Joel Pollack is a senior editor at Breitbart and a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Caller. He's also the host of the popular radio show The Rebel Radio show on SiriusXM.
00:06:00.400It seems to me that a lot of media—I mean, here in Canada, the Globe and Mail is owned by our wealthiest family, the Thompsons.
00:06:07.700It seems to me that media is maybe returning to what it was a couple hundred years ago,
00:06:14.220where they were factional instruments of wealthy tycoons who were trying to make this point or that point.
00:06:21.100Like, I don't think that The Washington Post or The New York Times are independent.
00:06:25.460I think that they follow the general direction of Bezos and Slim.
00:06:30.000I'm not saying those guys edit it, but they say generally we're for open borders, we're against Trump, we're for, you know, certain basic policies.
00:06:40.040And there's no economic reason to support The Washington Post, but there's a political reason.
00:07:24.100We're not the mouthpiece for anybody who comes along, whether advertisers or owners or whatever.
00:07:30.920We are the mouthpiece of our movement.
00:07:33.480We are, in a sense, the voice of our readers.
00:07:35.220Our readers determine much of what we do, and that gives us a kind of independence that perhaps some other publications don't have when they are given their marching orders by one billionaire or another.
00:07:50.400You talked about sometimes you beat some of these old established brands with all that corporate money behind them and all that history.
00:07:58.400Tell me some of the stats about Breitbart, because obviously things wax and wane with the news.
00:08:02.820I mean, everyone was super attentive to politics during the 2016 presidential election.
00:08:09.560But in a way, that sort of kept on going, because Trump's presidency has been a perpetual campaign and a perpetual crisis in the true meaning of that word.
00:08:29.040I mean, every six weeks or so, another story gets printed in Politico or somewhere else that Breitbart's doing terribly and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:10:34.120But then, boom, YouTube, Google decided to demonetize conservative commentary.
00:10:41.020Guys like Paul Joseph Watson of the U.K., Mark Dice from San Diego.
00:10:46.280Just anyone who had a YouTube account who was just killing it in traffic and even ad revenue, suddenly YouTube pushed a button and it fell by 85% for us.
00:10:55.380And now, if we have key words in our headlines like Trudeau, feminism, and ISIS are three words we've identified, YouTube will automatically not even serve up ads at all.
00:11:09.280And I'm talking a lot about us here, but I'm asking, has Breitbart being marginalized by Facebook, YouTube, Google, Amazon in a similar manner?
00:11:19.480Yes, in different ways, but I can tell you it happened to me personally.
00:11:27.240I did a story about an illegal alien in California who was given a statewide office here.
00:11:35.800I think the original report came out in the Associated Press.
00:11:38.780So different outlets were picking it up and adding to it or giving their own spin on it.
00:11:42.800But our version of the story was the most successful, I think, largely because of the photograph we used.
00:11:47.400We used a picture of the young woman in question holding a Mexican flag.
00:11:52.580So holding up a Mexican flag, very proud of being from Mexico and now serving in state government in the United States.
00:11:59.340So that got people interested in the story.
00:12:02.400And for a while, we were the number one story on social media in North America.
00:12:06.960That means people were sharing our article on Facebook and other platforms more than they were sharing any other article for that moment.
00:12:14.600As soon as that happened, our traffic on the article got shut down.
00:12:20.280And we tried to figure out what happened.
00:12:22.300But Facebook essentially had a pop-up window over the article that said, you may want to read more information about this subject from another source.
00:12:31.440And if you clicked on that, it redirected you to the Associated Press.
00:12:35.400So essentially, the Associated Press was stealing our traffic.
00:12:40.000And I asked Facebook about what happened.
00:12:42.120They said, well, we don't control that.
00:12:43.540That's the old fact-checking operation.
00:12:45.660Remember, they used to flag fake news.
00:12:47.860And the problem with doing it is that human beings would go, when they were told not to do something, they would do it.
00:12:54.040So when Facebook was flagging articles as fake news, people were reading the articles more.
00:14:00.660The other thing that Facebook does is they have a little italicized I above our articles.
00:14:06.060And if you hover your mouse above it or your cursor, whatever they call it, a little box comes up that says, click here for more information, something like that.
00:14:14.300And then you click it, and it gives you more information about that news source.
00:14:18.100Well, guess where they're getting their information from?
00:14:20.040They're getting their information from Wikipedia.
00:14:25.740And Breitbart's Wikipedia entry is not just inaccurate, but really hostile.
00:14:31.020So Facebook is basically telling its readers by using Wikipedia that we are not to be trusted.
00:14:37.640Ironically, Wikipedia is probably the biggest source of fake news in the world.
00:14:41.520In college classes, they don't let you cite Wikipedia.
00:14:43.800We don't let our journalists cite Wikipedia unless it's for rhetorical purposes.
00:14:49.200You know, like even Wikipedia says blah, blah, blah, you know, something silly like that.
00:14:52.800But basically, that's the kind of shutdown or interference I've experienced directly.
00:14:58.680There are other kinds, and the social media companies know what they're doing.
00:15:03.300In some cases, they are not acting out of political bias necessarily, but they are under the spotlight.
00:15:09.280The left blames Facebook for handing the 2016 election to Donald Trump ostensibly because Facebook allowed Russians to advertise on their platform.
00:15:17.580When you see the ads the Russians made, you'll laugh.
00:15:20.600Nobody would have been convinced of anything by these ads.
00:15:23.900But anyway, there's this idea that Facebook is responsible for it.
00:15:27.660So they're trying to show that they can be team players, and they're reconfiguring their algorithms.
00:15:33.000They're changing the way they do things so that Breitbart and sites like Breitbart can no longer do as well.
00:15:39.060And if you actually look at what's happened since Facebook has started changing its algorithm, many of the more political sites, especially on the right, have fallen off in traffic, whereas the mainstream media outlets have gone up in traffic, CNN and so forth.
00:15:54.500We don't fully understand it yet, but there's an effort to throttle the traffic or interfere with the social media sharing of conservative media outlets.
00:17:26.560And partly that's because the employees of Facebook are very much on the left.
00:17:30.100When we've had trouble with Facebook, I've tried to contact them or other social media companies, and they're very tough to track down.
00:17:38.180So you try finding them through their own social media sites.
00:17:40.600And when you look at these executives, they've got all sorts of left wing political stuff on their own personal sites.
00:17:46.700So I think they know when something bad is being done to the left and they're able to prevent it from happening or to clean it up as soon as it does happen, if it does.
00:17:56.620Whereas I think they're more inclined to regard bad things that happen to conservative media websites as ordinary and expected.
00:18:05.560Yeah. Yeah. I'll just give you one more example.
00:18:08.800And we sometimes buy micro sites like little websites.
00:18:12.740We had one when our correspondent Katie Hopkins was threatened with a defamation suit by the mayor of Molenbeek, Belgium.
00:18:20.760So we just put up a website called SaveHopkins.com.
00:18:23.880And we have 500 of those websites, Joel.
00:18:26.840And we had one in Florida for Sheriff Scott Israel, the Broward County coward.
00:18:33.120So we have one called FireScottIsrael.com.
00:18:37.280And if you type either of those websites into Twitter to this day, if you type in FireScottIsrael.com, Twitter will not let you type those words.
00:18:49.800It'll either say so many people are doing this, we think it's spam.
00:18:54.460Or that is a malicious website when, of course, it's not.
00:18:59.200It's based on a—so it's—I don't know how that's happened, but I'm just—I thought I'd give you two examples.
00:19:05.120Anyways, this is an interview of you, not me telling you my war stories, too.
00:19:09.220Let me ask you something that I find equally terrifying, and that is governments pressuring these social media companies to crack down.
00:19:16.720In Canada, there was a story in the Toronto Star.
00:19:19.000Justin Trudeau threatened Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, saying,
00:19:23.300fix your, quote, fake news problem in Canada before my re-election, or I will fix it for you.
00:19:31.980We see this in Europe, too, especially in Germany.
00:19:34.780How much of the censorship is social justice warriors embedded in Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter?
00:19:40.440And how much is government saying, you know what, if I passed a law, I'd have to do so through a legislature, transparency, people could see what I was doing.
00:19:48.480If I just have a private meeting with Facebook and either threaten them or offer them something in return, they can do my dirty work and no one will even know.
00:19:58.240It's hard to know, and I don't know that we could ever break that down.
00:20:01.320I mean, there were so many members of Google, for example, close to the Obama administration, that he wouldn't have had to really threaten them.
00:20:09.400They just would have carried out what he wanted.
00:20:10.780I'm sure it's the same in Canada, where there are high-level tech executives who are very much on the left and are big fans of Trudeau.
00:20:19.560It's probably only his own ineptitude that he would have to have made that threat explicit or even implicit.
00:20:24.480He wouldn't have had to say anything at all.
00:20:25.680I mean, if you wanted to be cool, if you were in a social media company, you sided with Obama or with Hillary Clinton, and everybody understood that.
00:20:33.060And it was kind of the hip thing to be and where you wanted to be on the political spectrum.
00:20:37.460So the trick is not to do that heavy-handed stuff.
00:20:41.820And the danger is, as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted almost 200 years ago, that when that form of despotism comes that is most dangerous and pervasive,
00:20:51.120it will come largely through the consent of the governed and not through the tyranny of the ruler.
00:20:58.660So that's something of what we see here, that people are indulging these anti-free speech campaigns because they are coming from people they like
00:21:10.840or because they're coming from private companies, not from the government, or because they're attacking unpopular ideas, unpopular people.
00:21:17.720So the real challenge is to articulate the case as to why this is bad.
00:21:22.920And that's something I think conservatives have to do a much better job of carrying out.
00:21:46.200And he was such an electric figure that he was doomed, I think, from my outsider's view,
00:21:55.560because he was such a big personality and a big figure.
00:21:58.180That doesn't necessarily do well as a staffer in an office supporting one man.
00:22:03.960But other than that, has Breitbart been marginalized by conservatives as, oh, they're not polite company, they're alt-right, we're conservative, but if Breitbart's there, we're not with you.
00:22:30.380Because that's what's happened in Canada.
00:22:32.880Our federal conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, and in Alberta, IKEA conservative province, the conservative leader, Jason Kenney,
00:22:39.840it's clear to me that they're so sensitive to left-wing criticism of The Rebel that if they dare consort with The Rebel, they will become targeted by The Mob too.
00:22:53.420So what I'm saying is the hatred for us is by the CBC and the mainstream media is so high, the conservative politicians say, yikes, I don't need to get in between that.
00:23:03.600I'll just let The Mob go after The Rebel.
00:23:05.780And if they ask me, I'll say, yeah, I don't like those guys either, or I'll be consumed by The Mob too.
00:23:14.360I think what people developed was a respect for Breitbart, especially after Trump won.
00:23:19.700I think there's some blacklisting on a personal level.
00:23:22.680You know, there are some journalists who don't like us, including conservatives.
00:23:26.040There are some politicians who don't like us, but that's mostly because we're quite critical of them or they don't like our audience.
00:23:32.060But for the most part, that doesn't happen.
00:23:34.860And I think it could turn around in Canada as well once you have some politicians who win by getting a message out through offering interviews to The Rebel or working with The Rebel.
00:23:45.360I mean, once people understand that your outlet is a gateway to people they need to reach, then you start to see the attitudes turn around.
00:23:53.760You start to see the invitations come.
00:23:56.000People may not like Breitbart and they may not like our readers, but there are a lot of them.
00:25:32.360And with Breitbart.com, we see how the left tries to silence alternative voices on the right.
00:25:38.640Hey, by the way, I recorded that interview with Joel a few days ago because I'm actually this is prerecorded to.
00:25:44.480I'm actually in Israel with the rebel Israel, 60 or so of our most enthusiastic viewers, sightseeing, fact finding.
00:25:54.420And in fact, here's a quick clip from our trip today.
00:26:04.300I'm here in Shterot in Israel, and I'm right on the border of the Gazan Strip.
00:26:09.960And this Children's Play Centre is unique because it's actually formed of a series of bomb shelters.
00:26:16.940The children have got 15 seconds to get down from whatever piece of kit or equipment they're playing on and get themselves into a place of safety.
00:26:24.540And I wonder, you know, what's it like to be a mum and know that you've got 15 seconds to grab everything you love the most, all your children, and make sure they're safe?
00:26:33.820What's it like to be in a car and know that you can't?
00:26:37.200And what's it like to live your life as the target of someone else's hate?