Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ Telegram CEO arrested. Will globalist censors target Elon Musk next？

00:00:00.000 Hello my friends, one of my favorite guests. We used to talk to him more often, but wow,

00:00:04.100 we reconnected today. I'm talking about Alam Bokhari. He used to be the senior tech editor

00:00:09.520 at Breitbart.com. Total Silicon Valley insider in terms of his connections, but he fights for

00:00:15.720 freedom and we're going to have a great rollicking talk today about Elon Musk, about Pavel Durov,

00:00:21.340 the president of the app called Telegram, who was arrested in France. Lots of stuff,

00:00:27.800 a feature interview. Sit back and enjoy. Do me a favor and why don't you get a subscription to

00:00:33.480 the video version of this podcast. It's called Rebel News Plus. That's what we call our subscription

00:00:38.580 service. It's eight bucks a month, which might not be a lot of money to you, but it really adds up for

00:00:43.280 us because we don't take any money from the government. We're completely demonetized by

00:00:47.200 big tech. So really it's just you. If you can help us, we'll stay strong. Go to rebelnewsplus.com.

00:00:53.240 All right, here's today's show.

00:00:57.800 Tonight, they arrested the head of a social media company called Telegram.

00:01:03.440 Are they coming for Elon Musk next? It's August 30th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.

00:01:08.580 Shame on you, you censorious bug.

00:01:14.480 Well, as you know, when I was in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, two names kept coming

00:01:27.780 up, the two names they were most afraid of. Not afraid in a personal sense, but afraid that

00:01:32.980 these people would stop their agenda, this globalist, rootless, stateless, socialist agenda,

00:01:39.300 technocratic, the kind of thing that would cause Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the UK,

00:01:45.400 to say he preferred Davos to the Westminster Parliament. Remember when Starmer said that?

00:01:50.820 Let's ask you quickly. You have to choose now between Davos or Westminster.

00:01:56.080 Davos.

00:01:56.480 Well, the enemy of Davos, according to the Davosians, these are the World Economic Forum people,

00:02:01.740 was number one, most obviously, Donald Trump. He would stop so many of their schemes and stop some

00:02:07.760 of their wars too, which they love. But the number two name, and it was a very close second, was Elon

00:02:12.740 Musk. Now, Elon Musk is a great industrialist, a great entrepreneur, a dreamer, a visionary, a futurist.

00:02:20.080 I mean, my gosh, the man wants to colonize Mars. That's the kind of sort of crazy utopian schemes

00:02:26.380 that they normally love at the World Economic Forum. But the fact that Elon Musk believes,

00:02:31.920 or he says he believes, and it seems to be true, in freedom, and using Twitter to free

00:02:37.520 once-censored people, that irritated them in a very deep way. And there was a link between the two.

00:02:44.060 You felt that when they talked about Trump, that Elon Musk was rehabilitating him

00:02:49.020 and his supporters. It was very interesting. And so when I saw the other day that a billionaire

00:02:55.980 tech tycoon, Pavel Durov, born in Russia, the founder of various social networks, and now the

00:03:04.380 CEO of a messaging app called Telegram, when I saw that Durov, when he flew into France purportedly at

00:03:12.320 the invitation of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who said, hey, come to Paris, let's have

00:03:16.680 dinner. When Durov landed at the airport, he was arrested and charged with a whole roster of

00:03:24.660 crimes allegedly being perpetrated by his social media app called Telegram. And all I could think

00:03:33.600 of was that is what they, that is a test drive, that is a dress rehearsal for the big game. They

00:03:41.640 would, if they could, and they might, do that to Elon Musk himself. Joining us now to talk about this

00:03:48.540 and so many other social media things, is a man who probably knows more about economic, sorry,

00:03:53.620 about internet freedom, rather, than anyone else I've ever met. Someone who's been studying

00:03:58.440 internet freedom and the loss of it at the hands of government and by woke entries in those corporations

00:04:04.620 themselves. You know who I'm talking about. His name is Alan Bokhari. He's the managing director

00:04:09.320 of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and we're just so happy to have him back as a guest today.

00:04:14.340 Alan, great to see you again.

00:04:16.720 Great to see you, Ezra.

00:04:17.940 Do you agree with the World Economic Forum delegates that I met with, that after Donald Trump, a close

00:04:25.400 second in terms of jamming their plans, is Elon Musk? Do you agree with them? Should they be worried

00:04:33.140 about Elon Musk? I can certainly see why they said that, and it seems very accurate. What's really

00:04:41.340 frustrating to them about Elon Musk, I think, because the delegates at the World Economic Forum

00:04:47.480 have a vested interest in the thing that global internet censorship is trying to protect, which is

00:04:55.200 this global system of narrative control and corresponding political control. They worry that internet freedom

00:05:02.600 is going to eventually undermine their political power because it will undermine their control over narratives

00:05:08.500 and over what the public of Western countries and countries around the world believe.

00:05:14.560 And Elon Musk really epitomized that, and his takeover of Twitter really epitomized that.

00:05:19.800 It really broke down this system of censorship that they've been able to build up

00:05:26.420 over the preceding half decade or more. And what's really frustrating to them about Elon Musk is that

00:05:34.220 he's a little bit different to someone like Pavel Dura, because you mentioned Pavel Dura. Dura founded

00:05:40.580 the Russian version of Facebook. He founded Telegram. These are the most big, big platforms

00:05:44.860 with massive influence. But Elon Musk has many, many other companies, and he's kind of essential

00:05:52.200 to Western governments. They can't just, you know, arrest him or bankrupt him or get rid of him in

00:05:59.700 some other way, because, you know, just look recently at this story with the stranded astronauts.

00:06:06.900 So NASA had to request help from SpaceX because they have a couple of astronauts stranded on the

00:06:14.100 International Space Station because the Boeing-built spacecraft that took them there malfunctioned and

00:06:19.860 can't bring them back home to Earth. So SpaceX has to come into the rescue.

00:06:24.100 The government's increasingly dependent on SpaceX rockets.

00:06:27.520 You go to Ukraine. Ukraine uses Starlink for a lot of their operations.

00:06:35.020 So, you know, Musk is kind of essential to the Western, the Western aero, becoming essential to the Western

00:06:41.000 aerospace, to Western internet infrastructure, to Western militaries.

00:06:46.060 And so even though the deep states and the governments of the West hate him for bringing

00:06:51.080 free speech back to the people and threatening the basis of their political power, they also

00:06:56.000 need him because he's shoring up their military power and he's succeeding where, you know,

00:07:01.580 older companies like Boeing are failing.

00:07:05.000 So, you know, on the one hand, he's this massive threat to them. On the other hand,

00:07:08.360 they still need him.

00:07:09.720 That is such a good point. I hadn't heard it expressed until you said it here.

00:07:13.740 I mean, Durov is an interesting personality. He's sort of a brooding guy, but he's an innovator,

00:07:19.540 of course. But he feels like sort of almost like a lone ranger. Whereas, God forbid, if

00:07:26.740 Elon Musk were arrested, I could just imagine what would happen to the price of Tesla. It

00:07:31.680 would plummet. SpaceX, Neuralink, all of his projects. He's responsible. His company alone

00:07:38.280 sends more than 90 percent of all payloads from planet Earth into space. So SpaceX, the company he

00:07:45.840 runs, does more space work than NASA, China, the Russian cosmonauts, all combined times 10.

00:07:55.280 And he has, Starlink is the name of his civilian system, but he has a military system and he's

00:08:01.260 putting up there just as quickly. I forget the name of it right now, but it's military. So you

00:08:06.960 can't take him out. He really is an essential man. You know, they say the graveyards are full

00:08:15.020 of irreplaceable men, but I think that Elon Musk might be the closest thing we have to that. You

00:08:23.860 would see the New York Stock Exchange tank. You would see, and he has a lot of friends that he's

00:08:28.720 made very wealthy along the way. I don't think there's actually another person in history who has

00:08:33.140 created more wealth for others than he has. That's a very good point. So in that, I'm not going to say

00:08:39.720 he's untouchable, but I don't know. Why do you think they went after Durov this way? It said,

00:08:47.100 you know, if you look at the official rap sheet, they say, well, you're allowing drug trafficking,

00:08:51.180 you're allowing human trafficking, you're allowing other crimes, you're not disclosing all that.

00:08:57.300 I suppose in a technical sense, that's probably true. Just like cell phone companies are letting

00:09:01.960 people commit crimes on the phone. And, you know, just like the post office lets you commit crimes if

00:09:08.780 you write mean letters. I mean, I suppose any platform allows crimes to happen on it. You don't

00:09:14.240 generally charge the owner of Apple with a crime for what's done on their phones. Am I right?

00:09:22.720 That's correct. And this is what liability exemptions for social media platforms and

00:09:27.720 online websites are supposed to protect them from. It's obviously ridiculous to say that,

00:09:33.500 you know, a phone line is responsible for someone using the phone to commit a crime.

00:09:37.040 But this really epitomizes the new relationship between governments and tech platforms. After

00:09:45.420 2016, and right up to say 2021, 2022, there was this extraordinary pressure that Silicon Valley

00:09:52.620 really succumbed to from the deep state, from their allies and the NGO media complex, you know,

00:09:58.980 the advertising industry, which Silicon Valley is quite dependent on, to force them to censor their

00:10:04.100 platforms and in particular to censor the 2020 presidential election. Now, Musk taking over

00:10:11.600 Twitter was, you know, the first big crack in that system that they've developed. But now we're seeing

00:10:19.200 more and more people in Silicon Valley coming out and saying, you know, we don't support, you know,

00:10:24.360 these government demands for censorship. We were even tricked by the government. You had

00:10:28.000 Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg telling the Judiciary Committee recently that the FBI told him that

00:10:36.000 the Hunter Biden laptop story was going to be a Russian hoax. And that was obviously a complete

00:10:40.780 lie. So I think many in Silicon Valley feel that they were hoodwinked by the deep state and its allies,

00:10:47.440 that they were unduly pressured by it, as well as the media and advertisers and so on, that they were

00:10:53.500 forced to do things they really didn't want to do. But with the entire industry acting as one,

00:10:58.220 it was very easy for every company to do the same thing and engage in the same kind of censorship.

00:11:03.580 And I think Elon Musk, you know, was a real sign to those people in Silicon Valley, those other people

00:11:09.740 who had misgivings about what had gone on with censorship over the previous half decade that,

00:11:15.020 you know, it was time to roll back the censorship to come out and say they didn't support it,

00:11:20.460 to come out and say they were pressured. So it's really, really been a massive, massively positive

00:11:26.620 development. And I think this coming presidential election is going to be far less censored than the

00:11:33.420 2020 election, although there are still holdouts like Microsoft and Google, which still have their

00:11:38.460 censorship regimes in place. I saw that letter from Mark Zuckerberg and it was interesting that he

00:11:45.420 conceded so much, he admitted so much. He admitted that some of that we knew before because of lawsuits

00:11:53.020 that caused the disclosure of internal records of how the deep state, the FBI and other government

00:11:58.940 agencies basically had direct backdoor access into various social media companies. And they had

00:12:06.540 sort of direct back channels to senior executives who would just give them whatever they wanted.

00:12:11.580 it. So some of that came out through litigation. When Zuckerberg basically admits, and I would say

00:12:20.700 even slightly apologizes for it, my first reaction is they're still censoring us today, for example.

00:12:30.060 One of our former reporters, Tommy Robinson, he's quite a controversial character. I'm aware of that.

00:12:36.380 But if you put anything on Facebook with his image or voice, that post will be suspended,

00:12:43.100 and you could risk your entire account being taken down. I don't want to emphasize that one example,

00:12:47.740 but I'm just saying, I'm not sure if I accept his apology at face value when he is continuing his woke

00:12:55.260 censorship on a daily basis. Maybe not so much on Trump versus Kamala Harris, but on so many other

00:13:02.460 woke things. I think Facebook is just as censorious today as it was a month ago and a year ago. What do

00:13:07.740 you think? Like, I just don't believe it's decided suddenly to change its corporate culture and no longer

00:13:13.260 be a politically correct censorship machine.

00:13:17.580 Yeah, or if it has, it's in a way that's, you know, not really noticeable to the people who are actually

00:13:24.140 engaged in dissident political conversations. I remember, I think it was 2022 when I was still a reporter for

00:13:30.460 Breitbart. I got a hold of Facebook's massive list of so-called hate agents, you know, prominent

00:13:37.340 social media, prominent figures on Facebook that they were monitoring and potentially going to ban.

00:13:44.860 And there were all sorts of mainstream, you know, big right wing names on there. I believe Tommy

00:13:49.020 Robinson was one of them. There was also Laura Loomer and many, many other, many other people were on that

00:13:54.460 list. So, you know, they had, they had a literal blacklist of political figures that they didn't

00:13:59.580 like. There were politicians on that list as well, if I remember correctly.

00:14:02.940 Yeah, I bet Nigel Horowitz has just continued to hold Facebook's feet to the fire and understand what,

00:14:08.780 if they're actually, if they're actually, like you said, rolling back any of their censorship policies.

00:14:13.100 I know they reinstated Donald Trump, but you know, that's, that's, you know, the bare minimum,

00:14:18.780 I would say. And it's also interesting to see in Brazil, we see the Brazilian Supreme Court going,

00:14:26.380 electoral court going after Elon Musk and X so strongly, but they haven't really said anything

00:14:31.100 about Facebook. And I think there'd be much more up in arms if Facebook were moving in an

00:14:36.220 anti-censorship direction, especially because in Brazil, they're so concerned with WhatsApp,

00:14:41.580 which is a Facebook company and so-called misinformation spreading on WhatsApp. WhatsApp was

00:14:46.220 seen as this critical factor in helping Bolsonaro win and get around media, media censorship in when

00:14:53.980 he won the election there. So the fact that Brazil is, you know, going so hard after Musk, but saying

00:15:00.620 nothing about Facebook suggests to me that Facebook is still in compliance largely with this global system

00:15:08.620 of censorship. Mm hmm. I find it terrifying that billions of people in the world are at the mercy of

00:15:15.660 individual men in terms of how we perceive things and what we say. I mean, I remember that famous quote,

00:15:23.180 I'm sure you know it off by heart, at Twitter, before Elon Musk took it over, I think, was it Parag, I forget his name,

00:15:32.380 a senior executive there who said, we don't believe in freedom, we believe in freedom of speech, but not

00:15:37.900 freedom of reach, I think was his phrase, which is, oh yeah, come on Twitter, say what you like,

00:15:44.780 fill your boots. We just won't show your words to anybody. So you'll have the simulation of free speech,

00:15:53.020 and you'll feel really good as some therapeutic exercise. But we're not going to let anyone hear

00:15:59.260 you. And that's so terrifying, because how do you know? You know, in the internet world, when

00:16:05.660 everything is filtered through these social media apps and their algorithms, how do you know? How do

00:16:10.460 you know if what you're saying gets out? And even more terrifying, how do you know that your perception

00:16:16.380 of the world is accurate, or what is being kept from your knowledge? I feel like I've eaten from

00:16:23.180 the tree of knowledge when I'm on Twitter, and I see, for example, the recent riots in the United

00:16:29.260 Kingdom. But for people who aren't on Twitter, who are on more censored apps, they don't even know about

00:16:34.860 that. If they know something about it, they probably believe the debunked government narrative.

00:16:42.060 And, and God forbid, Twitter were to fall or must be were to be jailed. I honestly don't know how I

00:16:49.340 would be able to know what the world is like, other than what's immediately in front of me,

00:16:53.500 because I can't trust things going through the out through any algorithm through any company.

00:16:56.780 And it feels like five oligarchs controlling my entire information flow. Well, I don't know,

00:17:01.740 is there a solution? It is, it is very precarious to have so much of our free speech infrastructure,

00:17:10.700 as you said, kind of dependent on one guy. The, you know, the fact that the rest of Silicon Valley,

00:17:16.460 you see venture capitalists like David Sachs being increasingly vocal, you see, you know,

00:17:22.940 other figures, Mark Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, you know, all these are fairly big Silicon Valley

00:17:29.980 figures. And there are much more vocal in their support of free speech today than they were in 2020,

00:17:36.060 some were completely silent in 2020. So it's more than just Elon Musk. I think Silicon Valley as a

00:17:42.780 whole has, you know, outside of the really, some of the really big tech companies like Microsoft and

00:17:48.940 Google has on the whole distance itself from the system of government control. But, you know,

00:17:54.380 I've always supported pro free speech regulation of tech companies. I'll be clear, I don't support this

00:18:01.900 sort of very strange sort of DC populist idea that you have to regulate the tech companies at any

00:18:08.940 chance you get. You know, to me, that's just handing weapons to the government that, you know,

00:18:14.860 that, you know, the government that wants new weapons to punish platforms like X and to punish

00:18:19.340 people like Elon Musk. But I do support these bills that have been passed in some of the states.

00:18:24.140 I think Texas passed a law that says, you know, if you're a user of a social media platform,

00:18:29.580 you should have a private right of action against social media platforms and other tech platforms.

00:18:34.940 If they ban your account, if they deny you service, you should be able to take them to court

00:18:39.820 and get your account reinstated if they suspended it unfairly or unjustly, which in many cases,

00:18:45.980 they do. It's preposterous to me that you have more due process if you own a physical business

00:18:54.380 with a physical location from being evicted than you do from being banned from your social media

00:19:00.380 account or your Amazon account or your e-commerce accounts or even your PayPal account. These are,

00:19:04.700 you know, these online accounts are arguably much more important today to having a livelihood

00:19:11.020 than a physical business. And yet you have due process in one, but not the other. So I support

00:19:17.740 regulations like that, which sort of go beyond any individual or any oligarch in guaranteeing

00:19:25.580 free speech on social media. You know, it's interesting. I think of my own Twitter account,

00:19:31.180 which I've been tripping away at for 15 years, more than 100,000 little comments I've made,

00:19:37.740 a huge waste of time, I guess. But looked at from another point of view,

00:19:40.540 I've built up a big audience there through my own input. I mean, yes, I was a, you know,

00:19:47.100 they are the vendor or I'm the customer and there was a system of rules, but I have put a lot of work

00:19:53.820 into it. And I, we built the same with YouTube, same with all these other apps. We built our

00:19:58.620 companies around them based on a certain bundle of promises. And then they suddenly wake up one day

00:20:04.620 and say, well, it's a fireable offense if you're politically incorrect in this way or that way.

00:20:10.540 If you, you know, misgender someone to just to give a certain example, I don't know what I, 0.99

00:20:19.500 one of the things that I think about quite often, I'm going to shift gears here for a second about

00:20:24.940 Elon Musk and Twitter. And I thought of it again when he was called on to bail out NASA,

00:20:30.460 NASA, which is just so gorgeous, just so beautiful. NASA is all about DEI, diversity,

00:20:35.980 equity, inclusion. And that's not my opinion. That's what they boast about. I mean, they just

00:20:40.680 won't stop talking about DEI. They sort of forgot about the going into space part. So we have to

00:20:45.740 send Musk to the rescue. I remember, do you remember, Alan, right around the time that,

00:20:50.860 that Elon Musk was about to take over Twitter, there was all these, a day in the life of a Twitter

00:20:57.760 worker videos that all these, they were almost always young women in their twenties, millennial

00:21:04.980 or not Gen Z, but young women in their twenties, typically in HR or some other ethereal subjective

00:21:11.840 department that, that I don't even know if they could explain what they did. And they would do,

00:21:17.260 here's what my day at Twitter was like. I stopped in at the massage room. I went for a coffee. I got

00:21:22.780 a free cocktail. I had lunch. I was on the, and I mean, take a look here. I'll show you an example of

00:21:28.660 it. And I think Elon Musk finally saw one of these and he just flipped his wig. Here, take a look.

00:21:34.560 Welcome to a day in my life as a Twitter employee. So this past week went to SF for the first time

00:21:41.320 at a Twitter office, badged in, honestly took a moment to just soak everything in. What a blessing.

00:21:48.540 Also started my morning off with an iced matcha from the perch. Then I had a meeting. So quickly

00:21:54.520 scheduled one of these little pod rooms, which were so cool. They're literally noise canceling.

00:21:59.740 Took my meeting, got ready for a bunch. Look how delicious this food looks. Oh my goodness. I was so

00:22:05.900 overwhelmed. Then made my way down to this log cabin area. I don't know what this is, but it was really

00:22:12.680 cool. Played some foosball with my friends to kind of unwind a bit. Also found this really cool

00:22:20.020 meditation room that I thought was super neat. I didn't do any yoga, but they have this yoga room

00:22:27.520 if you were a yogi. So also thought that was really cool. Um, had a couple more meetings

00:22:32.960 in the afternoon, had a ton of projects that we needed to knock out. Say hi to my teammates.

00:22:37.740 Um, went to the, went to the library to kind of get some more work done. Obviously had to have

00:22:44.200 our afternoon coffee. So made some espresso. And then before leaving for the day, had some red wine,

00:22:50.340 um, that's on tap, went up to the rooftop and just honestly enjoyed the beautiful weather.

00:22:58.280 I mean, that looks like who wouldn't want to go to work there. But the thing is Elon Musk,

00:23:03.060 if you ask him what he is, essentially he'll say he's an engineer and he looks at Twitter as an

00:23:09.980 engineering product. He looks at SpaceX as an engineering product. I don't know much about

00:23:14.440 the boring company, but it's an engineering product. That's the tunneling company he has.

00:23:19.040 He's the flamethrower guy. He's the neural link guy. All of this is about hard sciences.

00:23:25.300 And so when he took over Twitter and fired 80% of the people there, probably every single gal

00:23:30.320 who did one of these day in the life videos, a lot of people said, Oh, you've wrecked it.

00:23:34.900 He didn't wreck it. He just cleaned the barnacles off the ship. And he's actually rolled out more

00:23:41.300 product functionality on Twitter in the last year than they did five years previously.

00:23:46.260 I think if you put Elon Musk in government, as I think Trump has been suggesting he might,

00:23:52.800 you put Elon Musk in charge of any government department, I don't think it would ever really

00:23:57.180 happen. But I think he could cut 80% of any bureaucracy and increase the output. I know that

00:24:03.000 sounds absurd, but the guy just did it on a $40 billion purchase he just made. What do you make of

00:24:08.100 that? I can see that happening. I think he would absolutely do that. He really runs his companies

00:24:15.300 very efficiently. And yeah, Twitter is still functioning perfectly well today, despite losing

00:24:23.440 80% of its workforce, as you said. And it's interesting that one of the things that global

00:24:31.080 internet censors really hope, and they say this in their public statements, they hope that regulations

00:24:36.700 like the EU's Digital Services Act will force platforms like X to rehire some of the people

00:24:42.940 they let go from the content moderation departments, the trust and safety departments, the censorship

00:24:47.920 squads, basically. They hope that regulation will force those to come back. But yeah, talking about

00:24:54.860 efficiency in government and what a Musk-like figure could do for that, it's not just the

00:25:02.380 government itself, but also the people they favor and the companies they favor in the private sector.

00:25:08.780 So much of this is because of contracts. So the spacecraft that failed to bring those astronauts

00:25:14.220 back to Earth, and now NASA has to turn to SpaceX, was a Boeing spacecraft, the same company whose

00:25:20.380 planes are malfunctioning everywhere because of engineering failures, because Boeing became a

00:25:26.620 sort of financialized company that forgot about that deprioritized engineering versus just making

00:25:33.660 profits and having a good balance sheet. So that's one example of a company that the government tends to

00:25:40.860 favor. We've also found out recent research found that the government funds the architects of censorship

00:25:46.220 through government contracts, over $10 billion collectively going to the same advertising

00:25:51.420 agencies that were members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, that same ad cartel that was

00:25:59.100 boycotting platforms like X, that was boycotting news companies for presenting dissident viewpoints or

00:26:06.220 allowing too much free speech. Government funds those companies over $10 billion, like I said, in things like

00:26:11.860 army recruitment ads and public service announcements. So what I hope happens is that a lot of these

00:26:18.900 contracts which go to entities that support the restriction of free speech and the restriction of

00:26:27.220 viewpoints online get really looked at by the public, that more people are aware that the US government

00:26:34.260 and taxpayers are funding this global network of speech censorship.

00:26:38.900 Yeah. You know, we've been censored by a number of these groups. I'll mention one of them,

00:26:43.380 NewsGuard, which is a self-appointed fact checker censor. And they don't actually check our facts,

00:26:49.860 they check our opinions. We've gone through the process several times, it's a waste of time.

00:26:54.180 They have their answer in advance, they just go through the motions. But they never,

00:26:58.020 I don't think we've ever been caught with a factual error by them. We correct errors when we make them.

00:27:03.140 And it's not, we're not, we love corrections. It sort of proves that everything else we got right.

00:27:07.940 I don't mind making a correction any day of the week. But what NewsGuard does is it says,

00:27:11.620 well, why did you interview this person? He has a point of view that's wrong. So, well,

00:27:16.500 but we accurately reported what this person in a contentious debate said. NewsGuard says you

00:27:22.580 shouldn't platform him at all because he's wrong. Well, he's part of the debate and we're just

00:27:27.860 showing both sides of the story. That is not a fact check. But NewsGuard is funded in part

00:27:33.300 by government contracts. I saved the story for another day. I bumped in to our sense.

00:27:38.500 Another thing NewsGuard does is it'll take blacklists of media companies like yours,

00:27:43.860 you're no doubt on the NewsGuard blacklist. It'll take those blacklists, it'll take them to the

00:27:48.420 advertising industry. The advertising industry will then use those blacklists to say, okay,

00:27:52.900 they don't get any ad revenue. We're going to financially throttle them because NewsGuard says they're bad.

00:27:57.860 They're also working with the European Union on their own, their vast online censorship apparatus.

00:28:03.380 This is like really a far reaching censorship organization that stretches across the Atlantic

00:28:08.420 in its influence. You're so right. And the NewsGuard browser extension blocks access to our site.

00:28:16.340 So they're atrocious. I'll save the story for another day, but I actually bumped in to our sensor

00:28:21.380 at an airport once. He didn't recognize me. I recognized him. I said, hello, I was being very

00:28:25.700 pleasant. And he said, who are you again? And I said, oh, I'm Ezra Levant with Rebel News.

00:28:30.580 You oversaw the censorship of us. And he was sort of startled by that. We spoke for about an hour.

00:28:35.860 He's not going to change. He gets paid too much and he doesn't give a care. And I'll tell that

00:28:41.220 story another day. Just briefly before we move on, it's actually quite relevant because if you keep

00:28:49.060 an eye on the Foundation for Freedom online website, foundationforfreedomonline.com,

00:28:53.780 we'll actually have a report up either today or tomorrow on NewsGuard's work in Europe.

00:28:58.100 Really? What a coincidence. I was just mentioning that because I bumped into this guy very recently.

00:29:03.460 I'll check that out for sure. They're awful. Hey, let me just, I wanted to show you one more

00:29:08.100 Elon Musk thing before I move on from him because he's great. There's this famous biographer, Walter

00:29:14.660 Isaacson, who's done some very, he's a great bestselling biographer. The guy can really write.

00:29:20.180 I think he did Steve Jobs biography too. And I saw this little video of him online talking about

00:29:26.580 the get it done, no BS, roll up your sleeves attitude of Elon Musk. And I just want to share

00:29:32.100 it. It's not really apropos of censorship. It's not really apropos of anything other than

00:29:37.780 what an interesting guy he is. And I know this is turning in sort of an Elon Musk fan club here,

00:29:42.340 but there's a lot to admire. And here's the story that Walter Isaacson tells of very early in the

00:29:49.860 days when Twitter was acquired by Musk, and they had to go to some server farm and unlock some and

00:29:56.740 take some servers out. And he asked his staff, how long will it take? This many months? Well,

00:30:01.460 you can do it in this many weeks. Like he was pushing them. No, no, it doesn't take months.

00:30:05.140 And in the end, they just flew there themselves. And Musk and his little team just did the work

00:30:12.340 themselves like that day that they had been told would take months to do. I didn't tell the story

00:30:17.380 great here. Look at Walter Isaacson to tell this fascinating little anecdote about the quintessence of

00:30:25.540 a no BS, get it done attitude that is so rare. Take a look.

00:30:30.260 He was at Twitter headquarters and he looks at all the engineering things and they have three server

00:30:37.780 farms for one in Portland, one in Sacramento, and one, I think in Atlanta. And he does the calculus

00:30:45.140 in his head. And he said, we don't really need three different redundant server farms. And the

00:30:50.260 engineers say, well, yes, we do, because we need backups and we need caching or whatever. And he says,

00:30:54.660 no, you're not going back to first principles linking. If you look at this. Anyway, he decides

00:31:01.300 they should get rid of the servers in Sacramento. Well, they say fine, but that'll take six months

00:31:06.340 because, and he said, no, you can do it in six weeks. And the engineer, and I'm sitting there in

00:31:12.820 the meeting and he's getting really dark and they don't know how to deal with him because it is like

00:31:16.980 a month after he took over Twitter. So they don't know this dude. And they say, well, no, I'm sorry,

00:31:21.460 Elon, we can't do it. And that, and he'd say, you can do it in six weeks. And by the end of the

00:31:25.540 meeting, he said, you can do it in six days. He gets really dark and he decides he's going to fire

00:31:31.460 them, but it's December 23rd. So it's like two days before Christmas. He does fire them. But

00:31:38.820 the next day, Christmas Eve, he's flying from San Francisco to Austin, Texas to go home for Christmas.

00:31:44.580 He's with two young cousins on the plane who are engineers. And one of them says,

00:31:49.780 why don't we just take those servers out ourselves? Elon Musk makes a U-turn in his

00:31:54.660 airplane, tells the pilot to go to Sacramento. They were already over Nevada. They land. He

00:32:01.300 rents, there are like four of them on the plane. They rent a truck, a sort of what we call a U-Haul

00:32:07.620 truck, a rental truck. And they go to the server facility and they, the guard there is like flummoxed.

00:32:14.900 It's Christmas Eve and they're forcing their way in and they're looking at the servers. And

00:32:20.580 one of the engineers says, well, you know, we can't take them out because we need engineers to

00:32:25.620 take off these elevated floors, you know, those floor tiles where people say. And Musk turns to his

00:32:32.580 bodyguard and says, do you got a pocket knife? The guy goes, yeah. And he takes a pocket knife and

00:32:38.100 pulls up one of the vents, rips up the floor thing, goes underneath the floor panel with a

00:32:43.300 set of wire cutters that he got from Home Depot and cuts the cable to the servers. And they start

00:32:49.700 moving them out and put them in the U-Haul truck. Just amazing. And how many CEOs would actually roll

00:32:56.580 up their sleeves and do something down and dirty like that, let alone one of the richest men in the

00:33:00.820 world? Go ahead, Alan. What's your reflection on that little clip? Yeah. And I think there is a

00:33:05.780 somewhat relationship to censorship here because this idea that competence should be prioritized

00:33:11.060 is actually pretty horrifying to the deep state and the supporters of censorship. The idea that you

00:33:15.940 should prioritize, you know, working space rockets and working airplanes and working satellites over

00:33:24.580 DEI quotas or, you know, getting another big contract for your buddies, you know, for the company that

00:33:30.980 you've been buddies with for the last five decades. You know, this is all very, very horrifying to the

00:33:36.660 permanent governing class in Washington and other places. And, you know, protecting themselves from

00:33:42.580 calls for competent governance and calls for competence in general, you know, calls for police to arrest

00:33:49.300 criminals and not innocent people who are expressing their political viewpoints. You know, just calls for

00:33:55.700 results that everyone wants is somehow an alien concept to the permanent governing class. And I

00:34:02.420 think that's a big part of why they're so desperate to control what people can say online because

00:34:08.260 they'll just, otherwise they'll just drown under a wave of criticism and organizing from

00:34:13.140 people who have had it with, frankly, their lack of competence.

00:34:16.580 Yeah. Hey, I want to ask you one last question about Elon Musk. We've seen a lot of people take

00:34:23.060 swipes at them all around the world. You mentioned a very senior judge in Brazil who's been issuing

00:34:32.420 astonishing demands against Twitter. Nicolas Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela,

00:34:40.180 has gone absolutely kooky. Like, I think he hallucinates that Elon Musk is breaking into his house or

00:34:46.100 something. France, we've seen condemnations of Elon Musk verbally and the symbolic, you know,

00:34:54.900 precedent setting arrest of Pavel Durov. The UK, Keir Starmer, I should say it with a German accent,

00:35:02.580 Herr Starmer has essentially blamed Elon Musk, not only for allowing Twitter to show race riots,

00:35:12.100 but says that Musk himself, his comments are themselves inciting hate.

00:35:19.700 You've seen European Union bureaucrats, one fellow, I want to get his name right, Thierry Breton,

00:35:26.020 if I'm saying it right, basically said on the eve of Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump,

00:35:32.500 he sent off a letter saying, you better be careful what you ask him. You better be careful because you

00:35:37.700 could break European Union law. The idea of one American interviewing another American on an

00:35:42.340 American app being the subject of censorship of a European unelected bureaucrat is just off the

00:35:48.420 charts, French audacity. What I'm saying is all these world governments are basically saying,

00:35:55.620 I hate Elon Musk. He's safe in America. There's less than 70 days till the election. Do you think

00:36:02.820 there's going to be some September surprise, October surprise? We've already had such astonishing

00:36:08.740 things happen. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the coup replacing Joe Biden.

00:36:13.940 There's still plenty of time for more tricks up the sleeve of the supervillains. What do you think

00:36:19.460 might happen? Well, you know, this network of global censorship is, and there's pressure from

00:36:26.580 foreign governments. A lot of people in America, pro-censorship voices in America, really see the

00:36:32.900 European Union and its Digital Services Act, which is what the vast system of online internet regulation

00:36:40.820 that the EU passed into law this year, they see that as, which they pushed for, by the way, as essential

00:36:49.540 to controlling American speech. So they think the European Union, by pressuring American companies,

00:36:56.180 will force them to censor not just people in Europe, but also people in America. And with

00:37:01.620 Terry Breton's letter, that's sort of exactly what he's doing. He was using a, you know, Elon Musk

00:37:08.020 interviewing Donald Trump, an American interviewing another American in an American presidential election.

00:37:14.100 Terry Breton, a European bureaucrat, somehow had a problem with that. It's really none of his

00:37:17.860 business. And another thing to remember is, you know, European Union, Britain, Brazil, these are

00:37:24.340 all nominally US allies. The US has a lot of influence there. And what the State Department

00:37:29.540 is supposed to do in situations like this is stand up for American companies. They haven't. They've done

00:37:34.900 more than that. In fact, they actively supported and encouraged the Digital Services Act, this online

00:37:41.940 regulation regime that Terry Breton is relying on. And what's even more interesting to me is that,

00:37:49.220 you know, Republicans supposedly, you know, mostly, I would say, a very pro-free speech party. Jim

00:37:54.740 Jordan's done great work at the Judiciary Committee. But, you know, not apparently entirely pro-free speech

00:38:02.420 because, you know, and there are some, you know, pro-free speech Democrats as well. RFK until recently,

00:38:08.420 a Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard until a couple of years ago, a Democrat. But interesting that the House

00:38:14.900 Foreign Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over these areas, over, you know, US, what the US

00:38:21.060 ambassadors and what the US State Department is doing in places like the UK and the European Union

00:38:25.140 and Brazil hasn't actually said anything about Musk being forced out of Brazil and the EU threatening

00:38:33.220 his company. It's, you know, very, very interesting to me that that committee has said nothing when

00:38:37.780 it's in their jurisdiction. So it's important not to see these things in the European Union and Brazil

00:38:44.420 and the UK as isolated because they are, you know, America does have some influence, their influence,

00:38:48.900 which it's not using. Yeah. You know, I see censorship being bills and laws popping up around

00:38:57.620 the world in the United Kingdom, in Ireland, in Scotland, in Canada. In fact, they're often called

00:39:04.660 the same thing, the Online Harms Act. That's the name of it here. But I think that's actually what

00:39:09.540 it's called in the UK. One of the laws, correct me if I'm wrong. So I do see it popping up. It's sort

00:39:14.820 of surrounding America and America isn't pushing back. I want to close by showing one of your scoops

00:39:23.300 from years ago. This is the emergency town hall meeting after Donald Trump won. This was in the

00:39:33.300 Google headquarters, right? Why don't you set up the clip? I want to, there's a couple of clips. You

00:39:38.900 know, the one where the staff were shell shocked. They thought, like every New York Times reading

00:39:44.980 liberal, that there was like a 5% chance Trump would win, a 90 plus percent chance Hillary Clinton

00:39:50.660 would win. And then they thought, oh my God, not only did Trump win, he won because of social media.

00:39:57.220 Set up this town hall meeting and then we'll play a couple of clips from it. And then I got a question

00:40:02.740 for you about the 2024 election. Remind our viewers, what was this clip and where did you get it from?

00:40:08.740 And we'll play a little bit of it. Yeah. So this clip is, was Google's reaction to the 2016 election.

00:40:15.620 It was recorded just a couple of days after the election in 2016. And I managed to obtain it in 2018

00:40:23.380 from an entirely, I was receiving a lot of leaks at the time from employees at Google. Google had just

00:40:29.780 shifted in a massively pro-censorship direction that fired James Damore, who was speaking out

00:40:34.660 against ideological conformity inside the company. So I had all these Google employees reaching out to me

00:40:39.940 with their stories about what was going on inside the company. And someone, I still don't know who,

00:40:44.340 it was an anonymous email, sent me a Dropbox link containing this video. And it's fascinating because

00:40:50.660 it shows Google's entire executive team expressing their horror, not just their regular employees,

00:40:56.340 but their co-founders, their CEO, their C-suite expressing their horror at the Trump election.

00:41:01.780 And not just that, but also plotting what they would do to make sure similar things

00:41:06.020 didn't happen in the future. They talk about all the things we saw in the

00:41:09.700 following years, controlling disinformation, controlling fake news,

00:41:14.020 dealing with so-called low information voters. So it's not just a despair session. It's also a plotting

00:41:21.620 session. You know, it shows where Silicon Valley is going. Speaking to white men, there's an 0.60

00:41:26.740 opportunity for you right now to understand your privilege in the society. Take the opportunity to

00:41:31.860 go through the bias-busting training, read about privilege, read about the real history of oppression

00:41:36.500 in our country, and tomorrow night, watch 13th, the movie that is here. If you can't watch it here,

00:41:41.860 watch it on Netflix. Discuss the issues you are passionate about during Thanksgiving dinner,

00:41:46.660 and don't back down and laugh it off when you hear the voice of oppression speak through metaphors.

00:41:51.140 And I promise to do this.

00:41:55.220 Google, I think, hasn't changed much at all. I think Google, along with Microsoft, which is a

00:42:00.580 partner of News Guard still, that organization we were just talking about, the media blacklisting

00:42:05.460 company, those two big tech companies, there's no signs of change at all. There's a little bit of,

00:42:10.340 we see some signs of change from Mark Zuckerberg. Like he said, he hasn't unbanned a lot of people,

00:42:14.180 but he has expressed at least some remorse at what he did in 2020. Obviously, X is now a mostly

00:42:20.500 free speech platform. But Google and Microsoft have shown no signs of changing, no signs that

00:42:26.580 they're going to change their search blacklists, which again, we were able to obtain them. They

00:42:31.380 were published at Breitbart News in 2019, YouTube political search blacklist, just search for it if

00:42:37.780 you can. So a lot of the big tech companies are still very much in the tank for censorship.

00:42:44.340 And despite the changing attitudes in Silicon Valley, more broadly, those are still two

00:42:49.620 giant companies that are very much tied to the regime and the global censorship complex.

00:42:55.140 8.30pm on Tuesday night, I was at home with friends and family watching the election returns.

00:43:01.300 And as we started to see the direction of the voting, I reached out to someone close to me who was at

00:43:08.980 the Javits Center where the big celebration was supposed to occur in New York City. Somebody had

00:43:15.060 been working on the campaign. And I just sent him a note and said, you know, are you okay? It looks

00:43:20.980 like it's going the wrong way. And I got back a very sad short text that read, people are leaving,

00:43:30.340 staff is crying, we're going to lose.

00:43:37.780 That was the first moment I really felt like we were going to lose. And it was this massive like

00:43:43.940 kick in the gut that we were going to lose. And it was really painful. It did feel like a ton of bricks

00:43:49.620 dropped on my chest. And I've had a chance to talk to a lot of fellow Googlers and people have said

00:43:54.980 different words, similar concept this, how painful is it? How painful this is?

00:43:59.620 Well, that's what they were like in 2016. Just they were shocked. They've had eight years to,

00:44:07.620 like you say, plot. If you had to predict what's going to happen in 2024, you said that

00:44:14.100 it'll be less censored than the 2020 election. I think some people are awake. People are alert to

00:44:21.460 some of the tricks. Zuckerberg himself said, I was tricked by the FBI or whoever.

00:44:29.140 How do you think the election is going to go? I mean, when it was Trump versus Biden,

00:44:34.980 I think people were feeling pretty good there for a while. Trump versus Harris,

00:44:38.020 it's got a lot of energy into the Democrats. What's your prediction? Like me, you're not an

00:44:42.500 American by birth. You're a keen observer and a friend of America. What do you think is going to happen?

00:44:48.020 I mean, it's interesting. I think Trump's chances are quite a bit better than they were in 2020.

00:44:55.860 In 2020, you had this combination of so many things. You had the very peak of Silicon Valley

00:45:01.380 censorship. Every single platform was controlled very, very tightly. Trump's most vocal supporters

00:45:09.540 were banned. He himself was censored on many occasions during the election and lost his account

00:45:14.020 on every major platform just after the election. That was all encouraged, by the way, by the US deep

00:45:21.140 state, by the agency within DHS, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency. There's a lot

00:45:30.980 of material there you can see about how they encouraged this since 2020 election. In addition to that,

00:45:36.820 the Democrats and their supporters just had a lot of energy going into that election. They were coming off the

00:45:43.700 the George Floyd riots and the mass mobilization there. They had an advantage because they had a

00:45:49.540 political turnout machine focused on mail-in ballots. Everyone was locked down under COVID.

00:45:54.340 So they had all these advantages, which I don't think they'll have this time around.

00:45:57.860 And also, if you look at the polling, it's true Kamala Harris had a bit of a bump 0.79

00:46:02.020 after she replaced Joe Biden, simply because she's not senile. But if you look at the polling averages,

00:46:10.740 Trump today is way better than where he was in 2020, and even way better than where he was in 2016,

00:46:17.940 at the same point in the race. So polling-wise, it's actually looking quite good for Trump, I would

00:46:23.700 say. It's still a very tight race. So it's really hard to say what the outcome is going to be

00:46:28.900 with any certainty. But certainly, there is less censorship. There's a genuine free speech

00:46:34.340 platform in X that people have access to. Trump's been unbanned on X. He's been unbanned on Facebook

00:46:39.940 as well. So we're dealing with a much less censored election than we were in 2020, which is great to

00:46:45.780 see. Yeah, I sure hope so. Well, I'm nervous about it. I'm also excited about it. Alma, it's great to

00:46:51.620 reconnect with you. Thanks for spending so much time with us and letting me talk so much. This is one of my

00:46:56.660 favorite subjects. I find Elon Musk, the leading citizen of our day. And he continues to impress

00:47:04.100 and perplex and challenge and innovate. And we are the beneficiaries of some of that because we are in

00:47:11.220 the free speech business too. By the way, I look forward to your NewsGuard story. What's your website

00:47:16.100 that we can find that at? Yeah, it'll be up on the foundationforfreedomonline.com. You'll find

00:47:22.100 plenty of other material there about NewsGuard. If you just tap the little search button,

00:47:26.500 you'll find a good rundown on NewsGuard on their work pushing global censorship.

00:47:31.620 Great. Nice to see you again. Keep fighting for freedom.

00:47:34.180 Keep fighting for freedom! 0.95

00:47:37.460 Shame on you, you censorious bug! 0.92

Rebel News Podcast - August 31, 2024

EZRA LEVANT ｜ Telegram CEO arrested. Will globalist censors target Elon Musk next？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript