EZRA LEVANT ｜ Telegram CEO arrested. Will globalist censors target Elon Musk next？
Summary
After the arrest of Pavel Durov, the CEO of the messaging app Telegram, in France, the question is: Is Elon Musk next? Ezra talks to Alan Bokhari, founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, to ask that question.
Transcript
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Hello my friends, one of my favorite guests. We used to talk to him more often, but wow,
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we reconnected today. I'm talking about Alam Bokhari. He used to be the senior tech editor
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at Breitbart.com. Total Silicon Valley insider in terms of his connections, but he fights for
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freedom and we're going to have a great rollicking talk today about Elon Musk, about Pavel Durov,
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the president of the app called Telegram, who was arrested in France. Lots of stuff,
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a feature interview. Sit back and enjoy. Do me a favor and why don't you get a subscription to
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the video version of this podcast. It's called Rebel News Plus. That's what we call our subscription
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Tonight, they arrested the head of a social media company called Telegram.
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Are they coming for Elon Musk next? It's August 30th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
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Well, as you know, when I was in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, two names kept coming
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up, the two names they were most afraid of. Not afraid in a personal sense, but afraid that
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these people would stop their agenda, this globalist, rootless, stateless, socialist agenda,
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technocratic, the kind of thing that would cause Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the UK,
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to say he preferred Davos to the Westminster Parliament. Remember when Starmer said that?
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Let's ask you quickly. You have to choose now between Davos or Westminster.
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Well, the enemy of Davos, according to the Davosians, these are the World Economic Forum people,
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was number one, most obviously, Donald Trump. He would stop so many of their schemes and stop some
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of their wars too, which they love. But the number two name, and it was a very close second, was Elon
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Musk. Now, Elon Musk is a great industrialist, a great entrepreneur, a dreamer, a visionary, a futurist.
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I mean, my gosh, the man wants to colonize Mars. That's the kind of sort of crazy utopian schemes
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that they normally love at the World Economic Forum. But the fact that Elon Musk believes,
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or he says he believes, and it seems to be true, in freedom, and using Twitter to free
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once-censored people, that irritated them in a very deep way. And there was a link between the two.
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You felt that when they talked about Trump, that Elon Musk was rehabilitating him
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and his supporters. It was very interesting. And so when I saw the other day that a billionaire
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tech tycoon, Pavel Durov, born in Russia, the founder of various social networks, and now the
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CEO of a messaging app called Telegram, when I saw that Durov, when he flew into France purportedly at
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the invitation of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who said, hey, come to Paris, let's have
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dinner. When Durov landed at the airport, he was arrested and charged with a whole roster of
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crimes allegedly being perpetrated by his social media app called Telegram. And all I could think
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of was that is what they, that is a test drive, that is a dress rehearsal for the big game. They
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would, if they could, and they might, do that to Elon Musk himself. Joining us now to talk about this
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and so many other social media things, is a man who probably knows more about economic, sorry,
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about internet freedom, rather, than anyone else I've ever met. Someone who's been studying
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internet freedom and the loss of it at the hands of government and by woke entries in those corporations
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themselves. You know who I'm talking about. His name is Alan Bokhari. He's the managing director
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of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and we're just so happy to have him back as a guest today.
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Do you agree with the World Economic Forum delegates that I met with, that after Donald Trump, a close
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second in terms of jamming their plans, is Elon Musk? Do you agree with them? Should they be worried
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about Elon Musk? I can certainly see why they said that, and it seems very accurate. What's really
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frustrating to them about Elon Musk, I think, because the delegates at the World Economic Forum
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have a vested interest in the thing that global internet censorship is trying to protect, which is
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this global system of narrative control and corresponding political control. They worry that internet freedom
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is going to eventually undermine their political power because it will undermine their control over narratives
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and over what the public of Western countries and countries around the world believe.
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And Elon Musk really epitomized that, and his takeover of Twitter really epitomized that.
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It really broke down this system of censorship that they've been able to build up
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over the preceding half decade or more. And what's really frustrating to them about Elon Musk is that
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he's a little bit different to someone like Pavel Dura, because you mentioned Pavel Dura. Dura founded
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the Russian version of Facebook. He founded Telegram. These are the most big, big platforms
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with massive influence. But Elon Musk has many, many other companies, and he's kind of essential
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to Western governments. They can't just, you know, arrest him or bankrupt him or get rid of him in
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some other way, because, you know, just look recently at this story with the stranded astronauts.
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So NASA had to request help from SpaceX because they have a couple of astronauts stranded on the
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International Space Station because the Boeing-built spacecraft that took them there malfunctioned and
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can't bring them back home to Earth. So SpaceX has to come into the rescue.
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The government's increasingly dependent on SpaceX rockets.
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You go to Ukraine. Ukraine uses Starlink for a lot of their operations.
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So, you know, Musk is kind of essential to the Western, the Western aero, becoming essential to the Western
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aerospace, to Western internet infrastructure, to Western militaries.
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And so even though the deep states and the governments of the West hate him for bringing
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free speech back to the people and threatening the basis of their political power, they also
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need him because he's shoring up their military power and he's succeeding where, you know,
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So, you know, on the one hand, he's this massive threat to them. On the other hand,
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That is such a good point. I hadn't heard it expressed until you said it here.
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I mean, Durov is an interesting personality. He's sort of a brooding guy, but he's an innovator,
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of course. But he feels like sort of almost like a lone ranger. Whereas, God forbid, if
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Elon Musk were arrested, I could just imagine what would happen to the price of Tesla. It
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would plummet. SpaceX, Neuralink, all of his projects. He's responsible. His company alone
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sends more than 90 percent of all payloads from planet Earth into space. So SpaceX, the company he
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runs, does more space work than NASA, China, the Russian cosmonauts, all combined times 10.
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And he has, Starlink is the name of his civilian system, but he has a military system and he's
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putting up there just as quickly. I forget the name of it right now, but it's military. So you
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can't take him out. He really is an essential man. You know, they say the graveyards are full
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of irreplaceable men, but I think that Elon Musk might be the closest thing we have to that. You
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would see the New York Stock Exchange tank. You would see, and he has a lot of friends that he's
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made very wealthy along the way. I don't think there's actually another person in history who has
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created more wealth for others than he has. That's a very good point. So in that, I'm not going to say
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he's untouchable, but I don't know. Why do you think they went after Durov this way? It said,
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you know, if you look at the official rap sheet, they say, well, you're allowing drug trafficking,
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you're allowing human trafficking, you're allowing other crimes, you're not disclosing all that.
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I suppose in a technical sense, that's probably true. Just like cell phone companies are letting
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people commit crimes on the phone. And, you know, just like the post office lets you commit crimes if
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you write mean letters. I mean, I suppose any platform allows crimes to happen on it. You don't
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generally charge the owner of Apple with a crime for what's done on their phones. Am I right?
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That's correct. And this is what liability exemptions for social media platforms and
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online websites are supposed to protect them from. It's obviously ridiculous to say that,
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you know, a phone line is responsible for someone using the phone to commit a crime.
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But this really epitomizes the new relationship between governments and tech platforms. After
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2016, and right up to say 2021, 2022, there was this extraordinary pressure that Silicon Valley
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really succumbed to from the deep state, from their allies and the NGO media complex, you know,
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the advertising industry, which Silicon Valley is quite dependent on, to force them to censor their
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platforms and in particular to censor the 2020 presidential election. Now, Musk taking over
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Twitter was, you know, the first big crack in that system that they've developed. But now we're seeing
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more and more people in Silicon Valley coming out and saying, you know, we don't support, you know,
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these government demands for censorship. We were even tricked by the government. You had
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Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg telling the Judiciary Committee recently that the FBI told him that
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the Hunter Biden laptop story was going to be a Russian hoax. And that was obviously a complete
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lie. So I think many in Silicon Valley feel that they were hoodwinked by the deep state and its allies,
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that they were unduly pressured by it, as well as the media and advertisers and so on, that they were
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forced to do things they really didn't want to do. But with the entire industry acting as one,
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it was very easy for every company to do the same thing and engage in the same kind of censorship.
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And I think Elon Musk, you know, was a real sign to those people in Silicon Valley, those other people
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who had misgivings about what had gone on with censorship over the previous half decade that,
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you know, it was time to roll back the censorship to come out and say they didn't support it,
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to come out and say they were pressured. So it's really, really been a massive, massively positive
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development. And I think this coming presidential election is going to be far less censored than the
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2020 election, although there are still holdouts like Microsoft and Google, which still have their
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censorship regimes in place. I saw that letter from Mark Zuckerberg and it was interesting that he
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conceded so much, he admitted so much. He admitted that some of that we knew before because of lawsuits
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that caused the disclosure of internal records of how the deep state, the FBI and other government
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agencies basically had direct backdoor access into various social media companies. And they had
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sort of direct back channels to senior executives who would just give them whatever they wanted.
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it. So some of that came out through litigation. When Zuckerberg basically admits, and I would say
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even slightly apologizes for it, my first reaction is they're still censoring us today, for example.
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One of our former reporters, Tommy Robinson, he's quite a controversial character. I'm aware of that.
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But if you put anything on Facebook with his image or voice, that post will be suspended,
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and you could risk your entire account being taken down. I don't want to emphasize that one example,
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but I'm just saying, I'm not sure if I accept his apology at face value when he is continuing his woke
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censorship on a daily basis. Maybe not so much on Trump versus Kamala Harris, but on so many other
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woke things. I think Facebook is just as censorious today as it was a month ago and a year ago. What do
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you think? Like, I just don't believe it's decided suddenly to change its corporate culture and no longer
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Yeah, or if it has, it's in a way that's, you know, not really noticeable to the people who are actually
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engaged in dissident political conversations. I remember, I think it was 2022 when I was still a reporter for
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Breitbart. I got a hold of Facebook's massive list of so-called hate agents, you know, prominent
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social media, prominent figures on Facebook that they were monitoring and potentially going to ban.
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And there were all sorts of mainstream, you know, big right wing names on there. I believe Tommy
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Robinson was one of them. There was also Laura Loomer and many, many other, many other people were on that
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list. So, you know, they had, they had a literal blacklist of political figures that they didn't
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like. There were politicians on that list as well, if I remember correctly.
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Yeah, I bet Nigel Horowitz has just continued to hold Facebook's feet to the fire and understand what,
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if they're actually, if they're actually, like you said, rolling back any of their censorship policies.
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I know they reinstated Donald Trump, but you know, that's, that's, you know, the bare minimum,
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I would say. And it's also interesting to see in Brazil, we see the Brazilian Supreme Court going,
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electoral court going after Elon Musk and X so strongly, but they haven't really said anything
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about Facebook. And I think there'd be much more up in arms if Facebook were moving in an
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anti-censorship direction, especially because in Brazil, they're so concerned with WhatsApp,
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which is a Facebook company and so-called misinformation spreading on WhatsApp. WhatsApp was
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seen as this critical factor in helping Bolsonaro win and get around media, media censorship in when
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he won the election there. So the fact that Brazil is, you know, going so hard after Musk, but saying
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nothing about Facebook suggests to me that Facebook is still in compliance largely with this global system
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of censorship. Mm hmm. I find it terrifying that billions of people in the world are at the mercy of
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individual men in terms of how we perceive things and what we say. I mean, I remember that famous quote,
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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,
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a senior executive there who said, we don't believe in freedom, we believe in freedom of speech, but not
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freedom of reach, I think was his phrase, which is, oh yeah, come on Twitter, say what you like,
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fill your boots. We just won't show your words to anybody. So you'll have the simulation of free speech,
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and you'll feel really good as some therapeutic exercise. But we're not going to let anyone hear
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you. And that's so terrifying, because how do you know? You know, in the internet world, when
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everything is filtered through these social media apps and their algorithms, how do you know? How do
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you know if what you're saying gets out? And even more terrifying, how do you know that your perception
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of the world is accurate, or what is being kept from your knowledge? I feel like I've eaten from
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the tree of knowledge when I'm on Twitter, and I see, for example, the recent riots in the United
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Kingdom. But for people who aren't on Twitter, who are on more censored apps, they don't even know about
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that. If they know something about it, they probably believe the debunked government narrative.
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And, and God forbid, Twitter were to fall or must be were to be jailed. I honestly don't know how I
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would be able to know what the world is like, other than what's immediately in front of me,
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because I can't trust things going through the out through any algorithm through any company.
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And it feels like five oligarchs controlling my entire information flow. Well, I don't know,
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is there a solution? It is, it is very precarious to have so much of our free speech infrastructure,
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as you said, kind of dependent on one guy. The, you know, the fact that the rest of Silicon Valley,
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you see venture capitalists like David Sachs being increasingly vocal, you see, you know,
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other figures, Mark Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, you know, all these are fairly big Silicon Valley
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figures. And there are much more vocal in their support of free speech today than they were in 2020,
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some were completely silent in 2020. So it's more than just Elon Musk. I think Silicon Valley as a
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whole has, you know, outside of the really, some of the really big tech companies like Microsoft and
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Google has on the whole distance itself from the system of government control. But, you know,
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I've always supported pro free speech regulation of tech companies. I'll be clear, I don't support this
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sort of very strange sort of DC populist idea that you have to regulate the tech companies at any
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chance you get. You know, to me, that's just handing weapons to the government that, you know,
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that, you know, the government that wants new weapons to punish platforms like X and to punish
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people like Elon Musk. But I do support these bills that have been passed in some of the states.
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I think Texas passed a law that says, you know, if you're a user of a social media platform,
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you should have a private right of action against social media platforms and other tech platforms.
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If they ban your account, if they deny you service, you should be able to take them to court
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and get your account reinstated if they suspended it unfairly or unjustly, which in many cases,
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they do. It's preposterous to me that you have more due process if you own a physical business
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with a physical location from being evicted than you do from being banned from your social media
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account or your Amazon account or your e-commerce accounts or even your PayPal account. These are,
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you know, these online accounts are arguably much more important today to having a livelihood
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than a physical business. And yet you have due process in one, but not the other. So I support
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regulations like that, which sort of go beyond any individual or any oligarch in guaranteeing
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free speech on social media. You know, it's interesting. I think of my own Twitter account,
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which I've been tripping away at for 15 years, more than 100,000 little comments I've made,
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a huge waste of time, I guess. But looked at from another point of view,
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I've built up a big audience there through my own input. I mean, yes, I was a, you know,
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they are the vendor or I'm the customer and there was a system of rules, but I have put a lot of work
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into it. And I, we built the same with YouTube, same with all these other apps. We built our
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companies around them based on a certain bundle of promises. And then they suddenly wake up one day
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and say, well, it's a fireable offense if you're politically incorrect in this way or that way.
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If you, you know, misgender someone to just to give a certain example, I don't know what I,
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one of the things that I think about quite often, I'm going to shift gears here for a second about
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Elon Musk and Twitter. And I thought of it again when he was called on to bail out NASA,
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NASA, which is just so gorgeous, just so beautiful. NASA is all about DEI, diversity,
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equity, inclusion. And that's not my opinion. That's what they boast about. I mean, they just
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won't stop talking about DEI. They sort of forgot about the going into space part. So we have to
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send Musk to the rescue. I remember, do you remember, Alan, right around the time that,
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that Elon Musk was about to take over Twitter, there was all these, a day in the life of a Twitter
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worker videos that all these, they were almost always young women in their twenties, millennial
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or not Gen Z, but young women in their twenties, typically in HR or some other ethereal subjective
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department that, that I don't even know if they could explain what they did. And they would do,
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here's what my day at Twitter was like. I stopped in at the massage room. I went for a coffee. I got
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a free cocktail. I had lunch. I was on the, and I mean, take a look here. I'll show you an example of
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it. And I think Elon Musk finally saw one of these and he just flipped his wig. Here, take a look.
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Welcome to a day in my life as a Twitter employee. So this past week went to SF for the first time
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at a Twitter office, badged in, honestly took a moment to just soak everything in. What a blessing.
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Also started my morning off with an iced matcha from the perch. Then I had a meeting. So quickly
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scheduled one of these little pod rooms, which were so cool. They're literally noise canceling.
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Took my meeting, got ready for a bunch. Look how delicious this food looks. Oh my goodness. I was so
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overwhelmed. Then made my way down to this log cabin area. I don't know what this is, but it was really
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cool. Played some foosball with my friends to kind of unwind a bit. Also found this really cool
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meditation room that I thought was super neat. I didn't do any yoga, but they have this yoga room
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if you were a yogi. So also thought that was really cool. Um, had a couple more meetings
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in the afternoon, had a ton of projects that we needed to knock out. Say hi to my teammates.
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Um, went to the, went to the library to kind of get some more work done. Obviously had to have
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our afternoon coffee. So made some espresso. And then before leaving for the day, had some red wine,
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um, that's on tap, went up to the rooftop and just honestly enjoyed the beautiful weather.
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I mean, that looks like who wouldn't want to go to work there. But the thing is Elon Musk,
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if you ask him what he is, essentially he'll say he's an engineer and he looks at Twitter as an
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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.
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He's the flamethrower guy. He's the neural link guy. All of this is about hard sciences.
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And so when he took over Twitter and fired 80% of the people there, probably every single gal
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who did one of these day in the life videos, a lot of people said, Oh, you've wrecked it.
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He didn't wreck it. He just cleaned the barnacles off the ship. And he's actually rolled out more
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product functionality on Twitter in the last year than they did five years previously.
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I think if you put Elon Musk in government, as I think Trump has been suggesting he might,
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you put Elon Musk in charge of any government department, I don't think it would ever really
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happen. But I think he could cut 80% of any bureaucracy and increase the output. I know that
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sounds absurd, but the guy just did it on a $40 billion purchase he just made. What do you make of
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that? I can see that happening. I think he would absolutely do that. He really runs his companies
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very efficiently. And yeah, Twitter is still functioning perfectly well today, despite losing
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80% of its workforce, as you said. And it's interesting that one of the things that global
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internet censors really hope, and they say this in their public statements, they hope that regulations
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like the EU's Digital Services Act will force platforms like X to rehire some of the people
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they let go from the content moderation departments, the trust and safety departments, the censorship
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squads, basically. They hope that regulation will force those to come back. But yeah, talking about
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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
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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
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.
00:41:55.220
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,
00:43:37.780
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
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.