Rebel News Podcast - SPECIAL： Joel Pollak on the history (and future) of conservative media in an era of leftwing censorship

00:00:00.000 Tonight, the media party calls us fake news, but they're the ones telling the lies.

00:00:05.400 It's June 28th and you're watching The Ezra LeVance Show.

00:00:13.380 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:00:17.180 There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.

00:00:20.900 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

00:00:27.840 is because it's my bloody right to do so.

00:00:34.480 Welcome back.

00:00:35.300 Well, one of our favorite guests to talk about is my friend Joel Pollack.

00:00:38.460 He's a senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.

00:00:41.240 He focuses on foreign affairs, especially Israel.

00:00:44.220 He once did an interview with us from there.

00:00:47.180 He talks about California matters, being based as he is in L.A.

00:00:51.960 U.S. politics is his main beat.

00:00:54.500 He covered the Trump campaign very closely.

00:00:56.360 But today we're going to do something a little bit different.

00:00:58.640 We're going to talk to Joel about his media organization itself,

00:01:03.480 Breitbart.com, where he is a senior editor.

00:01:06.080 And not just Breitbart and what it's done in the American media atmosphere

00:01:12.680 and around the world, too.

00:01:14.360 Of course, they have a big office in London.

00:01:16.320 But what Breitbart.com and alternative media, including The Rebel,

00:01:21.040 what we stand for in the new era of fake news and Silicon Valley censorship

00:01:27.320 and how, in fact, governments are trying to restrict our conversation.

00:01:31.620 It's something new.

00:01:32.640 But I think Joel Pollack is the guy to help us.

00:01:35.340 And he joins us now via Skype.

00:01:36.860 Joel, great to see you again.

00:01:38.660 Good to be with you.

00:01:39.520 I covered about 10 things there all together.

00:01:41.880 And I don't know if it really hung together.

00:01:43.920 But my point is this.

00:01:45.480 Breitbart.com, I've been following it since, you know,

00:01:48.920 I never met Breitbart personally, but I interviewed him via satellite

00:01:52.260 at the Sun News Network.

00:01:53.700 And I thought, boy, there's a guy who fights.

00:01:56.280 Finally, a guy who doesn't try and split the difference with his haters.

00:01:59.580 Finally, a guy who doesn't accept the premises of the other side.

00:02:03.380 And then you guys were such an important force in the 2016 election.

00:02:07.420 Why don't you tell us from your American point of view,

00:02:10.100 what has the reaction been to Breitbart from your enemies?

00:02:17.100 Oh, well, they're still trying to put us out of business.

00:02:21.020 I think they have predicted that we'd be out of business for many years now.

00:02:25.580 In fact, in 2012, right after Andrew passed away,

00:02:29.460 there was a piece in BuzzFeed about the crumbling empire of Andrew Breitbart.

00:02:33.300 So we went on to expand dramatically in traffic and influence.

00:02:38.600 So they're really trying hard.

00:02:39.780 There are boycott movements.

00:02:41.440 There are efforts to keep us out of the White House or out of the Senate press gallery.

00:02:46.800 I mean, there's all kinds of things going on to try to delegitimize and destroy us.

00:02:50.620 They can't win an argument.

00:02:52.880 So they would rather we just shut up.

00:02:55.780 But we're very successful because there's a huge thirst,

00:02:59.800 a huge demand for the content we provide.

00:03:02.620 Fox News is very successful in the United States

00:03:04.720 because it's the only conservative cable news channel.

00:03:07.860 But that does not satisfy the demand by itself for news that is at least not liberal.

00:03:13.880 It doesn't even have to be necessarily conservative news.

00:03:16.320 But the other options are all so far left of center that there's a market that's more than half the country.

00:03:22.820 I wouldn't even say half the country.

00:03:23.960 It's more than that for something different.

00:03:26.380 And that's much bigger than I think people have realized.

00:03:29.700 So Fox News fills some of that demand, but we do as well.

00:03:33.980 Yeah.

00:03:36.780 Breitbart had some help.

00:03:38.720 I remember when Andrew Breitbart himself was alive and things were growing.

00:03:43.420 And I later visited Breitbart's offices in L.A.

00:03:47.640 And I was struck by how modest they were.

00:03:50.040 It felt very low cost.

00:03:51.960 A bunch of guys in a big boardroom on their laptops.

00:03:54.300 Like it's not fancy and it's not big.

00:03:57.580 I know a lot of people work from home.

00:04:01.200 That's sort of how you got to do it in the Internet age.

00:04:04.660 You got to keep your costs low if you're going to compete,

00:04:07.500 unless you have a huge corporate backer like in Canada, the CBC state broadcaster.

00:04:13.220 But otherwise, you've got to sort of be low budget and fast moving.

00:04:17.700 Am I right?

00:04:18.060 Well, that's what we show visitors, of course.

00:04:21.960 If you had hung around long enough and developed a trusting relationship,

00:04:25.640 we would have shown you our high-tech underground bunker with laser tripwires.

00:04:32.620 And no, I mean, look, media companies have to stay lean because there are so many of us.

00:04:39.240 And even though the conservative space is not that overpopulated,

00:04:44.220 still a lot of room there, I think.

00:04:46.200 There's a lot of other media companies we see ourselves as competing with.

00:04:50.560 We don't see our competitors as being other conservative news websites.

00:04:53.500 We're competing with the BuzzFeeds of the world, with The Atlantic,

00:04:58.840 even with mainstream newspapers like The Washington Post.

00:05:02.380 We are up there in terms of traffic.

00:05:04.120 We go back and forth beating them.

00:05:05.700 They beat us a month.

00:05:07.000 But we are in that kind of a space.

00:05:09.120 And if you're going to survive in that cutthroat competitive environment,

00:05:11.940 you can't waste money on the kinds of things that perhaps newspapers indulged in the past.

00:05:18.980 This is when newspapers were still a thing.

00:05:21.240 So, yeah, we try to keep costs down.

00:05:24.180 But we are definitely in a very nice part of L.A.

00:05:28.520 I mean, we're in—I won't say where we are exactly.

00:05:31.640 We do try to keep that under wraps.

00:05:33.120 But it's a beautiful part of L.A., and it's a very nice office, so nothing to complain about.

00:05:38.640 Well, I mean, you mentioned some newspapers there.

00:05:42.060 I know that The New York Times was bought by Carlos Slim, once the world's richest man, a Mexican tycoon.

00:05:51.700 The Washington Post, very influential newspaper, was bought by Jeff Bezos, who is the world's richest man.

00:05:59.100 He's the owner of Amazon.

00:06:00.400 It 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.

00:06:07.700 It seems to me that media is maybe returning to what it was a couple hundred years ago,

00:06:14.220 where they were factional instruments of wealthy tycoons who were trying to make this point or that point.

00:06:21.100 Like, I don't think that The Washington Post or The New York Times are independent.

00:06:25.460 I think that they follow the general direction of Bezos and Slim.

00:06:30.000 I'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.

00:06:40.040 And there's no economic reason to support The Washington Post, but there's a political reason.

00:06:45.760 It's like a daily lobby force.

00:06:48.520 That's my view.

00:06:49.180 Well, Andrew used to call himself a middle-class mogul.

00:06:55.340 So he wasn't some big financier trying to make his stamp on political debate.

00:07:00.500 He was a true believer in the conservative cause and in the idea of citizen journalism.

00:07:06.820 He really wanted to empower people to tell their own stories.

00:07:09.980 And so he was a middle-class mogul, as he put it.

00:07:12.340 He was very, very influential without money.

00:07:14.540 His influence was cultural.

00:07:16.440 His influence was intellectual and eventually political as well.

00:07:21.800 And that's how the company is built.

00:07:24.100 We're not the mouthpiece for anybody who comes along, whether advertisers or owners or whatever.

00:07:30.920 We are the mouthpiece of our movement.

00:07:33.480 We are, in a sense, the voice of our readers.

00:07:35.220 Our 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.

00:07:50.400 You talked about sometimes you beat some of these old established brands with all that corporate money behind them and all that history.

00:07:58.400 Tell me some of the stats about Breitbart, because obviously things wax and wane with the news.

00:08:02.820 I mean, everyone was super attentive to politics during the 2016 presidential election.

00:08:09.560 But 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.

00:08:19.940 Clashes of ideas, issue campaigns.

00:08:23.940 How has traffic since the election?

00:08:27.840 You know, traffic's been steady.

00:08:29.040 I 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.

00:08:36.480 It's all based on lies.

00:08:38.640 I mean, there was a Vanity Fair piece some time ago that was based on traffic numbers that were caused by a glitch at Amazon.

00:08:46.800 You know, you talk about Amazon and whose interest they represent.

00:08:49.900 And Amazon, it turns out, controls one of the big traffic monitoring sites.

00:08:55.020 And somebody at Amazon unplugged our counter.

00:08:58.360 So our numbers dipped and Vanity Fair reported as if it were an actual event.

00:09:04.120 As soon as they put the counter back on again, things went right back to where they'd been.

00:09:07.660 So a lot of it is fake news.

00:09:10.100 And we've actually sustained, I think, the interest and traffic in our website since the election, which is remarkable.

00:09:15.400 Most years, the traffic for news websites drops off after an election.

00:09:20.600 Your peak traffic is in the October before Election Day.

00:09:23.920 Election Day always happening, typically in November.

00:09:26.640 But that's not been the case.

00:09:29.040 I don't know the exact numbers.

00:09:30.560 I don't follow it that closely.

00:09:31.880 You know, I'm much more interested in following narratives, following stories.

00:09:34.620 I don't look at the numbers every day.

00:09:35.760 But I do think we've been pretty successful.

00:09:38.700 And it's funny to me how invested some journalists are in trying to prove otherwise.

00:09:44.440 By the way, not just left-wing mainstream media journalists.

00:09:47.860 Some of our competitors in the conservative world want to create the impression that we're not doing as well.

00:09:53.380 But I don't think that's true at all.

00:09:54.700 Yeah.

00:09:55.580 Well, have you guys faced the kind of throttling or kettling, I'll use a policing term, of your traffic from social media companies?

00:10:05.580 I mean, we were growing on YouTube by 8% per month, Joel.

00:10:11.440 It was staggering.

00:10:12.520 I mean, we are by far the largest YouTube channel in all of Canadian news.

00:10:16.920 I mean, we're just under a million.

00:10:19.540 That's larger than the CBC, Global, and CTV combined.

00:10:22.880 But it was like someone flipped the switch in January of 2017.

00:10:28.400 I mean, we were the only pro-Trump media in all of Canada.

00:10:32.140 That was part of our growth.

00:10:34.120 But then, boom, YouTube, Google decided to demonetize conservative commentary.

00:10:41.020 Guys like Paul Joseph Watson of the U.K., Mark Dice from San Diego.

00:10:46.280 Just 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.

00:10:55.380 And 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.

00:11:09.280 And 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?

00:11:19.480 Yes, in different ways, but I can tell you it happened to me personally.

00:11:27.240 I did a story about an illegal alien in California who was given a statewide office here.

00:11:33.760 And a lot of people had the story.

00:11:35.800 I think the original report came out in the Associated Press.

00:11:38.780 So different outlets were picking it up and adding to it or giving their own spin on it.

00:11:42.800 But our version of the story was the most successful, I think, largely because of the photograph we used.

00:11:47.400 We used a picture of the young woman in question holding a Mexican flag.

00:11:52.580 So holding up a Mexican flag, very proud of being from Mexico and now serving in state government in the United States.

00:11:59.340 So that got people interested in the story.

00:12:02.400 And for a while, we were the number one story on social media in North America.

00:12:06.960 That means people were sharing our article on Facebook and other platforms more than they were sharing any other article for that moment.

00:12:14.600 As soon as that happened, our traffic on the article got shut down.

00:12:20.280 And we tried to figure out what happened.

00:12:22.300 But 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.

00:12:31.440 And if you clicked on that, it redirected you to the Associated Press.

00:12:35.400 So essentially, the Associated Press was stealing our traffic.

00:12:40.000 And I asked Facebook about what happened.

00:12:42.120 They said, well, we don't control that.

00:12:43.540 That's the old fact-checking operation.

00:12:45.660 Remember, they used to flag fake news.

00:12:47.860 And the problem with doing it is that human beings would go, when they were told not to do something, they would do it.

00:12:54.040 So when Facebook was flagging articles as fake news, people were reading the articles more.

00:12:58.300 So they changed it.

00:12:59.380 They call it something more euphemistic now.

00:13:01.120 I think it's called related subjects or further reading or something like that.

00:13:04.600 And the same system works.

00:13:07.500 They have some fact-checkers at these different competing media companies.

00:13:11.940 And somebody at the Associated Press flagged our article and redirected our traffic to them.

00:13:17.700 And there's a huge conflict of interest in the system.

00:13:21.200 There's no reason it should have been flagged.

00:13:22.860 And Facebook actually apologized to me and said, no, there was nothing wrong with your article.

00:13:26.340 Fact-based, totally 100% true, at least as far as everybody knew at the time.

00:13:31.160 There was some information that came out later, but the Associated Press also didn't have that information.

00:13:35.060 So basically, this was a sabotage effort, I think.

00:13:42.220 The Associated Press said it was a mistake.

00:13:45.720 But I think that they knew what they were doing.

00:13:48.500 They saw that our article was doing very well.

00:13:50.060 And they put the brakes on it by using their privilege as a member of Facebook's fact-checking squad.

00:13:57.000 There are certain media organizations that they use.

00:13:59.340 So that's happened.

00:14:00.660 The other thing that Facebook does is they have a little italicized I above our articles.

00:14:06.060 And 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.

00:14:14.300 And then you click it, and it gives you more information about that news source.

00:14:18.100 Well, guess where they're getting their information from?

00:14:20.040 They're getting their information from Wikipedia.

00:14:22.580 Wikipedia is dominated by the left.

00:14:25.740 And Breitbart's Wikipedia entry is not just inaccurate, but really hostile.

00:14:31.020 So Facebook is basically telling its readers by using Wikipedia that we are not to be trusted.

00:14:37.640 Ironically, Wikipedia is probably the biggest source of fake news in the world.

00:14:41.520 In college classes, they don't let you cite Wikipedia.

00:14:43.800 We don't let our journalists cite Wikipedia unless it's for rhetorical purposes.

00:14:49.200 You know, like even Wikipedia says blah, blah, blah, you know, something silly like that.

00:14:52.800 But basically, that's the kind of shutdown or interference I've experienced directly.

00:14:58.680 There are other kinds, and the social media companies know what they're doing.

00:15:03.300 In some cases, they are not acting out of political bias necessarily, but they are under the spotlight.

00:15:09.280 The left blames Facebook for handing the 2016 election to Donald Trump ostensibly because Facebook allowed Russians to advertise on their platform.

00:15:17.580 When you see the ads the Russians made, you'll laugh. 1.00

00:15:19.660 I mean, they're so bad.

00:15:20.600 Nobody would have been convinced of anything by these ads.

00:15:23.900 But anyway, there's this idea that Facebook is responsible for it.

00:15:27.660 So they're trying to show that they can be team players, and they're reconfiguring their algorithms.

00:15:33.000 They're changing the way they do things so that Breitbart and sites like Breitbart can no longer do as well.

00:15:39.060 And 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.

00:15:52.600 So I think there is an effort.

00:15:54.500 We 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.

00:16:03.740 Yeah.

00:16:04.020 Well, there's a lot of similar experiences we've had here.

00:16:06.640 I won't take a lot of your time on them, but there was one.

00:16:11.000 Our web editors went to post a story on Facebook, as they do 10 times a day, and a screen popped up and said,

00:16:18.340 You violated our Terms of Service. Would you like to delete your page now?

00:16:23.140 Like, you can delete your page. Yes or no?

00:16:26.060 They didn't say what we did that violated the Terms of Service.

00:16:29.320 They didn't say which term we violated.

00:16:32.060 They just said, Well, you know what you did.

00:16:34.800 And the only option they had was not appeal or learn more.

00:16:38.460 The only option was delete your page. Yes or no?

00:16:42.820 Right.

00:16:43.180 Now, can you imagine that? So I managed to get a hold of some executive in Facebook Canada.

00:16:49.480 I sent her that. And she said, Oh, it was a glitch.

00:16:52.680 And I said, Well, I'm, you know, what kind of glitch?

00:16:55.560 Oh, a technical glitch. And I went back and forth with her about five times.

00:16:58.940 And I said, Well, you got to give me a little more than a technical glitch.

00:17:02.140 And she asked me to make a public statement acknowledging that it was just a mistake on the part of Facebook.

00:17:07.600 I said, Sure, but you just got to tell me what happened.

00:17:10.060 And just saying it's a glitch ain't it.

00:17:13.080 I tell you, it's tough to take these folks seriously, Joel, because all their mistakes seem to be in one direction.

00:17:19.780 That's just how it looks like to me.

00:17:21.820 Yeah, yeah. They're all in one direction.

00:17:24.340 It's rare that they hurt the left.

00:17:26.560 And partly that's because the employees of Facebook are very much on the left.

00:17:30.100 When 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.

00:17:38.180 So you try finding them through their own social media sites.

00:17:40.600 And when you look at these executives, they've got all sorts of left wing political stuff on their own personal sites.

00:17:46.700 So 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.

00:17:56.620 Whereas I think they're more inclined to regard bad things that happen to conservative media websites as ordinary and expected.

00:18:05.560 Yeah. Yeah. I'll just give you one more example.

00:18:08.800 And we sometimes buy micro sites like little websites.

00:18:12.740 We had one when our correspondent Katie Hopkins was threatened with a defamation suit by the mayor of Molenbeek, Belgium.

00:18:20.760 So we just put up a website called SaveHopkins.com.

00:18:23.880 And we have 500 of those websites, Joel.

00:18:26.840 And we had one in Florida for Sheriff Scott Israel, the Broward County coward.

00:18:33.120 So we have one called FireScottIsrael.com.

00:18:35.840 It's a petition.

00:18:37.280 And 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.

00:18:49.800 It'll either say so many people are doing this, we think it's spam.

00:18:54.460 Or that is a malicious website when, of course, it's not.

00:18:59.200 It'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.

00:19:05.120 Anyways, this is an interview of you, not me telling you my war stories, too.

00:19:09.220 Let me ask you something that I find equally terrifying, and that is governments pressuring these social media companies to crack down.

00:19:16.720 In Canada, there was a story in the Toronto Star.

00:19:19.000 Justin Trudeau threatened Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, saying,

00:19:23.300 fix your, quote, fake news problem in Canada before my re-election, or I will fix it for you.

00:19:29.860 That was in the Star.

00:19:30.940 This is shocking.

00:19:31.980 We see this in Europe, too, especially in Germany.

00:19:34.780 How much of the censorship is social justice warriors embedded in Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter?

00:19:40.440 And 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.

00:19:48.480 If 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.

00:19:58.240 It's hard to know, and I don't know that we could ever break that down.

00:20:01.320 I 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.

00:20:09.400 They just would have carried out what he wanted.

00:20:10.780 I'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.

00:20:19.560 It's probably only his own ineptitude that he would have to have made that threat explicit or even implicit.

00:20:24.480 He wouldn't have had to say anything at all.

00:20:25.680 I 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.

00:20:33.060 And it was kind of the hip thing to be and where you wanted to be on the political spectrum.

00:20:37.460 So the trick is not to do that heavy-handed stuff.

00:20:41.820 And 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,

00:20:51.120 it will come largely through the consent of the governed and not through the tyranny of the ruler.

00:20:58.660 So 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

00:21:10.840 or because they're coming from private companies, not from the government, or because they're attacking unpopular ideas, unpopular people.

00:21:17.720 So the real challenge is to articulate the case as to why this is bad.

00:21:22.920 And that's something I think conservatives have to do a much better job of carrying out.

00:21:26.640 Yeah.

00:21:27.300 I want to ask you about a phenomenon that we faced here at The Rebel.

00:21:30.580 I don't know if you faced it at Breitbart.

00:21:32.480 You have an interesting wrinkle in that your charismatic chairman figure, Steve Bannon,

00:21:38.200 was seconded halfway through Trump's campaign to come in and reboot the campaign.

00:21:45.120 And it worked.

00:21:46.200 And he was such an electric figure that he was doomed, I think, from my outsider's view,

00:21:55.560 because he was such a big personality and a big figure.

00:21:58.180 That doesn't necessarily do well as a staffer in an office supporting one man.

00:22:03.960 But 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.

00:22:30.380 Because that's what's happened in Canada.

00:22:32.880 Our federal conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, and in Alberta, IKEA conservative province, the conservative leader, Jason Kenney,

00:22:39.840 it'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.

00:22:53.420 So 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.

00:23:03.600 I'll just let The Mob go after The Rebel.

00:23:05.780 And if they ask me, I'll say, yeah, I don't like those guys either, or I'll be consumed by The Mob too.

00:23:09.940 Does that happen to you?

00:23:10.740 Not anymore.

00:23:13.540 It used to happen.

00:23:14.360 I think what people developed was a respect for Breitbart, especially after Trump won.

00:23:19.700 I think there's some blacklisting on a personal level.

00:23:22.680 You know, there are some journalists who don't like us, including conservatives.

00:23:26.040 There 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.

00:23:32.060 But for the most part, that doesn't happen.

00:23:34.860 And 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.

00:23:45.360 I 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.

00:23:53.760 You start to see the invitations come.

00:23:56.000 People may not like Breitbart and they may not like our readers, but there are a lot of them.

00:24:00.080 And they show they make a difference.

00:24:02.420 And so people have to treat us respectfully, even if they don't like us.

00:24:05.720 Well, that's a nice note to end on and a hopeful note, too.

00:24:08.520 It's true.

00:24:08.980 We are, by many measures, the largest, not just conservative medium in Canada, but even in social media, the largest on YouTube.

00:24:16.660 We're not the largest on Twitter, but we have millions of names of supporters.

00:24:21.920 And, you know, it's like you say, we are their voice.

00:24:25.440 And it's for them that we operate, even in some ways more than Breitbart.

00:24:29.560 I think we're crowdfunded and grassrootsy.

00:24:31.900 I really enjoy you taking time to come on our show so regularly throughout the year, Joel.

00:24:36.880 So it's nice to have a longer sit down with you like this.

00:24:39.680 I appreciate it.

00:24:40.420 And you guys keep up the fight down there.

00:24:42.340 In many ways, we see you as a role model up here.

00:24:45.180 All right.

00:24:45.660 Well, yeah, keep it up.

00:24:47.620 OK, we'll do.

00:24:48.760 Thanks so much.

00:24:50.200 Well, that's our friend, Joel Pollack.

00:24:51.500 He joins us so often to talk about the news of the day.

00:24:53.620 It was good to spend some time with him just talking about Breitbart and even the rebel and and some of the battles we both face.

00:24:59.360 There you have it.

00:25:00.200 Stay with us.

00:25:01.400 More ahead.

00:25:01.740 Well, that's my friend, Joel Pollack.

00:25:19.860 What a smart guy.

00:25:21.200 He covers so many different bases.

00:25:24.480 Donald Trump, American politics, immigration, covers Israel.

00:25:28.260 Well, he covers the law.

00:25:29.360 He's a very smart cook.

00:25:30.300 I'm so glad he spends time with us.

00:25:32.360 And with Breitbart.com, we see how the left tries to silence alternative voices on the right.

00:25:38.640 Hey, by the way, I recorded that interview with Joel a few days ago because I'm actually this is prerecorded to.

00:25:44.480 I'm actually in Israel with the rebel Israel, 60 or so of our most enthusiastic viewers, sightseeing, fact finding. 0.89

00:25:54.420 And in fact, here's a quick clip from our trip today.

00:26:04.300 I'm here in Shterot in Israel, and I'm right on the border of the Gazan Strip.

00:26:09.960 And this Children's Play Centre is unique because it's actually formed of a series of bomb shelters.

00:26:16.940 The 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.

00:26:24.540 And 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?

00:26:33.820 What's it like to be in a car and know that you can't?

00:26:37.200 And what's it like to live your life as the target of someone else's hate?

00:26:43.100 Well, that's it for today.

00:26:45.060 On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.

Rebel News Podcast - June 29, 2018

SPECIAL： Joel Pollak on the history (and future) of conservative media in an era of leftwing censorship

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