. And now the
00:41:00.600
Democratic Party has like a 31% approval rating. This is why. I think he's right. And I think so
00:41:06.360
many of Trump's opponents really do have Trump derangement syndrome, that no matter what Trump
00:41:12.440
does, they'll oppose him, even if it's wildly popular. I've got to think this Doge cutting of
00:41:19.480
crazy spending. I mean, I haven't seen polling on it, but I got it. I got to hope that it's extremely
00:41:25.800
popular. How could it not be the kind of waste they've discovered? And for the Democrats to dig
00:41:31.400
in either shows that they're just anti-Trumpers or maybe they were on the take. I think it's such
00:41:36.280
a winner. I'm so excited. And I hope and wish one day it comes to Canada. Last word to you.
00:41:41.960
Uh, yeah, I think that's that's what the blob is really afraid of, that the example set by
00:41:47.240
Musk and Trump just in the past few weeks is going to spread to other countries because,
00:41:51.720
you know, the public in Canada, I'm sure, are fed up. The public in Britain are fed up. The public
00:41:55.560
in Europe are fed up, uh, with their, with their leaders who've just slavishly followed
00:42:00.520
what the, uh, the global establishment base in Washington has, has, uh, has directed them to
00:42:05.560
do over the past few decades. And I think, uh, there'll be demands for similar things elsewhere.
00:42:11.320
Alan, it's great to see you again. We're super fans of yours. We've been
00:42:14.200
reading your stuff for years. Everybody, we've been talking with Alan Bokari. He's the
00:42:18.040
managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. Keep in touch, my friend.
00:42:23.560
All right. There you have it. Well, that's our show for today. Until next time,
00:42:27.960
on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night,
00:42:33.400
Hey there, Rebel News listeners. Do you have a business or cause that you want to promote
00:42:39.320
to the tens of thousands of regular Rebel News viewers? Now's your chance. Whether it's ads on
00:42:48.360
podcasts like this one, videos, our website, or even our digital billboard truck, Rebel News has
00:42:56.520
your advertising needs covered. It's easy to get started. Just head over to rebelnews.com
00:43:04.200
slash advertise. That's rebelnews.com slash advertise. Fill out our form and find out how Rebel News can
00:43:15.240
help spread your message today. Don't wait. Advertise with Rebel News. Reach freedom-loving
00:43:22.520
patriots and support our independent journalism.