Breitbart News senior technology correspondent Allum Bokhari appeared on the Trevor Carey Show to discuss his book, DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.
You can listen to the full recording of the episode for free at Spreaker. DELETED can be purchased at deletedbook.com.
In the show, Bokhari said that President Trump’s banning by most major tech platforms in the days leading up to President Biden’s inauguration revealed where power truly lies in the U.S.
Transcript:
BOKHARI: I gotta say, the world has witnessed the power of American oligarchy over the past week. It’s not just the tech companies, the social media platforms that banned the President, that kicked Parler off the internet, it’s web hosting providers that did that, it’s email service providers, they’ve also deplatformed President Trump. His personal bank account has cut off service. We’re witnessing…this is the most powerful elected office in the world, right? Supposedly! But now we’re seeing now that these corporations seem to have all the power. And I think we always knew they have al the power, but now we’re witnessing them actually using it, and it’s a really shocking thing to see.
CAREY: Well in our last interview we were talking, you’ve been talking about this for quite a while. And they’ve really put the pedal to the metal since the last time we spoke. Allum, I had a couple callers yesterday give us a fifth-grade explanation to explain the internet. I think there’s a lot of us out there, myself included, you know I flip the light switch on but I don’t know how PG&E, how electricity gets to my house per se. Now with the internet, is there anywhere for Parler to run to, is there anybody that has the final control that could stop conservatives from going online and getting our message out?
BOKHARI: Well, the problem is, all these corporations and all these online infrastructure providers, they’re behaving as a kind of ideological cartel. So there are alternatives to Amazon Web Services, which is what provided Parler its access to web hosting. They’re the reason Parler went offline, because Amazon pulled service. And Amazon’s being sued now, by the way, by Parler. But I think the CEO of that social network said that all the other vendors he’d been trying to work with, they’ve refused service as well. It’s still technically possible, but it’s not just “build your own social network” – this is the free market libertarian answer to Twitter censorship, right – but you have to build your own web hosting, you have to build your own DNS registrar, that’s the service that gives you your url, your website address. You have to build your own payment processors, because credit cards and banking companies will refuse to do business with you. We’re seeing a cartel of corporations acting in ideological lockstep. And I think it’s horrifying the rest of the world as well. We’re now seeing foreign leaders, who don’t have much in common with Trump by the way, saying that the deplatforming of the President by Twitter and Facebook was a step too far.
CAREY: So you think it will backfire. It certainly seems like, I know Mexican President Abrador was saying “that’s too far,” so, well, if it backfires around the world doesn’t mean it’s backfiring here, inside America. Will we have conservative banks, and conservative providers, do you think we’ll see a line drawn like that? What else is there, unless they go “ok guys, we’re just kidding, come on back now” – what’s the end result here?
BOKHARI: The problem is, there are no conservative providers. And the same thing that happened to Parler, by the way, happened to Gab.com, which is another free speech social network. And they had to actually build their own servers. They were off the internet for a while. The good thing is they have those servers now, so it’s very difficult to de-platform them. But we’re certainly witnessing the rise of this sort of, ideological ghetto almost, where conservatives, just to exist on the internet, have to build everything from the ground up.
The title of my book, we discussed it last time I was on the show, Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election… Trump himself has now been erased from the internet. And that’s the first time that’s ever happened to a world leader… This just shows what Silicon Valley’s priority has been over the past four years, it has been to influence the election, to influence U.S. politics. And I think people in other countries, not just the Mexican president, but also the German chancellor, leaders in the French government, the British prime minister, they’re all now according to reports and according to their own statements, extremely concerned about these Silicon Valley companies interfering in their own democracies. I think we’re going to see a massive backlash against these companies around the world now, because if you’re a foreign country, whether you’re authoritarian or democratic, you don’t want a bunch of people in Silicon Valley interfering in your politics.
The Trevor Carey Show, which broadcasts live from Fresno on FM 96.7 and AM 1400 from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. Pacific, is available any time nationwide via iHeartRADIO.