Pamela Geller, American Freedom Defense Initiative president and Geller Report proprietor, joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about PayPal’s attempt to ban her group.
“PayPal did indeed suspend my account after a hit piece by ProPublica, a George Soros-funded uber-left quote-unquote ‘think tank,’ as it were,” said Geller, venturing that not much thinking seemed to be going on at the think tank in question.
“This is in the aftermath of Charlottesville. The left is using Charlottesville to move in for the kill and crush anyone who dissents,” she said. “ProPublica did this piece, and the reporter, Lauren Kirchner, had written to me and asked me a series of questions. Clearly, one could see from the questions that it was a set-up.”
“She had asked me, ‘Have you been shut down by other tech companies for being a hate site?’ I mean, you have to love the assumption that I’m a hate site because I cover jihad terror-related news and sharia. That’s the focus of the website,” Geller said.
“What’s interesting is that so many people – I mean thousands of people on Twitter, on Facebook – really were outraged when I announced the ban. My tweet, for example, got thousands of retweets. Literally, that same day, PayPal reversed its decision,” she reported. “People need to know that they can make a difference; it’s not futile.”
Geller noted that her website has also been erased from Google search results, despite having accumulated thousands of posts during the past thirteen years, and her account has been banned from Google Accents.
“There is a systematic takedown of conservative websites. It’s very dangerous. Never in the history of mankind has so much power – well, I shouldn’t say mankind. I shouldn’t say history. There’s Alexander the Great, okay? – but in recent history, has so much power, immense power, been in the hands of so few,” she declared.
Kassam asked Geller if she thought the left would succeed in its attack on the First Amendment.
“They are being successful,” she replied. “They’re being very successful.”
Geller criticized senior Facebook executives for assuring the government of Pakistan that “Facebook will enforce sharia” by blocking “explicit, hateful, and provocative material that’s critical of Islam.”
“It’s extraordinary that the West is succumbing, submitting, to this really most extreme ideology,” she said. “Will it happen? It’s happening. It is happening. We see it in everything.”
Geller said that as an ardent capitalist, she has never supported anti-trust lawsuits, such as the Clinton administration’s action against Microsoft in the nineties, but she now believes that “we need legislative action on Facebook, on Google – the crushing of free speech.”
“That’s what my lawsuit is about,” she said. “We filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government for Section 230 under the FEC code that gives Facebook and YouTube and Twitter this immunity against these lawsuits. That has to change. So many millions of Americans, and Europeans as well, it’s our bulletin board. It’s how we communicate with each other.”
Geller cited the blocking of her news feed, which has around a million followers. “This is deeply problematic. I don’t know if our Republican Congress would have the stones to do something about this, but we need legislation because it’s only getting worse, Raheem,” she said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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