Rebel News Podcast - SPECIAL： How Silicon Valley became a bigger censor than the State (Guest： Allum Bokhari)

00:00:00.000 Tonight, how tech companies have more control over our free speech than most governments do.

00:00:05.560 It's July 3rd and you're watching The Ezra Levant Show.

00:00:13.720 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:00:17.540 There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.

00:00:21.260 You come here once a year with a sign and you feel morally superior.

00:00:24.240 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.

00:00:35.000 I've been worried about YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google for a couple years now.

00:00:39.780 When we started The Rebel, it felt like it was the golden age to be online.

00:00:44.800 We grew very rapidly. We have almost a million subscribers on YouTube.

00:00:49.460 And we were actually making money through ads on YouTube.

00:00:54.100 And I thought for a moment that it was possible to survive that way.

00:00:58.620 And conservatives in particular flourished online.

00:01:02.980 But you see, that was a problem to the powers that be because it was the online grassroots activists who won the Brexit referendum.

00:01:12.300 And then later that year, who put Donald Trump over the top while Hillary Clinton and the remainers in the UK thought TV ads and official endorsements did it. 0.95

00:01:24.560 Well, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter was where it was at.

00:01:27.360 And so, in early 2017, the social media companies almost collectively decided to shut that down.

00:01:36.300 They immediately demonetized websites like ours.

00:01:40.460 Our YouTube revenues that were on track for a million dollars in the year were cut by 85%.

00:01:46.380 Our viewership was restricted.

00:01:49.120 And later on, our top talent, like Tommy Robinson, who used to be with us, was thrown off of Twitter, banned altogether, simply for expressing points of view.

00:01:59.060 It's not just a particular concern to us as a media company, but to anyone who wants the other side of the story, the contrarian side of the story,

00:02:07.500 either to say something or, just as importantly, to hear something that the powers that be disagree with.

00:02:14.200 I think it's actually the most important story of our age.

00:02:18.180 And whereas a decade ago, when I was prosecuted before Alberta's Human Rights Commission,

00:02:22.340 a government agency for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in the Western Standard magazine,

00:02:28.720 censorship today does not have those processes, procedures and appeals.

00:02:32.440 It all happens in some back room, perhaps by some millennial staffer pushing a button that no one ever knows about, but a voice has disappeared.

00:02:40.900 I think one of the most important journalists covering this beat right now works for Breitbart.com.

00:02:46.920 His name is Alan Bokhari, and he's agreed to spend the entire show with us today.

00:02:51.940 Alan joins us now via Skype from the UK.

00:02:54.240 Nice to see you again, Alan, and welcome to a special program on The Rebel.

00:02:59.280 How did you get into covering this unique beat?

00:03:02.840 Well, you know, I'm one of those millennials, so I grew up on the Internet, essentially.

00:03:09.280 I spent way too much of my teenage years online, and I saw increasingly, I think it was around 2012, 2013,

00:03:17.560 I started to notice these initially calls from, you know, far-left radical blue-haired type activists from Tumblr

00:03:25.660 saying that, you know, platforms like Reddit, Facebook, needed to kick offensive people off their platforms.

00:03:32.700 You know, offensive content that it started off with, you know, there was a big panic about men's rights activists back in 2013,

00:03:38.280 and then they started panicking about racists and neo-Nazis.

00:03:42.120 And we've seen that, and I saw this push over the years for the platforms that, you know, I grew up with,

00:03:48.660 which were previously open, free platforms to become more and more censored.

00:03:52.360 Let's talk about the corporate culture of these places.

00:03:57.000 I mean, so many of the tech innovators are men who are engineers, mathematicians.

00:04:06.740 I mean, if you look at the inventors of the Google algorithm, a couple of Russian Jews with great math savvy,

00:04:13.240 look at Steve Jobs, these are not people who are inherently political.

00:04:17.640 And if they were political, they would tend towards the meritocracy, they would tend towards, you know, objective ideas,

00:04:24.100 right, wrong, on, off, zeros and ones.

00:04:27.740 I mean, mathematics and physics, there's not a lot of room for postmodern, you know,

00:04:32.240 there's really no feminist answer to a math equation. 1.00

00:04:35.200 How did tech companies go from being really the domain,

00:04:38.420 I mean, I'm going to use some racial and gender language here,

00:04:43.580 straight, white, male and Asian male mathematicians,

00:04:49.800 to being the domain of feminists, transgender activists, anti-Islamophobia activists,

00:04:56.580 how did it move so far away from its scientific meritocratic roots?

00:05:00.920 So, yeah, as you said, Silicon Valley started off founded by these very sort of non-political, apolitical types,

00:05:07.600 very science-y, nerdy types.

00:05:10.220 And if they were political at all, their values were normally quite libertarian.

00:05:14.180 If you look at the values of early internet companies, the ethos of early internet companies,

00:05:19.200 even the World Wide Web itself, it's a very libertarian idea.

00:05:22.400 Everyone can have this platform to express themselves.

00:05:26.300 And that's what Reddit promised initially, that's what Twitter promised initially,

00:05:29.880 and then it changed over time, partly due to pressure from these social justice warrior gender studies types 0.99

00:05:36.220 who suddenly started infiltrating Silicon Valley and pushing for more censorship and more diversity quotas.

00:05:42.580 And I think what happened was essentially partly because Silicon Valley is so dominated by –

00:05:48.420 it's a very male field, partly because technology is a very male field,

00:05:51.640 is what male people enjoy doing, and it's just a natural consequence of equality of opportunity

00:05:58.680 and people following what they want to do.

00:06:01.000 But partly because of that, the left was able to attack Silicon Valley for being this straight, white, male place.

00:06:08.120 And this gave social justice warriors and the far left a foothold.

00:06:12.500 They were able to attack Silicon Valley, give them bad press when they didn't do what they wanted them to do.

00:06:16.540 And they were essentially able to intimidate a lot of these companies into taking a very far left line on political issues.

00:06:23.780 It's also partly a geographical problem.

00:06:26.040 Silicon Valley is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, possibly the most liberal leftist area in the United States.

00:06:33.160 So a lot of the people they're hiring come from the same location.

00:06:37.540 They come from places like Berkeley and Stanford, which are these very left-wing campuses.

00:06:41.560 And that's another issue, I think, if these companies moved some of their operations to, say, the Midwest,

00:06:49.080 then some of the problems might be a little bit reduced.

00:06:51.740 You know, I remember when Mark Zuckerberg was on Capitol Hill, he said,

00:06:56.680 listen, San Francisco is a far left city.

00:06:58.800 And I think he was saying something that was fairly obvious.

00:07:01.860 Now, there are some people who have that original independent, even contrarian ethos.

00:07:07.920 I think of Peter Thiel.

00:07:09.520 He was an early investor in Facebook.

00:07:13.600 He was with PayPal and other. 0.91

00:07:16.880 He's a gay, libertarian, Trump supporter.

00:07:22.620 He says he doesn't even like hanging out in San Francisco anymore. 0.78

00:07:26.220 I think he said he's moving his operations, I think, to L.A. or something.

00:07:29.860 I don't remember where he moved.

00:07:30.420 Yeah, I think that's what I heard.

00:07:31.860 He has moved to L.A. now.

00:07:33.360 And Palmer Luckey is another one, the founder of Oculus Rift, a billion-dollar gaming company.

00:07:41.220 So, you know, conservatives in Silicon Valley really feel under siege.

00:07:46.480 They often don't even reveal the fact that they're conservative to their co-workers because they immediately face pressure.

00:07:52.560 They immediately face, you know, frivolous HR complaints and people, radicals, trying to get them fired.

00:07:58.080 So, if you're a conservative in Silicon Valley, your job is under perpetual threat from these people.

00:08:05.040 Part of the reason why the James Damore case is so important, he was fired from Google.

00:08:09.180 He was one of the senior engineers fired from Google because he expressed a pretty mainstream, moderate position on gender differences.

00:08:15.160 He essentially said that the ratio of male to female workers in Silicon Valley probably wasn't due to discrimination.

00:08:23.300 It might simply be because, you know, men and women have different preferences, and part of that's why a lot of due determined.

00:08:29.020 That's a pretty moderate position.

00:08:30.720 It's the kind of thing, you know, David Brooks would agree with in the New York Times, and he did actually agree with it a few days after Damore was fired.

00:08:37.980 It's a very moderate mainstream position.

00:08:40.500 It's not even a conservative position.

00:08:42.060 You could say it's a moderate liberal position.

00:08:43.360 But if you divert from far-left ideology even slightly, like Damore did, then your job is at risk in Silicon Valley.

00:08:51.820 So, I'm totally not surprised that conservatives are just simply choosing to leave.

00:08:56.320 I actually met James Damore, and I think he's such a sort of science nerd.

00:09:03.560 I mean, he's even a tiny bit awkward, I think.

00:09:07.820 I'm not disparaging.

00:09:08.580 I'm just saying he's exactly who you think would be programming in the bowels of these companies.

00:09:14.640 And I read his carefully argued item, and you can disagree with it, but he was trying, he was a problem solver.

00:09:22.800 Like, he's a problem solver, there's a problem, and he was laying out, well, here's how we can, he didn't just say there is a gender difference.

00:09:30.260 He's saying, well, here's how we can ameliorate it in ways other than reducing our standards.

00:09:35.460 And it was exactly the kind of discussion, problem-solving thing you'd think these companies would like, but they, like, took the torches and had a witch burning.

00:09:47.960 The reaction to him was stunning.

00:09:51.560 Describe what happened to this one fairly mild-mannered young guy who thought he would speak out against political discrimination based on gender, or, sorry, gender discrimination.

00:10:06.860 Tell me a bit about the mob that came for him.

00:10:09.600 So, yeah, his manifesto essentially had two key points, one of which was the fact that Google, the company where he worked, had become a fairly intolerant place towards people of differing political opinions.

00:10:22.720 That was the main thrust of his argument, that you're not free to express yourself at Google, you can't disagree with certain progressive policies, and if you do disagree, then your job is at risk.

00:10:34.000 And I think what happened after he published that memo kind of pretty much proved him right.

00:10:38.520 The second point he made was that gender differences, that the gender split in Silicon Valley, which is fairly dominated by white and Asian males, wasn't necessarily due to discrimination.

00:10:53.180 And this is what progressives have been arguing.

00:10:55.420 The progressives inside Silicon Valley have said, well, the reason there are so many men and so few women in tech companies isn't because, you know, men like tech more than women do.

00:11:06.000 It's because there's a culture of sexism and discrimination, which is a kind of bizarre argument to make, because, you know, Silicon Valley companies, you bend over backwards to be diverse and welcoming, and give incentives for minorities and women to join the companies.

00:11:22.200 You know, it's the most welcoming place you could imagine.

00:11:24.640 But this is the argument the left makes, and James Damore disagreed with it.

00:11:28.580 He said, well, no, the fact that there's a split could simply be because, you know, men and women have different preferences.

00:11:34.740 And what happened after that?

00:11:36.540 And the other important point to make was that this was a private memo that he circulated inside Google.

00:11:41.300 He did not publish it himself.

00:11:43.380 It was published maliciously by left-wing activists inside Google who wanted to publicly shame Damore and create public question on Google to fire him.

00:11:52.100 So that's what happened.

00:11:53.180 It was initially a private document.

00:11:56.800 And immediately there was this huge uproar inside Google.

00:12:00.720 All the left-wing employees said that Damore has to be blacklisted, not just from Google, but from the entire industry.

00:12:07.580 And you had Google saying openly in communication channels in Google that they were making lists of everyone inside Google who supported James Damore and supported his views.

00:12:20.480 And they were going to essentially have these lists and circulate them around and make sure that these guys were never employing Google or inside Silicon Valley ever again.

00:12:28.960 So, in a sense, it wasn't just the witch hunt of James Damore, it was the witch hunt of anyone who agreed with him.

00:12:34.460 And if you express agreement with his very moderate, you know, mainline, or centrist positions, James Damore was not a conservative, he was a centrist.

00:12:44.340 If you express agreement with them, you can expect to be put on one of these blacklists if you work in Silicon Valley.

00:12:48.780 You know, the fact that he sued them is very interesting because that's how we've gotten to learn some of these internal matters about Google.

00:12:58.120 Reading about it, it looked like there was an internal mob that the Google senior executives either stoked or, at the very least, allowed and most certainly didn't feel the need to suppress.

00:13:11.540 I mean, it was like a fire was raging within the building to cleanse any James Damore sympathizers.

00:13:20.900 That's how it looked.

00:13:21.980 But so many strange details have come out because of this lawsuit of the internal groupthink that's being enforced there.

00:13:30.600 I think this lawsuit could be much more important than just his own case.

00:13:34.980 I think it could show systemic discrimination against, not just against men, but against conservatives or skeptics of their affirmative action.

00:13:46.780 Do you think this lawsuit will go to term?

00:13:50.760 Do you think there will be actual hearings and actual witnesses testifying about the kind of censorship of conservatives and libertarians in Silicon Valley?

00:14:00.420 Oh, yeah, I know that for a fact.

00:14:02.740 There are quite a few people inside Google who have come forward to me anonymously and to Harvey Hillen, James Damore's lawyer, and told them that the extent of the radicalism inside Google and the extent to which conservatives and people, not just conservatives, people who dissent from the groupthink, are, you know, made to feel afraid, made to feel that their jobs are in danger, often get purposely reported to HR on minor complaints.

00:14:26.680 There was one guy I recently had reported for sharing a national review article on internal channels.

00:14:33.660 You know, national review is like an extremely establishment, moderate conservative magazine.

00:14:38.440 But even that, if you reported to HR at Google, I mean, this is a company that sells Black Lives Matter hoodies on their campus.

00:14:46.840 You know, it's a company that also through this lawsuit we heard allowed one of their employees to give a presentation on living as a yellow-scale wingless dragonkin, identifying as a yellow-scale wingless dragonkin, which is a bizarre far-left Tumblr identity politics.

00:15:07.080 It's one of the most left-wing radical companies in the world, and there have been threats of violence against Trump supporters.

00:15:17.580 You have this one guy who was openly supporting Antifa, Antifa, a far-left, politically violent organization in the U.S.

00:15:25.000 It's classified as a domestic terrorist organization by multiple U.S. security agencies.

00:15:29.680 And you have this guy who was openly supportive of Antifa inside Google, and he takes no consequences. 0.95

00:15:36.720 You know, he was allowed to go on Twitter, go on public channels, and say, yes, you should punch Nazis. 0.99

00:15:42.980 And also, anyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi, so you should punch them, too. 0.99

00:15:46.240 And this is the kind of thing that was, you know, tolerated and even encouraged at Google. 0.99

00:15:50.020 And I think we're going to see a lot more of it through this lawsuit.

00:15:52.680 I think it's one of the most important lawsuits of our time.

00:15:55.400 I think you're right, and I hope it goes the distance.

00:15:59.200 Here's what scares me about that.

00:16:00.580 I mean, Starbucks is such a social justice warrior-type company, and it's madness.

00:16:07.960 I think the senior executives are crazier than the workers there turning their bathrooms into basically homeless shelters.

00:16:15.660 But at the end of the day, Starbucks can't hurt me.

00:16:18.340 I mean, it's a cup of coffee.

00:16:20.380 There's really no politics to the actual drink itself.

00:16:23.720 If I don't like it, I'll go to some mom-and-pop coffee shop.

00:16:27.540 They can be insane in their own corporate culture, and it doesn't change the way the coffee tastes.

00:16:34.380 Google, if they're reporting someone to human resources because they shared a National Review article,

00:16:42.140 I've got to think, Alan, well, are they tweaking the search criteria for National Review?

00:16:50.180 Like, if it's corporate policy that Antifa is good, a violent alt-left street gang,

00:16:57.080 and that National Review is bad, extremely moderate conservatives, so moderate they're actually anti-Trumpers, many of them.

00:17:03.620 Well, it's not a cup of coffee they're making.

00:17:07.420 They're making how billions of us perceive the world.

00:17:11.680 They can make your website disappear, or they can promote a website.

00:17:15.560 And we won't even know about it because their algorithm is secret.

00:17:20.480 That's what terrifies me, Alan, is that they can make someone disappear, make them a non-person,

00:17:25.820 and we don't even know that the reality has been changed by one of these yellow-scale dragons.

00:17:36.980 I mean, it's terrifying when you look deeper into the research as well

00:17:41.720 because most people don't go to page two of Google search results.

00:17:46.900 They don't even scroll down the page.

00:17:48.500 The vast majority of clicks on Google searches are the top two, the top three results.

00:17:53.980 So if Google decides they're going to, like, put you at the bottom of the results on the first page

00:17:58.440 or on the second page, they've essentially disappeared you

00:18:01.220 because, you know, no matter how popular you were previously, you won't be popular anymore

00:18:04.900 because people just won't find you.

00:18:07.260 So they have an extraordinary amount of power over what becomes popular on the Internet,

00:18:13.440 what websites are popular, what news sources are popular, and even what politicians are popular.

00:18:17.760 The best research from this at the moment is a guy called Dr. Robert Epstein.

00:18:22.480 He's a former editor of Psychology Today.

00:18:25.120 And he's looked at how Google can affect elections by tweaking their search results,

00:18:29.780 and they can have insane amounts of impact on undecided voters.

00:18:36.040 The figures are, I can't remember the precise figures, but it's up to, like, 40%, 50% of undecided voters

00:18:42.220 will change their opinion if search results are manipulated in a certain way.

00:18:47.880 And, like I said, Google can do this entirely undetected because everyone's search result is different.

00:18:54.380 So it's very difficult to monitor search results for bias.

00:18:57.680 So they could be manipulating elections when we don't even know about it.

00:19:02.380 Yeah. Well, I mean, in some cases we know about it, but we only know a fraction of what happened.

00:19:08.480 For example, I mentioned Brexit and then Donald Trump.

00:19:12.100 Well, the next big election was in France, and you had Marine Le Pen of the National Front.

00:19:19.360 You can take her or leave her, but she was sort of the next outsider, anti-EU, anti-immigration candidate.

00:19:26.380 And I recall Facebook suddenly announcing that they deleted 30,000 Facebook pages

00:19:34.480 that were supportive of Marine Le Pen, calling them fake.

00:19:37.540 Well, maybe they were fake.

00:19:39.840 Or maybe someone in Facebook just said, we don't want to have the three-peat Brexit, Trump, and Le Pen.

00:19:47.380 And we have no idea.

00:19:48.580 Yeah. And I recall that Microsoft, Twitter, YouTube, Google, and I think I'm missing one more, Facebook,

00:19:59.760 struck a contract with the European Union to enforce their hate speech laws for parts of Europe, including Germany.

00:20:07.560 Private deal.

00:20:08.920 That they're literally enforced.

00:20:10.360 And how do we know what's going on?

00:20:12.620 How do we know that there weren't instructions in the EU put down these anti-EU parties, like in Hungary or Poland or Austria?

00:20:21.100 I'm far more terrified of the people that lynched James Damore than I am a dozen years ago

00:20:27.780 when I was prosecuted by the Human Rights Commissions in Alberta.

00:20:30.460 Far more terrified.

00:20:32.760 Well, the real age, like you said, is if governments start working with these social media companies

00:20:36.980 to censor people they don't like, then it becomes like a real force of, you know, authoritarianism.

00:20:40.620 I mean, this is, when you've got, like, the power of government combining with the power of their social media companies,

00:20:46.200 that's beyond anything, say.

00:20:48.160 Imagine the most totalitarian government of the 20th century, the USSR. 0.72

00:20:52.040 They didn't have this kind of power.

00:20:53.140 They didn't have this kind of technology.

00:20:55.820 And I think European governments are absolutely putting pressure on Facebook to censor people they don't like.

00:21:01.800 Not only enforce their hate speech laws, but also go beyond that and censor what they call fake news.

00:21:06.980 It's a very arbitrary concept that's very flexible and can be changed to cover anything they don't like.

00:21:15.680 I think when it comes to countries like Europe and Canada, the first thing that has to change is the hate speech laws.

00:21:20.820 I mean, it's no good getting Facebook to stop banning users for hate speech if you're going to be put in jail for it anyway.

00:21:28.560 So there's a political battle to be fought there first.

00:21:33.400 But certainly the alliance that's grown between governments and social media companies is quite terrifying to watch.

00:21:41.400 Let me ask you a question.

00:21:43.140 About a century ago, in the United States, there was an independent president, you know, the leader of the Bull Moose Party.

00:21:51.140 His name was Teddy Roosevelt.

00:21:52.380 He was a swashbuckler.

00:21:53.600 He was a disruptor.

00:21:56.640 And he also busted up the trusts.

00:21:59.680 You know, all the big oil and steel and banking, you know, monopolists.

00:22:06.040 He busted them up.

00:22:08.720 You could say it was a violation of capitalism.

00:22:11.960 I mean, if J.D. Rockefeller was the colossus and if he got it legally, who was the government to bust it up?

00:22:21.520 I put it to you that Facebook with two billion users or whatever it is, is more powerful politically than J.D. Rockefeller was at his apex.

00:22:31.180 And I'm terrified of Bezos, who not only controls Amazon, but who, by the way, has a massive CIA contract.

00:22:38.420 And I'm not engaging in conspiracy theories.

00:22:40.380 I'm just saying he's a very powerful man who also happens at the Washington Post.

00:22:44.700 And I wonder, you know, a libertarian free market purist would say, no, don't touch these companies.

00:22:52.040 That's meddling.

00:22:53.680 An alternative will come along, whether it's Friendster or MySpace.

00:22:58.740 There will be a competitor.

00:23:00.700 And just give it time.

00:23:02.080 If Twitter's misbehaving and Facebook's misbehaving and Google's misbehaving, they will lose customers to an upstart.

00:23:07.780 Yeah, maybe, maybe.

00:23:11.100 But when you've got two billion people and you're the starting and stopping point, you're really an alternative Internet.

00:23:18.200 And you're controlling the perception of reality.

00:23:22.260 You can make political parties disappear, literally like Tommy.

00:23:27.200 You can make them disappear.

00:23:27.960 You can make 30,000 pages disappear.

00:23:29.580 I wonder if we need our bull moose of our era, Donald Trump, to do something politically and legally.

00:23:39.240 But what can he do that doesn't just accrete unto himself and the U.S. government power?

00:23:46.320 Because we can't just think about Donald Trump.

00:23:48.180 What if it were Obama in office?

00:23:50.420 We wouldn't want to give Obama enormous power, so we have to be principled about it.

00:23:55.740 But what's the solution here?

00:23:57.480 Is there some way to bust up these new censors that doesn't empower the state even more?

00:24:03.860 Well, that's the real question.

00:24:05.580 I think the answer is unquestionably yes, but the answer is how.

00:24:09.200 The question is how.

00:24:11.720 Interestingly, the big social media companies like Twitter and Facebook and Google are doing exactly what net neutrality activists warned the ISPs would do.

00:24:19.840 They're discriminating on the basis of content.

00:24:21.680 They're privileging certain news organizations over others.

00:24:24.360 So everything that the net neutrality activists warned the Internet service providers would do, Facebook and Google and the social media companies are doing right now.

00:24:34.220 So I'm interested that we haven't heard more from them.

00:24:38.680 But I absolutely agree with your point that standard oil and the monopolies that were busted up in the 20th century are nothing compared to Facebook or Google because they didn't have the same amount of power over communications.

00:24:54.360 I mean, thinking back to that same time, you know, when there were revolutionaries in the 20s and 30s, one of the first things that, you know, a group living to seize power would do was seize the radio station or the television station because power over the means of communications is everything.

00:25:11.540 And now you've got all that power being concentrated into the hands of a few far left radical companies in Silicon Valley.

00:25:19.960 So absolutely deregulated.

00:25:22.880 And the idea of competitors one day coming in displaced and kind of misses the point because say if a competitor did displace Google or Facebook and they became the new Google or Facebook, come election time, that company would be just as much of a threat and just as much of a problem.

00:25:37.840 And that company would also need to be regulated to ensure it doesn't, you know, just swing an election or, you know, suppress a new source, you know, a few months before an election.

00:25:46.740 So, you know, even if competitors come along, you know, it's still a problem that they have all this power over information.

00:25:55.460 In terms of what can be done, that's the real question here because the problem that we have with social media companies is that on the one hand, they're being pressured by governments to crack down on content.

00:26:08.160 But on the other hand, they're being pressured by their own advertisers.

00:26:11.620 So if you pass a law saying that, you know, political speech is protected on Facebook, political speech is protected on Google and Twitter, this would sort of help the social media companies because they could then turn to the advertisers and say, well, you know, there's no point boycotting us because the government's making us do it.

00:26:28.320 So they should support it as well, frankly.

00:26:30.420 But I think the only way you get there is by it's through a massive grassroots movement because politicians, whether it's, you know, politicians of the left or establishment politicians from the conservative side, they're very much in favor of social media companies acting as their own as their own censors because then they can put pressure on them as well to defend their own political opponents, whether it's, you know, Tommy Robinson or Rebel Media or Breitbart or whoever.

00:26:57.140 So it's really got to be the grassroots that puts pressure on politicians and gets rid of politicians who don't support Breitbart on the Internet.

00:27:06.020 That's really the only way I think this could change.

00:27:08.700 Very interesting.

00:27:09.780 Well, I have to say I'm pessimistic because I see everything going towards more censorship.

00:27:16.060 I've said it before.

00:27:17.120 If Donald Trump doesn't bust the Silicon Valley monopolies, they will bust him.

00:27:23.380 I really think it is that they will not allow a repeat of 2016.

00:27:31.500 I think the Silicon Valley, through some of the reasons you've described and also, I think they've been deliberately colonized.

00:27:37.960 I think that there's a deliberate political strategy by the hard left to colonize these groups, these media.

00:27:45.660 I'm very pessimistic, but I'm always grateful for your reports because you're one of the few people shining a light of scrutiny on it.

00:27:54.060 And I hope we can continue to talk with you as this battle continues, Alan.

00:28:00.640 Thank you very much.

00:28:01.420 It's great to be on.

00:28:02.220 Well, thank you for spending so much time with us.

00:28:04.640 That's our friend Alan Bokari.

00:28:05.900 He's the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, and he covers this important beat that so many others ignore or are, frankly, complicit with.

00:28:16.200 Stay with us.

00:28:17.060 My final thoughts are next.

00:28:18.100 Well, what do you think of Alan Bokari?

00:28:36.000 I like his style.

00:28:37.600 Really smart.

00:28:38.800 And more than that, I think his beat is extremely important.

00:28:43.380 He's not a lovey-dovey tech reporter.

00:28:45.180 So many tech reporters, I think, want to suck up to Facebook or YouTube or whatever, writing PR for them, hopefully, to be hired by them to get some of that big Silicon Valley cash.

00:28:57.160 Not Alan Bokari.

00:28:58.220 I think he's really the only critical reporter who looks at the politics of Silicon Valley.

00:29:03.160 He works for Breitbart.com, so he's actually doing it out of self-interest as well as public intellectual reasons.

00:29:09.720 Breitbart.com is targeted just like we are here at The Rebel.

00:29:12.980 I hope you agree.

00:29:13.860 Boy, I hope we are allowed to continue to talk to him, both us at The Rebel and them at Breitbart.

00:29:20.080 Of course, if the left had their way, we would both be silenced.

00:29:23.960 Hey, by the way, I pre-taped this interview because I'm actually overseas with other rebels going on a fact-finding trip to Israel.

00:29:30.560 Here's a quick clip from there.

00:29:32.140 Ezra Levant here with TheRebel.media.

00:29:33.840 I am in Israel for almost 10 days with half a dozen of our on-air rebels and more than 50 of our most enthusiastic viewers from around the world.

00:29:43.560 We have folks here from as far away as Australia and the United Kingdom who are on this fact-finding adventure with us through Israel.

00:29:50.760 We were only a few days into it, but I think I know already what the highlight of the trip is going to be.

00:29:56.300 It's when we attended the graduation of the latest class of pilots for the Israel Air Force.

00:30:04.260 Some would say it's the best air force in the world, perhaps second only to the United States.

00:30:08.640 What was amazing was the air show obviously was spectacular.

00:30:13.040 There was a dogfight between two F-15s. Amazing.

00:30:16.800 The F-35 is in service in Israel, the most advanced aircraft in the world.

00:30:24.480 That was neat. That was exciting.

00:30:26.720 And watching the military procession and parade was cool.

00:30:30.640 But it was interesting to me that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came and the President of Israel, which is a more ceremonial position, came.

00:30:40.500 And the Head, the Defense Minister Abigdor Lieberman came and the Head of the Air Force.

00:30:44.380 So the absolute top political brass of the country came and they all gave speeches.

00:30:50.220 But then they stayed for the whole ceremony as each pilot's name was read out and in many cases a little personal anecdote was told about them.

00:31:01.160 And the Prime Minister and the President, who were very busy people, spent all of this time there.

00:31:06.560 And I realized at that point we were the only tourists in the group.

00:31:10.400 Everyone else was a family member or a personal friend of a pilot who had graduated from this most elite part of the Israel Defense Forces.

00:31:20.700 And then it struck me how amazing it was that we were able to come to such a personal event.

00:31:25.500 And yes, the demonstration of the hardware was amazing.

00:31:28.860 It was sort of neat because as there was marches, they showed on the big screen, I don't know if it was from a satellite or from a drone,

00:31:36.460 images from space of the same thing in real time.

00:31:39.920 It was tremendous.

00:31:41.180 But what struck me, besides the sheer thunder of it and the investment in it,

00:31:48.540 was the moral investment that Israel makes in its armed forces.

00:31:54.280 And that was a point that Netanyahu made, is that these are the absolute best people in the country.

00:31:59.100 And the country proves it with their paying for the best equipment, but also giving them all the moral support.

00:32:05.560 These are the people at the highest heights, the top of the social pyramid.

00:32:10.280 And I say that in contrast to Canada.

00:32:13.060 In Canada, where our prime minister would not go to such an event, of course.

00:32:17.940 And if he did, what would we be doing?

00:32:19.900 Flying some old F-18s, the ones that weren't in maintenance of that day.

00:32:24.460 And would he tell these people they're the absolute best in the country?

00:32:27.980 And would he stay after his own self-loving speech and listen to the stories of every other pilot there and meet their families?

00:32:35.860 He would not.

00:32:36.700 What was amazing to me is the fusion of nationalism, patriotism, military, and the fact that they're counting on these young people.

00:32:47.460 They're young.

00:32:48.280 As Sheila Gunn-Reed has pointed out in other videos, these are millennials.

00:32:51.060 Millennials who in the West are, you know, dyeing their hair pink and talking about, you know, use my proper gender pronoun.

00:32:58.940 Instead of that shenanigans in the West, in Israel, 18, 19, 20-year-olds are defending the country against real hot terror threats.

00:33:08.420 In a way, it's a wonderful luxury that in Canada we live in a country where the consequences and the drama of life is so remote

00:33:16.660 that we can afford to have a shallow, narcissistic, failure to launch man-child as our prime minister and not face the brutal consequences.

00:33:28.100 And I couldn't help but think, what if Israel, God forbid, in some parallel universe, were to have Justin Trudeau as its prime minister,

00:33:36.140 a man who loathes the military and lets it show, who doesn't give them the best equipment in the world,

00:33:41.520 but rather demands they give, I don't know, their sleeping bags back, as Trudeau did,

00:33:46.060 who says veterans are asking for more than he can give, but gives $10.5 million in his settlement to Omar Khadr.

00:33:52.260 Imagine the demoralization if Israel had such a failed prime minister.

00:33:57.440 It's unthinkable. All of Israel's prime ministers on the left and the right have done military service.

00:34:03.440 It was just such a reminder of the stakes at play in Israel and how seriously they take their own security

00:34:09.180 and a reminder of the lack of seriousness on these matters in our own country 0.91

00:34:13.840 and what a buffoon that we have as a leader by contrast. 0.97

00:34:17.160 But I suppose, I suppose we're lucky to be able to afford a buffoon as a leader, don't you think? 0.98

00:34:22.360 I'm here all week in Israel. If you want to see all our videos, go to rebelisrael.com.

00:34:28.160 That's our show for today. On behalf of all of us at The Rebel, good night and keep fighting for freedom.

00:34:33.120 www.youtube.com.

00:34:39.560 www.youtube.com.

00:34:44.840 www.youtube.com.

00:34:47.420 www.youtube.com.

00:34:49.320 www.youtube.com.

00:34:51.540 www.youtube.com.

00:34:53.400 www.youtube.com.

00:34:53.520 www.youtube.com.

00:34:53.560 www.youtube.com.

00:34:55.280 www.youtube.com.

00:34:56.520 www.youtube.com.

00:34:57.480 www.youtube.com.

00:34:59.760 www.youtube.com.

00:35:01.300 www.youtube.com.

Rebel News Podcast - July 04, 2018

SPECIAL： How Silicon Valley became a bigger censor than the State (Guest： Allum Bokhari)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript