In this special episode of The Ezra Levant Show, host Ezra Levant talks about how tech companies have more control over our free speech than most governments do, and why it matters. He's joined by Alan Bokhari, a reporter for the conservative website Breitbart, to discuss the issue.
00:00:00.000Tonight, how tech companies have more control over our free speech than most governments do.
00:00:05.560It's July 3rd and you're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
00:00:13.720Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:00:17.540There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
00:00:21.260You come here once a year with a sign and you feel morally superior.
00:00:24.240The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
00:00:35.000I've been worried about YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google for a couple years now.
00:00:39.780When we started The Rebel, it felt like it was the golden age to be online.
00:00:44.800We grew very rapidly. We have almost a million subscribers on YouTube.
00:00:49.460And we were actually making money through ads on YouTube.
00:00:54.100And I thought for a moment that it was possible to survive that way.
00:00:58.620And conservatives in particular flourished online.
00:01:02.980But you see, that was a problem to the powers that be because it was the online grassroots activists who won the Brexit referendum.
00:01:12.300And 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.
00:01:24.560Well, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter was where it was at.
00:01:27.360And so, in early 2017, the social media companies almost collectively decided to shut that down.
00:01:36.300They immediately demonetized websites like ours.
00:01:40.460Our YouTube revenues that were on track for a million dollars in the year were cut by 85%.
00:01:49.120And 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.
00:01:59.060It'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,
00:02:07.500either to say something or, just as importantly, to hear something that the powers that be disagree with.
00:02:14.200I think it's actually the most important story of our age.
00:02:18.180And whereas a decade ago, when I was prosecuted before Alberta's Human Rights Commission,
00:02:22.340a government agency for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in the Western Standard magazine,
00:02:28.720censorship today does not have those processes, procedures and appeals.
00:02:32.440It 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.
00:02:40.900I think one of the most important journalists covering this beat right now works for Breitbart.com.
00:02:46.920His name is Alan Bokhari, and he's agreed to spend the entire show with us today.
00:02:51.940Alan joins us now via Skype from the UK.
00:02:54.240Nice to see you again, Alan, and welcome to a special program on The Rebel.
00:02:59.280How did you get into covering this unique beat?
00:03:02.840Well, you know, I'm one of those millennials, so I grew up on the Internet, essentially.
00:03:09.280I spent way too much of my teenage years online, and I saw increasingly, I think it was around 2012, 2013,
00:03:17.560I started to notice these initially calls from, you know, far-left radical blue-haired type activists from Tumblr
00:03:25.660saying that, you know, platforms like Reddit, Facebook, needed to kick offensive people off their platforms.
00:03:32.700You know, offensive content that it started off with, you know, there was a big panic about men's rights activists back in 2013,
00:03:38.280and then they started panicking about racists and neo-Nazis.
00:03:42.120And we've seen that, and I saw this push over the years for the platforms that, you know, I grew up with,
00:03:48.660which were previously open, free platforms to become more and more censored.
00:03:52.360Let's talk about the corporate culture of these places.
00:03:57.000I mean, so many of the tech innovators are men who are engineers, mathematicians.
00:04:06.740I mean, if you look at the inventors of the Google algorithm, a couple of Russian Jews with great math savvy,
00:04:13.240look at Steve Jobs, these are not people who are inherently political.
00:04:17.640And if they were political, they would tend towards the meritocracy, they would tend towards, you know, objective ideas,
00:04:24.100right, wrong, on, off, zeros and ones.
00:04:27.740I mean, mathematics and physics, there's not a lot of room for postmodern, you know,
00:04:32.240there's really no feminist answer to a math equation.
00:04:35.200How did tech companies go from being really the domain,
00:04:38.420I mean, I'm going to use some racial and gender language here,
00:04:43.580straight, white, male and Asian male mathematicians,
00:04:49.800to being the domain of feminists, transgender activists, anti-Islamophobia activists,
00:04:56.580how did it move so far away from its scientific meritocratic roots?
00:05:00.920So, yeah, as you said, Silicon Valley started off founded by these very sort of non-political, apolitical types,
00:08:30.720It'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.
00:08:37.980It's a very moderate mainstream position.
00:08:40.500It's not even a conservative position.
00:08:42.060You could say it's a moderate liberal position.
00:08:43.360But if you divert from far-left ideology even slightly, like Damore did, then your job is at risk in Silicon Valley.
00:08:51.820So, I'm totally not surprised that conservatives are just simply choosing to leave.
00:08:56.320I actually met James Damore, and I think he's such a sort of science nerd.
00:09:03.560I mean, he's even a tiny bit awkward, I think.
00:09:08.580I'm just saying he's exactly who you think would be programming in the bowels of these companies.
00:09:14.640And I read his carefully argued item, and you can disagree with it, but he was trying, he was a problem solver.
00:09:22.800Like, 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.
00:09:30.260He's saying, well, here's how we can ameliorate it in ways other than reducing our standards.
00:09:35.460And 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.
00:09:51.560Describe 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.
00:10:06.860Tell me a bit about the mob that came for him.
00:10:09.600So, 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.
00:10:22.720That 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.
00:10:34.000And I think what happened after he published that memo kind of pretty much proved him right.
00:10:38.520The 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.
00:10:53.180And this is what progressives have been arguing.
00:10:55.420The 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.
00:11:06.000It'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.
00:11:22.200You know, it's the most welcoming place you could imagine.
00:11:24.640But this is the argument the left makes, and James Damore disagreed with it.
00:11:28.580He said, well, no, the fact that there's a split could simply be because, you know, men and women have different preferences.
00:11:43.380It was published maliciously by left-wing activists inside Google who wanted to publicly shame Damore and create public question on Google to fire him.
00:11:56.800And immediately there was this huge uproar inside Google.
00:12:00.720All the left-wing employees said that Damore has to be blacklisted, not just from Google, but from the entire industry.
00:12:07.580And 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.
00:12:20.480And 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.
00:12:28.960So, in a sense, it wasn't just the witch hunt of James Damore, it was the witch hunt of anyone who agreed with him.
00:12:34.460And if you express agreement with his very moderate, you know, mainline, or centrist positions, James Damore was not a conservative, he was a centrist.
00:12:44.340If you express agreement with them, you can expect to be put on one of these blacklists if you work in Silicon Valley.
00:12:48.780You 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.
00:12:58.120Reading 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.
00:13:11.540I mean, it was like a fire was raging within the building to cleanse any James Damore sympathizers.
00:13:21.980But so many strange details have come out because of this lawsuit of the internal groupthink that's being enforced there.
00:13:30.600I think this lawsuit could be much more important than just his own case.
00:13:34.980I think it could show systemic discrimination against, not just against men, but against conservatives or skeptics of their affirmative action.
00:13:46.780Do you think this lawsuit will go to term?
00:13:50.760Do you think there will be actual hearings and actual witnesses testifying about the kind of censorship of conservatives and libertarians in Silicon Valley?
00:14:02.740There 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.
00:14:26.680There was one guy I recently had reported for sharing a national review article on internal channels.
00:14:33.660You know, national review is like an extremely establishment, moderate conservative magazine.
00:14:38.440But even that, if you reported to HR at Google, I mean, this is a company that sells Black Lives Matter hoodies on their campus.
00:14:46.840You 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.
00:15:07.080It's one of the most left-wing radical companies in the world, and there have been threats of violence against Trump supporters.
00:15:17.580You have this one guy who was openly supporting Antifa, Antifa, a far-left, politically violent organization in the U.S.
00:15:25.000It's classified as a domestic terrorist organization by multiple U.S. security agencies.
00:15:29.680And you have this guy who was openly supportive of Antifa inside Google, and he takes no consequences.
00:15:36.720You know, he was allowed to go on Twitter, go on public channels, and say, yes, you should punch Nazis.
00:15:42.980And also, anyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi, so you should punch them, too.
00:15:46.240And this is the kind of thing that was, you know, tolerated and even encouraged at Google.
00:15:50.020And I think we're going to see a lot more of it through this lawsuit.
00:15:52.680I think it's one of the most important lawsuits of our time.
00:15:55.400I think you're right, and I hope it goes the distance.
00:22:08.720You could say it was a violation of capitalism.
00:22:11.960I mean, if J.D. Rockefeller was the colossus and if he got it legally, who was the government to bust it up?
00:22:21.520I 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.
00:22:31.180And I'm terrified of Bezos, who not only controls Amazon, but who, by the way, has a massive CIA contract.
00:22:38.420And I'm not engaging in conspiracy theories.
00:22:40.380I'm just saying he's a very powerful man who also happens at the Washington Post.
00:22:44.700And I wonder, you know, a libertarian free market purist would say, no, don't touch these companies.
00:24:11.720Interestingly, the big social media companies like Twitter and Facebook and Google are doing exactly what net neutrality activists warned the ISPs would do.
00:24:19.840They're discriminating on the basis of content.
00:24:21.680They're privileging certain news organizations over others.
00:24:24.360So 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.
00:24:34.220So I'm interested that we haven't heard more from them.
00:24:38.680But 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.
00:24:54.360I 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.
00:25:11.540And now you've got all that power being concentrated into the hands of a few far left radical companies in Silicon Valley.
00:25:22.880And 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.
00:25:37.840And 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.
00:25:46.740So, you know, even if competitors come along, you know, it's still a problem that they have all this power over information.
00:25:55.460In 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.
00:26:08.160But on the other hand, they're being pressured by their own advertisers.
00:26:11.620So 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.
00:26:28.320So they should support it as well, frankly.
00:26:30.420But 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.
00:26:57.140So 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.
00:27:06.020That's really the only way I think this could change.
00:28:05.900He's the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, and he covers this important beat that so many others ignore or are, frankly, complicit with.
00:28:45.180So 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.
00:29:33.840I 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.
00:29:43.560We have folks here from as far away as Australia and the United Kingdom who are on this fact-finding adventure with us through Israel.
00:29:50.760We were only a few days into it, but I think I know already what the highlight of the trip is going to be.
00:29:56.300It's when we attended the graduation of the latest class of pilots for the Israel Air Force.
00:30:04.260Some would say it's the best air force in the world, perhaps second only to the United States.
00:30:08.640What was amazing was the air show obviously was spectacular.
00:30:13.040There was a dogfight between two F-15s. Amazing.
00:30:16.800The F-35 is in service in Israel, the most advanced aircraft in the world.
00:30:26.720And watching the military procession and parade was cool.
00:30:30.640But it was interesting to me that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came and the President of Israel, which is a more ceremonial position, came.
00:30:40.500And the Head, the Defense Minister Abigdor Lieberman came and the Head of the Air Force.
00:30:44.380So the absolute top political brass of the country came and they all gave speeches.
00:30:50.220But 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.
00:31:01.160And the Prime Minister and the President, who were very busy people, spent all of this time there.
00:31:06.560And I realized at that point we were the only tourists in the group.
00:31:10.400Everyone 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.
00:31:20.700And then it struck me how amazing it was that we were able to come to such a personal event.
00:31:25.500And yes, the demonstration of the hardware was amazing.
00:31:28.860It 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,
00:31:36.460images from space of the same thing in real time.
00:32:48.280As Sheila Gunn-Reed has pointed out in other videos, these are millennials.
00:32:51.060Millennials who in the West are, you know, dyeing their hair pink and talking about, you know, use my proper gender pronoun.
00:32:58.940Instead of that shenanigans in the West, in Israel, 18, 19, 20-year-olds are defending the country against real hot terror threats.
00:33:08.420In 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
00:33:16.660that we can afford to have a shallow, narcissistic, failure to launch man-child as our prime minister and not face the brutal consequences.
00:33:28.100And I couldn't help but think, what if Israel, God forbid, in some parallel universe, were to have Justin Trudeau as its prime minister,
00:33:36.140a man who loathes the military and lets it show, who doesn't give them the best equipment in the world,
00:33:41.520but rather demands they give, I don't know, their sleeping bags back, as Trudeau did,
00:33:46.060who says veterans are asking for more than he can give, but gives $10.5 million in his settlement to Omar Khadr.
00:33:52.260Imagine the demoralization if Israel had such a failed prime minister.
00:33:57.440It's unthinkable. All of Israel's prime ministers on the left and the right have done military service.
00:34:03.440It was just such a reminder of the stakes at play in Israel and how seriously they take their own security
00:34:09.180and a reminder of the lack of seriousness on these matters in our own country
00:34:13.840and what a buffoon that we have as a leader by contrast.
00:34:17.160But I suppose, I suppose we're lucky to be able to afford a buffoon as a leader, don't you think?
00:34:22.360I'm here all week in Israel. If you want to see all our videos, go to rebelisrael.com.
00:34:28.160That's our show for today. On behalf of all of us at The Rebel, good night and keep fighting for freedom.