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I’m worried.
They’ve been trying to stop us at The Rebel for more than two years.
And I think they’ve finally figured out how to do it.
Mocking us didn’t work. Physically attacking our reporters in the streets didn’t work. Trying to whip up an ad boycott of us didn’t work.
We just kept growing — we have more than 850,000 YouTube subscribers now, more than the CBC, CTV and Global News combined.
But then on Tuesday, YouTube — which is owned by Google — announced new rules for “controversial” news channels like ours. From now on, they said, they will be:
“applying tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism. If we find that these videos don’t violate our policies but contain controversial religious or supremacist content, they will be placed in a limited state.”
So: even if we don’t do anything wrong, we can still have our videos censored if some left-wing activist complains.
That’s not idle speculation. On the very day YouTube announced its new policy, Professor Jordan Peterson — pretty much the only outspoken conservative professor left in Canada — had his channel suddenly shut down by YouTube.
No notice, no warning, no explanation. (They later put it back up — without ever explaining what he did wrong.)
It’s just a matter of time before they come for us at The Rebel, don’t you think?
It gets worse. The Liberal Party has a revolving door with Google executives who run YouTube. Leslie Church, the former head of public affairs for Google, now works as the chief of staff to Trudeau’s Heritage Minister. That’s the department implementing Trudeau’s M-103 Islamophobia ban.
Do you doubt Leslie Church is going to ask her old colleagues at YouTube to target The Rebel?
There are so many more connections. Google’s top lobbyist, Lindsay Doyle, used to work for the Liberal Party too. You can see this cozy relationship in action. In late 2015, Trudeau quietly asked Google to delete links to Stephen Harper’s historical records — and Google actually agreed.
If Google shut down Professor Peterson on the very first day of their new policy, and if they went after Stephen Harper himself, how long do you think it will be until they come for us?
A few months? Maybe a few days? I think it’s only a matter of time.
That will kill us, because we rely on YouTube.
In other words, we need an emergency plan to build a conservative alternative to YouTube.
So here’s how I’m going to do it. Click here to watch my video:
Here’s the plan: we’re going to build an “app” — that’s short for an application, or what used to be called software.
We’re going to build an app that we own — not owned by YouTube. An app that you can use to watch us on your smart phone — we’ll have both an Apple iPhone and an Android version. Plus a version for your laptop, or even on your TV set, through Roku or Apple TV.
We’ve been working on this app for months. We think it will be ready in September.
You can download it for free, and watch all our short videos for free. Just like always.
But The Rebel owns the app — not some other company that would have power over us.
And then we’ll build our own video player — a place where we store and then show thousands of our videos on demand.
And none of this will be controlled by Trudeau or his friends at YouTube.
But making high-tech apps is expensive — all the different parts of it will cost us $302,000. From the app itself, to the video player, to the bandwidth for the hundreds of millions of video views a year that we broadcast.
And we just don’t have the budget to do this on our own.
We’re not the CBC, that gets $1.5 billion a year from Trudeau.
By the way, $302,000 is what the CBC spends, of your tax dollars, in one hour and 45 minutes. I did the math.
We’ve set up a crowdfunding page here. We list the tools we need — it’s like a wedding gift registry. We’re going to raise the money from thousands of our viewers. Voluntarily — not the CBC way of grabbing it from your taxes.
And to make it fun, we have special perks for people who donate $100 or $250, and even higher amounts — including getting your name on a special brass plaque at our head office. (There’s also a donation level where I’ll come to your city and take you to lunch!)
Look, we have to ask. If we were the CBC, we would just take your money from your taxes.
Please help us — our enemies are hoping to shut us down, but with your help, that will never happen!
Yours gratefully,
Ezra Levant
Rebel Commander |
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