Keean Bexte, embedded on the United We Roll Convoy to Ottawa, debunks CBC and Maclean’s claims of white supremacist ties, detailing emotional trucker rallies—like Kathy Cachula’s tearful recount of Trudeau’s "awkward hug"—and praising organizers like Glenn Carrot for grassroots leadership. He condemns Antifa violence against convoy supporters, including three Rebel Media assaults in weeks, and warns that falsely labeling dissenters as Nazis fuels real extremism while shielding it. The episode exposes media bias and political avoidance, framing the convoy’s grievances as a fight against policies like Trudeau’s and Butts’ while urging listeners to support independent reporting at rebelconvoy.com. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show, The Gun Show.
Today, my guest is my friend and rebel colleague, Kian Bexty.
He's been embedded on the United We Roll Convoy to Ottawa for a whole week.
He's been bringing you the truth about the convoy while the mainstream media continues to spread lies and tries their best to discredit both the organizers and the movement as a whole.
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Truth, Lies, and the CBC.
I'm getting the full story of the United We Roll Convoy to Ottawa from the only reporter that was embedded with it from the very beginning, our very own Kian Bexti.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gun Show.
A convoy of angry Albertans and other Westerners rolls into Ottawa today for a mass protest against federal energy and environmental policies that has also become a magnet for extremist and anti-immigrant elements.
That's the headline from the publicly funded state broadcaster, the CBC, about the United We Roll convoy that left Red Deer a week ago, headed towards our nation's capital.
In one tweet, CBC managed to make the case for their defunding.
They managed to prove just how anti-Western they really are.
Then they managed to prove that they just really don't care what the truth is.
They're motivated by an agenda to protect the liberals and thus their funding at all costs, even if it costs the truth.
CBC can't possibly know what the concerns are of the people on the United We Roll convoy because the CBC haven't been on the convoy.
They haven't spoken to the people on the convoy.
CBC only had one reporter on it, an avowed Marxist who joined the convoy for a couple of hundred kilometers in the beginning in the comfort of the media bus before he had had enough and just packed it in.
Only one reporter has been with these folks the entire time.
Convoyer Rallies and Emotions00:13:55
From morning prayer to late night dinners in the hotels.
It's been our reporter, Kian Bexty, and he joins me now in an interview we recorded late last night from his hotel room in Ottawa.
Hey, Kian, thanks for joining me.
Looks like you're in a hotel room somewhere in Ottawa.
Is that about right?
Yep, just off Parliament Hill.
We're recording this on Tuesday night at my time, 7.18, so shortly after 9 for you.
It looks like you put in a heck of a long day.
Actually, I think you put in a long four or five days, hey?
It has been a whirlwind week.
I think we left last Wednesday, if I'm not mistaken.
And it's been 12, 13, 14-hour days, some days.
But it's been fun.
As you know, I've been on the convoy from Calgary to Ottawa.
Well, Red Deer to Ottawa, but I was picked up in Calgary.
I've met some pretty cool people along the way, been called some interesting things by the left, but I've had fun along the way.
Yeah, I mean, I've been following your Twitter account pretty closely.
Like, I just, I tune into your Twitter account first thing in the morning and before I go to bed.
And it is constant.
You're constantly working.
You're constantly moving.
You're constantly taking photos and you're trying to document everything.
So I know what it's like to go on these work trips.
And they're a lot of fun and it's very energizing, but it is really exhausting.
It's not a vacation by any stretch of the imagination.
Yeah, I'm hoping to get maybe a day or two off after I get home because I'm pretty beat.
I'm ready to go to bed for a couple days.
I'll pull some strings of the boss man for you.
He sort of likes me.
Now, I wanted to ask you about the convoy.
So you left on, was it Valentine's Day that you guys left?
It was in fact Valentine's Day.
I got my fair share of berating for that.
And you guys left pretty early in the morning and you guys are putting in a lot of, like you are driving like 12, 13 hours a day.
I wanted to ask you, what was that first stop like where you made your first stop and people were already gathered for you?
What was that like?
I guess for you and I guess for the truckers?
Well, thank God I wasn't driving because I can only imagine how exhausted they were.
But what I found so interesting throughout this trip was that I figured that as we got farther east, the momentum would die down.
I thought that the people lining across the side of the road, they would sort of dwindle, especially as we got closer to Ottawa.
But that was absolutely not the case.
As we left Alberta, there was quite a few people, hundreds of people in Alberta.
We went through Saskatchewan.
There was a little less.
We went through Manitoba.
There was a lot less.
There was some Antifa, though.
That was interesting when they tried to blockade the road.
And then we got to Ontario and it started picking up again.
The mainstream media realized that this wasn't something that they could ignore.
And once they started reporting on it, everyone and their dog came out to watch this several thousand kilometer long parade across Canada because that's what it was.
It was a convoy on the stretches of highway.
And then once we got into these small towns, it was a parade.
We'd slow down to about 20 kilometers an hour, 30 kilometers an hour.
You know, kids were along the side of the highway and families were along the side of the highway.
And we've honestly, we saw thousands of people, several thousand people throughout the whole trip.
And you could hear on the radio crackle too.
The truckers were really excited when there were kids on the side of the road because, and you would always hear them.
Some of them would break into tears a little bit too.
It was quite sweet.
And they would say, it's the kids that we're doing this for.
It's the future generation that we're standing up for to make sure that they have a future because they know that if Justin Trudeau and Gerald Butts get their way, well, I guess Gerald Butts is out of the picture now.
It was a nice family day present.
But if they got their way, there wouldn't be a future in Alberta.
So that's what they're fighting for.
You know, and that it's got to be emotional too for these guys.
I mean, a lot of these guys and ladies too have left their kids at home to make this trip.
If you're working in the oil patch, you don't get a lot of time off in the winter.
For a lot of guys, winter is the only time you work.
And we're headed into spring breakup in the oil patch.
So it really is the push time.
And these guys are not at work, which is sad as it is.
And they've left their kids behind to make this journey.
It was emotional.
Yeah, I know.
I saw that.
I thought that was really great.
And there have been a lot of emotions on this.
And actually, you found somebody who was pretty emotional a little while ago with Justin Trudeau in one of the sort of rally stops with the convoy.
You found Kathy Cachula.
Yeah, that was at the final rally prior to getting to Ottawa.
It was at Arnprior, actually.
And it was weird.
I was in the Rover vehicle, which is the vehicle that they were calling it Rover.
It was four kilometers ahead of the convoy, just sort of scouting everything out, making sure that there was a place for all the trucks to park and that kind of thing, getting logistics figured out.
So I was with them.
I got out early so that I could catch the convoy pulling into its last stop.
And I started asking people some questions.
And the first person I approached was Kathy Coutulla.
And something in the back of my mind was making a connection.
I recognized her.
I wasn't sure where, but then she went through this story about how Trudeau awkwardly hugged her.
And then it clicked.
She was the woman that stood up at that Trudeau town hall and told Trudeau how he failed her and can like her across Canada.
And then he cringily hugged her.
But I guess this is the Kokene Groper, right?
So he's always looking for physical contact.
But it was a touching story with him.
Oh, with a touching story with him.
It was a touching story with him.
It's always a touching story with him.
Yeah, it's true.
You know, it's funny.
I was thinking the other day.
I see these photographs of Trudeau and he hugs everybody so close and so weird.
And it's like the kind of thing that cult leaders do.
And sometimes it works on people and sometimes it doesn't.
And apparently it didn't work on Kathy.
So that's good to hear.
Now, I wanted to ask you, what was your favorite stop along the way?
My favorite stop, you know what it was?
It was Sault Ste. Marie, which is a town in Ottawa and town or city.
Don't want to offend them.
And it was the largest stop, the largest stop of the whole trip, besides obviously Ottawa, which you'd think it would have been Regina or some town in Saskatchewan.
No, it was Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario.
Hundreds of people showed up.
A local construction company paid money to throw up an impromptu barbecue.
There was hot dogs, there was hamburgers, and it was all put together within a couple hours because we're never exactly sure where they were going to stop and what hotel they were going to stop at.
Was a very fluid situation.
But it was definitely Sault Ste. Marie.
That was after the McLean's editor published a tweet that said that this was a movement of white supremacist.
So I went around asking people, and they can check out my video at rebelconvoy.com.
But I went around asking people if they were a Nazi or if they were a white supremacist.
And I was trying desperately to find these white supremacists that the mainstream media was talking about, but there was just, there wasn't any there.
But it was really fun.
There were hot dogs, there were hamburgers, there's trucks everywhere, and there were little kids sliding down these huge snow banks because Ontario gets an absurd amount of snow.
And the kids were chanting, Trudeau is dumb.
It was kind of cute.
But I mean, you know, it was fun.
It was a really good place to stop.
You know, and that's the thing, too.
Like, to even ask these people where are the white supremacists, it's so, it really is absurd because they're being called these things by people who've never taken the time to speak to them.
Glenn Carrot, he's been on my show before.
I run into him when I'm covering the convoys.
I mean, that guy drives across the province with his own money, takes time away from his own business.
He's an Innisvale, Alberta town councillor.
He's a legitimate, upstanding member of the community.
And the people who are saying things about him and the movement that he's created, they've never even taken the time to talk to him.
They're finding like one of weirdos out there in obscure Facebook groups.
And they're trying to say that this represents Glenn.
And they're trying to say that these people are organizers.
As far as I'm concerned, there's one main organizer.
That's Glenn.
Haley Weill, also, same thing.
She's been instrumental in organizing it, but no, no, and none of their critics are actually talking to them.
Because I suppose if their critics talk to them, it sort of debunks their narrative, doesn't it?
Yeah, I didn't know Glenn before.
I met Glenn the second day into the trip.
I'd never met him before, never really heard about him.
And I have gotten to know him throughout this trip.
And I cannot say enough about how much he's done for this movement, him and Haley.
I've watched him, he's a grandfather, and he's gotten emotional at a couple of these stops, watching the kids get passionate about the movement.
And I've watched Glenn Carrot, I don't want to guess his age, but a grandfather grow a lot throughout this trip.
At the first rallies in Alberta and Saskatchewan, there were a couple people showing up and it was kind of a ragtag group.
The convoy would pull in and they would honk their horns and then they'd pull out.
And I think that the people who were waiting for the convoy were a little bit disappointed.
But as each rally progressed, he became acutely aware of what these people wanted from this convoy.
They wanted inspiration.
They wanted to learn what the convoy was about.
And he took it all in stride and he learned and grew as it went.
And these rallies became these logistically complex events that were very fluid.
As I said before, he's planning them on the phone as he's coming across the country.
Someone else is driving for him and he's always on the phone planning these out at various stops.
And it turns into these rallies, especially in Arm Pryor and Sault Ste. Marie.
There are these rallies that politicians like Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau would be jealous of.
He gets on top of the trucks.
Someone donated a speaker and a mic.
And there's music and there's food.
And, you know, politicians in this country can't pull off rallies like Glenn Carrot now can.
And I asked him why this became so much easier.
And he told me that, and I asked him why he thinks he can pull off these rallies, whereas politicians struggle to.
And he told me, Kian, it's easier when you're speaking from the heart.
And it's easier when what you're saying actually means something to you personally.
And I thought that held a lot of weight.
I'm really inspired by him and how well he's handled these rallies.
Yeah, I think everybody probably knows by now.
My husband works in the oil patch and he actually moves drilling rigs for a living.
He's the guy in charge of logistics and organizing the trucks.
And I mean, just to do that, to move a drilling rig, take it apart, move it down the road, just, you know, a couple kilometers, it is a logistics nightmare.
It requires planning and for like, there's so many moving pieces.
So when I see Glenn able to get all these trucks and people down the road, organize food and lodging and rallies in advance while he's going down the road, I mean, I really don't know how he's doing it.
I have no idea, but somehow he pulled it off.
I wanted to ask you, I'm sure the convoyers, I mean, they're like you and I.
They have access to the internet.
How did they feel or how did they feel when they first saw some of the tweets sort of trying to discredit the convoy, calling them white supremacists, calling them xenophobes, calling them racists?
How did they feel when that's how they were being painted?
I characterize it as disappointed.
There was a large response to that across the convoyers.
Convayers' Disappointment00:11:14
Some people were angry.
Some people were upset.
One person was crying.
It was an emotional ride altogether, but pretty much unanimously, they were thanking me, which I found humbling because, I mean, I'm just a small part of the Rebel.
But they thanked me personally for what the Rebel does to contribute to public discourse because nobody was giving this convoy a fair shake at the beginning, except for the Rebel.
And as we got to Ontario, that's when the mainstream media started picking it up.
That's when Jason Kenney grudgingly accepted the convoy as this huge political movement across the country.
And they really just wanted to thank us for what we did in the first couple days to give this movement some credibility.
But in terms of how the mainstream media has characterized them, it's been anywhere from incredulous to angry to frustrated and sad.
So, yeah, it's been a wide range of emotions.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose it's even tough.
Like, I've got a pretty thick skin now after three and a half years.
You're kind of new to this, but I think you're pretty tough.
But it's still, it's sort of, I was going to swear, but it's sort of ugly when people lie about you.
People who don't know you say these things about you.
Like, they'll call me a homophobe and a racist.
Anybody who knows me knows that's not true.
And I suppose that's the point.
These people don't know.
They don't know anybody.
They don't know anything.
So the best they can do is lie about completely innocent people, drag their names and reputations through the mud because that's all they really have.
And I just, I think it's a real shame.
And I don't, let me just go back for a minute though.
I don't like how you said that you're a small part of the rebel because you're really not.
What you did for those people, and you continue to do on this convoy, I think is a true testament to your character because you're getting a lot of the same backlash that the people on the convoy are.
But you sort of have to put that all aside because it's our job to tell the other side of the story.
CBC is not going to treat these people fairly.
Mainstream media is not going to treat them fairly.
McLean's isn't going to treat them fairly.
You know what?
The politicians aren't even going to treat them fairly because the politicians jumped on the bandwagon about a month too late.
And I think it's so important what you're doing out there because these people, I mean, I don't know all that much about your family, but they're doing it for my family.
They're out there literally taking time away from their family to make sure that my husband has a job to go to.
No, same with my family.
I mean, I was born when my dad was working in Norman Wells for slumber.
Yeah.
That's great.
My husband, my littlest one, was like my husband had to fly home from Norman Wells when she was born.
Barely made it.
Yeah, it's weird.
Anyways, go on.
Sorry.
I was born on the road on the way back from Norman Wells in Red Deer, Alberta.
I've never lived in Red Deer, Alberta my entire life, but I was born there.
So what was your question?
I forgot.
I don't know.
I was on a soliloquy.
Well, you know what?
We'll go back to the name-calling.
I mean, I've never gotten this much.
Like, if people go to my Twitter, you can see I've never gotten this kind of traction on Twitter before.
People are really excited about this movement.
But in conjunction with this, this huge positivity and groundswell of support this convoy has seen, and I've seen personally in a personal and professional capacity, there's been an equal amount of hate and name-calling and mudslinging.
I've been called a white supremac more times than I can count, and it's something that I haven't gotten used to yet.
It's really a personally painful thing to be called.
And my heart goes out to everyone in this convoy who's been called a similar thing, but it's a totally different story when it happens personally.
And it is beyond upsetting to be called something that you're not.
But that's what this movement, that's what the opposition to this movement resorts to.
They have nothing to say other than to detract from this positivity.
So it's beyond upsetting, that's for sure.
Now, you just touched on some of the negativity, but you really crossed the line from just verbal negativity and angry tweets and trolling to actual violence against you today.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Sure.
I just finished recording some speeches.
There's two groups of protests here on Parliament Hill.
If you haven't ever been to Parliament Hill, there's Wellington Street, which runs basically in front of Parliament buildings.
And then about half a kilometer north, you have Center Block, which is the picture of Parliament that everyone knows and sees.
Right at the base of Center Block is where the main rally was held, where Andrew Scheer, Maxine Bernier were speaking.
And about half of the rally was there, and the other half of the rally was on Wellington Street, right in front of the parliamentary lawn.
So I was jumping back and forth between the two, and after some speakers were recorded, I went back down to Wellington Street to watch and record the rest of the protest.
And that's when Antifa showed up.
They showed up marching with banners taken off the walls from a Carlton University art exhibit.
It's not really art, but it was a faculty or student union paid-for art exhibit that was calling for the dismantlement of the oil and gas industry.
Anyways, I show up there.
I want to know what's up.
I want to know why student unions are paying.
I want to know why students are paying for these political messages.
I met some of the students there that paid for them themselves out of their own pocket, out of their own tuition money, and they were very upset about it.
So, I went to inquire with Antifa, which in retrospect might not have been a good idea, but I wanted to know what brought them there.
I wanted to know what their message was, what they wanted to tell Canadians and the viewers at the Rebel.
And not a word of a lie, within two minutes of me talking to them, they had already punched my hand and knocked my phone to the ground and destroyed some equipment that is hundreds of dollars to replace what they had destroyed.
My ego is bruised too a little bit, but I was a little bit frustrated with the police response.
And I've been in this hotel room for a couple hours now going through the live feeds of everything that happened, reading the responses on Twitter.
And something that I noticed is it's not something that just happened to me.
There's the exact same thing happened to this kind old man who was just standing there recording Antifa watching them holding his phone.
And Antifa pushed up their barricade.
This was before the police decided it might be a good idea to stand between the two protesting groups.
Antifa moved forward a little bit quickly, very quickly, and with their gloved hands, flicked the cell phone out of his hand, just flicked it up like that.
And the phone went flying.
Police officers saw the whole thing, saw the face of the individual who did it, walked the phone, fell to the ground, fell into the Antifa group.
The police officer pushed Antifa backwards, picked up the phone, handed it back to the guy, and then turned around and left.
And that phone, I guarantee, if it's like mine, it's a $1,200 phone.
Screen is shattered to hell.
And he, and to replace it, it's $300, $400 to replace a screen.
And to replace the phone, it's even more if there's internal damage.
And the police officer just couldn't care less.
You know, I know we're working hard to identify the person who assaulted you, but this is ridiculous.
This is three assaults against rebel employees in three weeks.
David and our wonderful videographer, little Efron, they were assaulted by that deranged hotel manager a couple weeks ago.
And now you at the refugee hotel that, you know, a high-strung maniac came out there and started shoving them around.
Now they weren't hurt, and luckily you weren't hurt.
But I'm not hearing a lot of outcry from the journalists, hurt feelings, or violence crowd at all.
I see a lot of trutherism, in fact, directed at you.
Like maybe you had done something to ask for it.
Like maybe your dress was too short, maybe you were dressed a little too sexy to be out at the bar that night.
Like, and I'm here, I'm seeing it from feminists and left-wing agitators who are just looking for any reason to justify an assault against someone with different ideas.
It frustrates me that this is the level of political discourse in this country where Antifa just decides that where the left in general and it's not just Antifa's fault.
I mean, it's the mainstream media's fault.
It's left-wing politicians who are propagating this false narrative that this group of people is Nazis.
I mean, there's something to be said about fighting Nazis.
I mean, they're terrible people.
And that's what our grandfathers and our forefathers did in World War II.
They fought Nazis, and it was a commendable thing to do.
And when the mainstream media and left-wing politicians are saying that these people are Nazis, I mean, it inspires people to some degree to fight back because being a Nazi is a reprehensible thing to be.
And so, so, what I'm trying to say is that the left has an equal share to blame across all facets of their movement, from the mainstream media to politicians all the way up to the actual people who are committing these acts of violence in Antifa.
Yeah, I mean, when you are calling everybody who disagrees with you a Nazi, the punch Nazis crowd registers that as permission to go around punching people.
That's what it does.
And it does a second more reprehensible thing, I suppose, and that's actually run cover for actual Nazis because then they just sort of end up being just like regular conservatives instead of being the worst creatures to walk the face of the earth.
I mean, it's really disgusting.
When I was in Auschwitz, that really hit home for me that we really shouldn't be throwing around that word as casually as the left often does.
Appreciating Coverage Tonight00:02:47
Kian, I know that it is late where you are, and you've been working hard and you're still working hard.
You're going through footage.
So I don't want to take up too much of your time.
I want to thank you for the incredible coverage that you've given all of us.
You've made me feel really, really jealous that you were on the convoy and I wasn't, but parenting duties and life gets in the way.
And you know what?
You did such a phenomenal job that I felt like I was there the whole time anyway.
So I just want to thank you for how hard you've been working and the time you've really put in to tell the other side of this story.
I appreciate that, Sheila.
It's my job and I love doing it.
Oh, Kian, where can everybody find your coverage before you go?
And where can they pitch in to help cover the cost?
Because you don't work for free.
I do not work for free.
If you go to rebelconvoy.com, you can help pitch in to pay my salary to help pay for some hotel rooms to help replace my phone.
Your phone.
I mean, there's costs everywhere.
And I appreciate everything that people pitch in to help.
And they can see all of your coverage on that same page at rebelconvoy.com.
Great.
Thanks, Kian.
Try to get some sleep tonight, buddy.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Over the next couple of days, we are going to see how the mainstream media works their hardest to discredit what these truckers and their supporters have done this past week.
These folks have driven thousands of miles with the help of crowdfunding from everyday Canadians and their own personal bank accounts to take the message that Alberta and the whole West is hurting.
They've taken the message all the way to Justin Trudeau's doorstep.
And you know what?
Justin Trudeau, he didn't even have the decency or the courage to meet with these people.
Now, he's not alone in his cowardice because Natural Resources Minister and Alberta MP Amarjeet Sohi didn't meet with them either.
And neither did Alberta's newest so-called independent senator, former journalist Paula Simons.
Those truckers on the hill and their supporters, they don't vote for hair and socks and sunny ways.
So the only time they count to this liberal government is when they're paying their tax bill.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thanks again for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.