Ezra Levant’s Rebel News faced alleged U.S. Navy and Canadian military surveillance, with a 2019 report labeling it "far-right" for 291 fake sites tied to Singh’s campaign—despite only one verified link. Contractors like Nittin Agrawal and Pentagon-linked studies claimed influence, while Trudeau’s office and Sajjan’s Special Forces Command were implicated. Parallels drawn to Biden’s military policies and Carlson’s censorship reveal a pattern: conservative media and critics are targeted under vague "extremism" definitions, despite $160B budgets and no left-wing scrutiny, exposing militaries as potential ideological weapons. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello, my friends, a stunning show today, if I may say so.
I have documents showing that the U.S. Navy hired a military contractor to spy on rebel news.
And then I learned that Harjit Sajan's Special Forces Command hired the same military contractors in the States to do more spying on us.
I'll take you through the documents.
I'll read them to you.
But this is one of those cases where having Rebel News Plus really makes a difference because that way you can follow the documents.
I want to show you these documents.
They're crazy.
How do you feel about that?
The militaries of Canada and the United States both spying on rebel news.
I'll show it to you.
That's ahead.
But before I get there, hey, do me a favor.
If you want to keep us strong, go to RebelNews.com, click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month to become a video subscriber.
We call that Rebel News Plus.
You eat their video version of this podcast.
And really, frankly, do it to keep us strong.
Do it to help us.
The U.S. Navy has a $161 billion budget this year.
They're spying on us.
Harjit Sajan's spying on us.
It's just us.
So if you want to chip in a few bucks to help us out, I'd be so grateful.
You can do that at RebelNews.com.
Okay, here's today's report.
Tonight, why are the U.S. and Canadian military spying on rebel news?
It's March 15th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government about why I publish this is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Why are the U.S. and Canadian military spying on rebel news?
I'll show you the proof in a moment.
But first, let me state the obvious.
Military Spying Scandal00:07:28
If you think the military is a right-wing operation, you're wrong.
Hi, I'm Harjit Sajin, the Minister of National Defense, and my pronouns are he and him.
And that means creating spaces that are inclusive and respectful.
Making sure we are deliberate with the language we use, and using people's pronouns.
This Transgender Awareness Week, we celebrate the Transgender Defense Team members who enrich our team.
While Harjit Sajan was busy working on his pronouns, he was literally overseeing the winter warfare training of China's People's Liberation Army soldiers at a Canadian forces base.
It's shocking, but you can't say that Trudeau never warned us.
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a diet.
What does it mean when the military gets so political, when it puts other goals ahead of winning in a battlefield?
I mean, maybe we need to have a big transgender campaign in Canada.
I'm a skeptic.
I have a lot of questions.
But can we all agree that the only purpose of a military is, to be blunt about it, to kill people and break things?
There's no affirmative action on the battlefield.
No quotas, no words like triggered and safe spaces.
They have real meanings there, not their woke meanings.
Well, when as military becomes woke, it gets into politics and it starts acting like an enforcer for the politics of its politician leaders.
It stops focusing on foreign military threats and turns against domestic political threats.
We saw that with a series of outbursts from the military in the United States against a conservative TV host named Tucker Carlson.
Just weird.
Drama TV.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's what I call it.
I'll apologize up front and tell you that I don't have cable news at home.
I don't have it here in the office and I don't watch a lot of drama TV.
I understand some comments were made yesterday and I watched the clip that Mr. Carlson produced as he referred to pregnant women in the military.
I'll remind everyone that his opinion, which he has a right to, is based off of actually zero days of service in the armed forces.
And then a bunch of other senior military leaders joined in, including generals.
What on earth is going on?
Could you imagine if the military under Donald Trump started publicly denouncing, I don't know, CNN reporters or New York Times reporters, smearing them while wearing the uniform of the U.S. military, using U.S. military resources and official U.S. military accounts.
It's insane.
It's what the left baselessly accused Trump of wanting to do.
Militaries and police forces have to be absolutely nonpartisan and non-political.
These are the Pentagon versions of James Comey, political activists pretending to be officers.
They had the sense to keep quiet when Trump was president, but now they obviously feel that they can fly their real colors.
Or maybe they were instructed to, to take down the leading conservative commentator in America, Tucker Carlson.
He has the biggest ratings and he's the strongest critic of the Democrats.
So what about us here in Canada?
I'm no Tucker Carlson.
I don't have his dashing good looks, for one thing.
But I did comb my hair once and put on a tie to talk to him about Trudeau training those Chinese soldiers.
But all kidding aside, there is a similarity.
We are conservative critics of a left-wing politician named Trudeau and of left-wing generals and left-wing military like Harjit Sejan.
We're not part of the left-wing media party.
We don't take any government grants, so we can't be controlled that way.
Fox News is the largest cable news show in America.
We're the largest independent news channel in Canada.
And just like the Democrats hate Tucker Carlson and Fox News, Trudeau and the Liberals hate me and rebel news.
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives and the member opposite engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
Yeah, the media party freaked out when Trump said mean things to CNN, but you'll notice he kept calling on CNN every single day.
He didn't ban them or have military generals condemn them.
That's banana republic type stuff, generals in camouflage denouncing civilian journalists.
I haven't heard a Pete from the ACLU or Reporters Without Borders, though, have you?
Well, that's what's going on in the U.S., but it's also going on in Canada.
I know because we're the target of it.
Let me be very precise in my language.
The United States Department of Defense and the Canadian Armed Forces have both funded a joint cyber intelligence operation against rebel news.
It was apparently led by this woman, Rebecca Goolsby, who has worked for the U.S. Navy for 20 years.
Let me give you an idea of who Dr. Goolsby is.
Her job is to fight against enemy narratives, and I guess we're the enemy.
Yeah, we're interested, not interested in individuals at all.
As a matter of fact, when you actually operationalize this stuff, usually it's highly anonymized because there are a lot of constraints on the military on what they can see.
But we're not really interested in the individuals so much as we are interested in understanding the information flow.
You know, is there disinformation out there?
You know, is there social hysteria out there?
A lot of people think about this as trying to shut people up.
But really, usually the problem is we need to put out more information.
We need to out-compete the disinformation.
But you need to know what the level of competition is in order to ramp up messaging and to improve the quality of messaging in order to out-compete.
This was an interview she gave just a few months ago.
She says her job with the Pentagon is to fend off invaders who sow hysteria.
And by that, she doesn't mean China or Iran or Venezuela.
I guess she means peaceful news outlets like Rebel News that just happened to be based in Canada, the closest ally of the U.S. We're interested in the universities providing the knowledge out there to the world so that they can, so that the communities themselves can fend off inauthentic users,
you know, that are trying to invade their communities and sow hysteria and rumors and try to fend those people off, how to fend them off better, and how to organize a community so that they're resilient against disinformation.
China is clearly the rising threat to the United States Navy.
They're building their fourth aircraft carrier right now.
They're going further and further out to sea, harassing other countries' vessels, threatening Taiwan.
But the U.S. Navy thinks a news website with conservative points of view, that's the real enemy.
But honest, they're not evil people.
You know, people get very worried about working with the Department of Defense.
They think we're all, you know, kind of like evil people.
But, you know, that's kind of a story that has been told.
I've been very happy working with working in the Department of Defense.
Rebel\.Media Spy Operation00:15:20
I have, you know, there have been times when people suggested things that made me go, you know, but we were able to calm them down and talk them back in reality.
There's always hawks who don't understand what's going on.
But for the more part, I have found that my relationships with the ethical level of the Department of Defense is very, very high.
And I've been very, very pleased and proud to be working with them.
So that's the woman who has led the spying operation against us.
I've left her a voicemail and I've sent her an email to ask her about it, but she hasn't got back to me yet.
If she does, I'll let you know.
Then again, the friendly friends at the U.S. Navy might choose to, I don't know, shut down our whole website instead of returning my calls.
We'll find out soon enough.
So here's how the spy operation worked.
The U.S. Navy contracted a little department in the University of Arkansas in Little Rock to use, amongst other applications, a program called Spy on Web to do a workup on rebel news.
And they produced this report called the Canada Election Cyber Forensic Analysis.
You can see it was dated October 10th, 2019, which is quite something, given that the election wasn't actually over until 11 days later.
But as you'll soon see, they knew what they were going to say before they even did their research.
I'll read a little bit of it.
Executive summary.
This report summarizes the significant findings on the hidden digital footprints of the Canadian website, The RebelOp Media.
The website provides far-right political and social commentary and was founded in February 2015 by Ezra Levan and Brian Lilly.
Does the U.S. Navy, does the Pentagon do this a lot?
Pay contractors to use software called Spy on Web to spy on Canadian journalists?
Why?
Who ordered this?
On what criteria?
Who else do they spy on?
How else do they spy?
Are they tapping my phones?
Are they hacking my emails?
Those are my main questions.
Privacy, legality.
What the hell is the U.S. military doing spying on civilian journalists?
But another question I just can't help asking it is: are all U.S. spies this stupid?
I mean, we all know the joke: military intelligence is an oxymoron like Jumbo Shrimp.
But seriously, this is the stupidest report I've ever seen.
I kid you not, a teenager could have done a better job of it and probably for a million dollars less.
There's a lot of military jargon here, which, like academic jargon, is designed to make it harder to understand something rather than easier.
It's designed to be cryptic, not plain.
But let me take you through some of it.
Identifying hidden or external links.
A well-known political Canadian news and commentary site that frequently contributes stories about the Canadian elections was analyzed.
Using a variety of cyber forensic analytical capabilities provided by Maltego and Spy on Web, the following open source information was obtained.
Okay, got it.
Perfectly normal, just the U.S. Navy using a website called Spy on Web to spy on our little website.
I'll keep reading.
They are attempting to create an influence operation such that they are increasing their digital footprint by creating fake websites to drive traffic to their own website using their own agendas.
What?
Well, I suppose we do want to influence the world.
That's why we're interested in current events and why we express our editorial opinions.
And, you know, during an election, that's the time to do it for sure.
I think it's what all journalists do.
But what's that fake website part?
Our website is pretty real.
What do they mean by fake?
Does it not work?
Is it not what it seems?
I'll read some more.
The analysis revealed the operations are located in the United States, but the registrant contact and location information is not shown in the Whois database.
Hey guys, the U.S. Navy has an annual budget of $161 billion U.S. You think you could buy a clue.
Our operations are in the U.S.
I actually don't think we have a single employee down there now that I think about it.
And we haven't in years.
We're incorporated in Canada.
Our offices are in Canada.
It's where our people are.
It's where our reports come from.
Sometimes we do travel to other countries and we do have one reporter in Australia.
It's true.
But, you know, seriously, how do you say that our operations are located in the U.S. and that we hide who we are?
Our address is at the bottom of every single one of our web pages.
I'll keep reading.
External links were extracted that show the Rebel.media blog is the primary link containing most of their content.
Okay, that part they got right, except not really.
We changed our website from the Rebel.media to rebelnews.com in September of 2019, a month before this report was written.
I'll keep reading.
The IP addresses are constantly changing.
It is not clear if this is a function of their web hosting service or this an additional measure to counter any identification efforts.
Are you crazy?
We use Akamai and Amazon's CloudFront for our website, if you really want to know.
They both have thousands of nodes throughout the world.
They're used to serve and direct traffic.
So just plain English.
Someone from Toronto will likely reach a different IP address than someone from Vancouver might, but no one notices or cares.
That's just tech gobbledygook.
It's just about how to get our website the fastest.
We don't control that Amazon does.
Imagine paying for this report, this BS.
I like this next part.
They're on a first-name basis with me, apparently, despite never having reached out to me for their research.
Of course not.
I'd say they're scammers.
I think it's quite likely that the angle here is they're just milking the Pentagon for money by whipping up fake spies or something.
Or maybe it's not about the money.
Maybe it's just about demonizing conservatives.
I don't know which it is.
I've written to the University of Arkansas as well.
I haven't heard back, but I'll let you know if they do write back.
But boy, are they full of it?
Let me quote.
Ezra, that's Mr. Levant to you.
Ezra and his team has basically used the Built With API to create fake websites for certain narratives that they want to control.
When a user searches for one of these websites or hashtags, they are redirected to the Rebel.media site with a quote story or blog entry about the original narrative the user searched for, but with information now coming from the Rebel.media, they are using these fake sites to drive traffic to their website.
They are orchestrating Twitter hashtags from some of these same subjects and using the Twitter platform to drive traffic to the fake websites and then turn back to the original The Rebel.media site.
My head's spinning.
I like how they put the word stories in scare quotes as if they're not stories.
What's fake about these websites?
Are they not websites?
I'm guessing this cyber intelligence analysis was written just to bamboozle 75-year-old generals and admirals who have no idea what a Twitter is.
They give an example of one of these fake websites.
I just think, what are they talking about?
It was a fun video that I did mocking Justin Trudeau's costume party, an India remember, when he went there for eight days and seven of them were just playing dress up.
And I don't know if you remember, he brought along a convicted terrorist with him on the trip who tried to assassinate an Indian cabinet minister.
I'm not sure what was fake about this whole thing other than Trudeau's costumes.
Here, just to refresh your memory, if you don't know, here's a little bit of the video that they're talking about.
But not all Canadians put on bindies and wear Indian clothing when we go to an Indian restaurant and say, Namaste, Namaste, Namaste, all the time.
When most Canadians meet Indian people, we can stay calm.
We don't have to pretend we're at a costume party or that Indians are a curiosity in a museum.
I mean, it's pretty embarrassing when Trudeau met a Bollywood star, but he was the only one wearing an over-the-top costume.
So it's a real video, and it really was on our website.
And we really had a petition for people to sign to say sorry to India for sending such an idiot over there and to promise people in India that we're not all like that.
Please don't think we're all as dumb as Trudeau.
And you can see, by the way, in their naval intelligence memo, that it's all very real.
Our name Rebel News was all over it.
I don't know what the fake part is.
So it was a little video on a little website with a petition and an easy to remember domain, We're Sorry India.
I love it.
It was really fun to do, got a quarter million views.
But look at how it was described: deep fakes of websites in Canadian elections.
This is an email from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
That's the contractor, the spy contractor, to the Navy Spy Master Goolsby, written on October 29, 2019.
So about a week after the election.
It's actually a chain of emails, so let's start at the bottom and work up just to do it in order.
Hi, Rebecca.
That's the spy man.
That's M. If this were James Bond, she'd be M. Please see the report on cyber forensic analysis of the Rebel.media website.
Both Word and PDF versions are attached.
The analysis revealed a new cyber information operation tactic of deep fakes for websites at play.
A collection of fake websites, at least 291, were deployed to amplify the narrative that Trudeau is not a friend of the Canadian Indian community in order to rally support for opposition candidate Jagmeet Singh.
There are more insights in the report, first page, and in-depth description of the analysis is provided on the subsequent pages.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks.
Nitten, that's the contractor.
I got a few questions.
You know what a deep fake is, right?
Have you ever heard that word?
It's a pretty new thing.
I first saw a lot of deepfakes involving Tom Cruise.
It's when you digitally take his face and put it on someone else and sort of, let's just take a look.
As much as the momentum.
Hey, listen up, sports and TikTok fans.
If you like what you're seeing, just wait till what's coming next.
That's a deep fake.
Pretty convincing.
It's designed to deceive you.
It's like a forgery, a video forgery, really.
It pretends to be someone, typically someone famous, but it is a forgery.
How is me standing in my studio with my logo on the page on my website railing against Trudeau?
How's that a deep fake?
That was really me doing it.
And help me out here.
Have you ever in your life heard me trying to help Mr. Jagmeet Singh win the election or anything?
By the way, I re-watched that video today.
I didn't mention Jagmeet Singh in the video at all or on that website or the petition.
It was not about him.
It was really just saying sorry to India for having such an idiot as a PM.
I wanted people in India to know that we don't all like make fun of Indian clothing or something.
And we only did one website called We're Sorry India.
Not, what did they say?
291?
That 291 number, I think, is talking about the total number of little campaigns we've ever had on any subject at all over six years.
Like, for example, I don't know if you remember, like five years ago, we had a campaign to boycott the hamburger restaurant A ⁇ W for switching from Canadian beef to U.S. beef.
Seriously, I know I'm getting too into the details here, but presumably that's what these spies were paid gazillions of dollars to do.
They think we had 291 deep fake websites in the last federal election designed to promote Jag.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh.
Designed to promote Jagmeet Singh.
In fact, we had one and it didn't even mention Jagmeet Singh.
I like the video.
Here's a little more from it.
Most of all, please do not think that Canadians support terrorism.
Like you, we were shocked to learn that Justin Trudeau invited a convicted terrorist, a man who was found guilty of attempted murder against an Indian cabinet minister.
We were shocked to read that that man was invited to attend a dinner with Justin Trudeau and his entourage on this India trip.
There's the terrorist, Jazz Paul Atwall, with Sophie Trudeau in Mumbai.
The Trudeau's have known Atwal for a long time.
There's another picture with Trudeau meeting with Atwal back in Canada.
For Trudeau to work with a convicted terrorist is inexcusable.
But the Navy spy boss was thrilled with the news.
Here's what she wrote back.
Rebecca Goolsby wrote, great work, many thanks in all caps.
And on October 29th, Nittin Agrawal, that's the defense contractor, wrote back and said, this is more like a coordinated deep fake.
I don't think we have seen it heard about this yet.
And she wrote back right away.
Agreed.
Now, it's super gross that the Pentagon is spying on us.
It's super gross that they're using software called spy on web.
I mean, that's a little on the nose, isn't it?
It's gross that instead of fighting China, they're sneaking and creeping a conservative YouTube channel based in Canada.
I think it might be illegal.
I don't know.
I don't know American laws that well.
It's definitely political.
It's definitely unethical.
China's got to be laughing at the U.S. Navy right now.
But are they really that dumb, the Navy intelligence officers or these Arkansas professors, or are they just scamming the system with their breathless talk about 291 deep fakes?
It's very, very creepy to be spied on by the U.S. Navy.
I don't even have a boat.
But I won't lie, it's also disappointing to know that the greatest force for freedom in the world, the U.S. military, is so abjectly stupid, at least when it comes to cyber intelligence.
I don't know if they got anything right.
It probably isn't against the law for the U.S. military to spy on me.
I'm not an American citizen.
I am one of the most pro-American, pro-NATO, pro-military journalists in all of Canada, by the way, which is probably why Navy intelligence hates me, come to think of it.
Pentagon Spying on Canadian YouTube?00:10:44
But what about the Canadian armed forces?
I am a Canadian citizen.
I have the right under our Constitution to be free of warrantless searches and seizures.
I have a lot of rights, privacy rights.
The Canadian armed forces, like the U.S. military, the Canadian Armed Forces have a mandate to fight Canada's enemies, not spy on Canada's journalists.
And I'm not Canada's enemy.
So why did Harjit Sajjan then take this study and fund those same Arkansas spies, those same military contractors, and publish their spy work in Canada?
Look at this.
DHSCISA releases election disinformation toolkit.
And it's from that same defense contractor, Nittan Agarwal, to Rebecca Goolsby.
That's the spy master of the Navy.
Hi, Rebecca.
Thanks for sharing.
On a related note, our Canadian election online influence campaign study was recently published in the Journal of Future Conflict by Queen's College Department of Psychology in cooperation with the Center for Security, Armed Forces, and Society at the Department of Politics of the Royal Military College of Canada.
The Special Operations Forces Command Education and Research Center, as well as with support from Defense Research and Development Canada.
The full article is available at this website.
Best Nitton, that's a defense contractor.
So hang on.
The Special Operations Forces Command of Canada?
They spent taxpayers' dollars meant for the military.
They spent that money instead of spending it defending Canada or, I don't know, spying on China.
They spent their defense budget spying on rebel news.
Harjit Sajjan's special forces team spent money, hired foreign military contractors to spy on rebel news.
Oh, not just them.
You saw the memo.
Defense Research and Development Canada.
They spent taxpayers' dollars meant for the military.
They spent that money to spy on rebel news.
Did Justin Trudeau order them to do that?
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives and the member opposite engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
Here's the publication that they paid for, paying the University of Arkansas military contractors to rewrite it and publish it in Canada.
This was the link that was in the contractor's email to her spy boss in the Navy.
The role of YouTube during the 2019 Canadian federal election, a multi-method analysis of online discourse and information actors.
And it's all those Americans.
Catherine Kanye-Galliano, Rick Galliano, Esther Mead, Billy Spann, Joseph Cready, and Nit Niagarawal.
That's the head military contractor.
Now, don't worry, I'm not going to take you through all of it, but look at a few parts.
For our research, we identified 75 unique channels on YouTube that published 6,019 videos about the Canadian federal election between January 1st, 2019 through October 31st, 2019.
Okay, got it.
But look at this.
For the purpose of brevity of this report, we are providing our observations of the right-wing Canadian media news and commentary website, Rebel News.
Yeah, you're lying.
You're lying.
You didn't study 75 channels.
You studied one channel.
We saw, we just went through, we saw your memo.
You studied the one channel that you were specifically hired to spy on by the U.S. Navy.
You just threw in the names of 74 other websites to make it look like you weren't spying on Canada's leading conservative YouTube channel.
You're spies, but you're really, really bad at this, guys.
I always thought the smartest students in university went on to became spies.
No.
The analysis revealed that the operations were located in the United States.
Yeah, no, I'm right here in Canada, you stupid buffoons.
Most of this study repeats the errors, the wrong guesses, and the smears of the earlier memo that I showed you.
It's just fake.
That's a bit ironic.
They claim to be on the hunt for misinformation and fake news, but they are the purveyors of fake news.
I'm not American.
We're not an American operation.
We've never made that deep fake video in our lives.
I don't support Jagmeet Singh, and the feeling is mutual.
We're not your enemies, America.
We're actually the most pro-American channel in Canada.
I'm just trying to figure out why.
Is it because that Navy spy master just hates conservatives?
Could be.
Is it because she's just empire building?
She needs to do lots of busy work to justify her budget and get more budget and get more staff and get more praise.
I don't know.
It's because Justin Trudeau and Harjit Sejan asked for this to be done to us.
Could be.
Because you have to admit, it's very, very weird for the U.S. Navy Intelligence Department to hire a military contractor at the University of Arkansas to specifically smear a Canadian YouTube channel.
I got to tell you, that's really weird unless they were asked to do that by Justin Trudeau or Harjit Sajjan.
I don't know.
I'm laughing at how stupid they are.
I'm laughing at how wrong they are.
I made 219 videos and supported Jagmeet Singh.
Yeah, no, I didn't, guys.
I'm laughing, but it's not funny at all.
Actually, they are spying on me and my staff.
Who knows what they've done?
They're making an enemies list.
Obviously, they're lying about us.
Obviously, I suppose that's normal.
If you're making an enemies list, you're probably not afraid to lie about someone.
I wonder if anyone will care about all this.
I mean, if we were a left-wing YouTube channel, I don't know, the Young Turks or something, and Donald Trump ordered the Navy to spy on the Young Turks or some other left-wing YouTube site, would anyone care?
I think so.
I should note, this spying actually did occur when Donald Trump was president, though he unlikely, it was unlikely he was briefed on it.
I don't think he would have approved it.
I think this is the military deep state, which we saw this weekend go after Tucker Carlson.
I think they're left wing.
What do you think?
We have access to information requests into both Queen's University, which reprinted this smear, and to the University of Arkansas with the defense contractors, which really, really doesn't want to hand over their documents to us.
We've been fighting with them for a little while.
I mean, I can sort of guess why they don't want to hand it over, right?
Do you think any of this is a problem?
The Pentagon spying on rebel news?
Or how about Harjit Sajjan and his Special Forces Office spying on us, hiring foreign military contractors to have a go at us?
Do you have a problem with that?
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney set up an inquiry into foreign-funded eco-extremist groups attacking the oil sands in Alberta.
And that has been a five-alarm fire for the left in Canada and journalists and civil libertarians saying he's invading their privacy.
Yeah, he's not spying on, though.
How about when Harjit Sajjan and Justin Trudeau send money from their Special Forces Command to a foreign military contractor in Arkansas to work up a spy memo on Canadian journalists?
Is that a problem for anyone?
It's a problem for me, but it's a sign of how far Canada has fallen in terms of press freedom and indeed all freedoms.
But I will say this one thing about the spy report that raised my spirits.
If they're going to lock us up, they better start building more prisons because you see, we've got some friends out there.
As you can see, we were the fifth most important producer of videos in the entire 2019 election.
As you can see, the CBC is counted twice ahead of us and CTV and Global, so we're actually in fourth place.
Then it was us, way, way ahead of anyone else.
That's just measuring YouTube videos that were served up.
That's why Harjit Sajan and Justin Trudeau were spying on us.
Because tens of millions of Canadians are watching us hundreds of millions of times.
In fact, although the CBC and the rest of the media party had numerically more videos produced during the 2019 election, they actually pumped out more of them.
Ours were the most influential, according to these spies.
Although I have to say, I don't trust the word they say.
They're that incompetent.
But if you take them at their word, we were bigger than Global News, bigger than CTV, bigger than CBC.
I see our friends True North on that map too.
I'm glad to see it.
According to these stupid spies, so who knows if it's true, we were the most influential YouTube channel in the 2019 election.
Maybe that's why Trudeau paid the United States contractors to spy on us, my friends.
Hey, before I go, if you want to help keep us strong, maybe pop by helprebelnews.com, chip in a few bucks.
You know, according to the spies, we're doing more than anyone else on the internet to push back against Trudeau.
And that ain't fake, my friends.
Welcome back.
Well, I tell you, if Donald Trump and his generals had attacked journalists of the left, it would have been, and should have been, a scandal.
Alas, he didn't do so.
In fact, for some reason, Trump just couldn't stop calling on his so-called enemies, Jim Acosta and the CNN boys.
He couldn't resist bantering with them every day.
I think he liked the sparring.
Military's Political Correctness Push00:14:35
Not so much Joe Biden, who is yet to give an actual press conference 50 days into his presidency.
I don't think he's up for it.
And even if he thought he was, I don't think his staff would allow such a disaster for someone who's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
But what do we make about this attack on a conservative civilian journalist by uniformed members of the United States Department of Defense using their official resources and then having a round of attaboys by senior commanders, including generals?
Joining us now via Scribe to talk about this is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, it's really creepy to have men in uniform, camouflage uniforms, giving political speeches.
That feels a little banana Republiki to me.
Well, there are a number of things that are quite disturbing about this.
Let me just set the frame around this and give you the context.
President Biden was making remarks at the promotion of two female officers to very senior positions in the military, and he went on to talk about the things that the U.S. military is doing to make women more comfortable in the armed forces and also to eliminate barriers to women's advancement.
And in the armed forces, as in other parts of the workforce, the most significant obstacle or challenge, I should say, for women is pregnancy.
Pregnancy takes women out of the workforce at a key point in their careers, often when male counterparts are earning promotions and so forth.
So you can eliminate all the gender discrimination in the world, but pregnancy essentially is a significant disadvantage, at least in regard to the career ladder.
So under Trump, actually, the armed forces took efforts to minimize the amount that pregnancy would take away from women's career paths in the military.
And the ways they did that involved many different things, but one of them included making more uniforms friendly to pregnant women.
And I can actually speak about this from first or secondhand experience, at least, because my wife is in the U.S. Navy Reserve and has been through the reserve in now three pregnancies.
So this is something that they've done.
Now, she can't do all her normal duties when she's pregnant, and we're not actually sending pregnant women to the front lines in any sense.
They have other duties when they are pregnant, but the military has become more flexible in allowing them to serve within limits.
If you get pregnant too often in the military, they may discharge you because you're non-deployable for too long or too frequently.
The military still wants to be able to have its forces deployment ready.
So it's not as if you can basically just be pregnant all the time and get excused from duty all the time.
But the military has become more accommodating both under Republican and Democratic administrations.
Tucker Carlson took exception to Biden's comments, and he contrasted the attitude of the U.S. armed forces with that of the Chinese military, which is building Navy ships rapidly and is encouraging masculine behavior among Chinese men in order to make them, I suppose, better soldiers.
Tucker then said, we're doing the opposite in the U.S. armed forces, and he hit on the example of the pregnant flight suit.
Now, I think Tucker is wrong on the substance here, because I don't think that the pregnant flight suit has anything to do with military readiness.
But I think his overall point is largely correct, which is that under Democratic administrations like Obama, like Biden, the military does spend a lot more time doing politically correct things rather than doing things that make our military more effective.
And a great example is the transgender policy.
There are militaries that allow transgender soldiers to serve, the Israeli army, for example, but that's a different situation where there's universal conscription.
In the United States, transgender soldiers often require transition surgery.
So you're joining the military and you need surgery to correct gender dysphoria.
That takes transgender soldiers out of deployable status, out of active duty.
It costs the taxpayer a lot of money to have these surgeries.
And it's a special exception, actually.
We don't allow people in the military who need corrective surgery for other things.
Yeah, if your teeth are bad, you know, the Navy will pay to fix them.
But if you have flat feet, if you have a bad back, if you have asthma, whatever, the military is not going to take you and no hard feelings, but they need soldiers who are ready to be physically deployed.
Again, with the exception of pregnancy, where the military is trying to become more flexible.
But there are examples like the transgender issue where the armed forces has put, you could say, political correctness or in a more charitable light, you could say inclusion ahead of military readiness.
And I think that's Tucker Carlson's point.
Now, what was really unacceptable, whether you agree with Tucker or not, was you had several Defense Department accounts on social media blasting Tucker Carlson, not only blasting him over the substance of what he said, but also suggesting directly that he had no right to say it because he's a civilian who hasn't served in uniform.
When the military starts telling journalists that they have no right to criticize or examine military policies because they are civilians, now you have a rogue military.
You have a military operating outside of the umbrella of civilian control.
And this seems to be okay with the Biden administration as long as the targets are conservative.
There was also an extraordinary press conference where Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, a political flack of note, who, despite his distinguished military career, has always been on the left and was a State Department spokesman under Obama.
He attacked Tucker Carlson.
And the way the Pentagon presented that was as Pentagon spokesman smites Fox news hosts.
They used the term smites, like in the biblical sense.
And they claim that what Tucker Carlson was smited for doing was dissing diversity.
So the military, the Pentagon, characterized Tucker Carlson's specific criticism of a specific issue, pregnant flight suits, women in combat situations, let's say, and they made it about diversity.
Diversity includes a lot more than just pregnant soldiers.
Diversity includes racial diversity, other kinds of diversity.
So basically, the Pentagon made Tucker Carlson out to be a racist on the basis of nothing, just because he criticized the military's ongoing policy toward pregnant soldiers and so forth.
Now, again, you can disagree with Tucker on the substance.
It was extraordinary that uniformed senior members of the military and the Pentagon itself attacked a Fox News host.
And when he hit back, they doubled down.
They didn't stop.
Now, there's one account, I believe, associated with the Marines that did try to back away from its comments.
But what's really frightening about this is the degree to which there's been almost no compunction whatsoever about having the military go after Tucker Carlson in this way.
You know, they never did the same thing with regard to Islamic jihadists within the ranks, but there seems to be zero tolerance for conservative views.
And this is all coming at a time when the military under Lloyd Austin is busy trying to weed out quote-unquote extremists within its ranks.
We don't know what extremism means in this context.
Lloyd Austin said there's going to be a 60-day standdown, quote unquote, in the military in various branches while they ferret out the extremists because there were a handful of former soldiers and a few reservists, maybe one or two active duty people who were arrested at the Capitol riot.
But we're talking about maybe about a dozen people.
The military as a whole is now being tarnished, and Lloyd Austin is rooting out extremism.
Well, the examples of extremism that we're aware of all have to do with the Capitol riot.
We don't know that the military is going after Black Lives Matter sympathizers or Antifa supporters in the military.
We don't know that, but we do know that they're trying to target people who supported the Capitol protest, and there's no real solid definition of extremism.
So now you have the military going after Tucker Carlson and Fox News, who are within the mainstream, well within the mainstream.
In fact, Fox News takes a lot of heat from Trump supporters for being too critical of Trump.
Fox News, well within the mainstream.
Now you have the military going after Fox News and Tucker Carlson.
It's an unprecedented politicization of the military.
And conservatives are starting to sound the alarm.
I don't know why leftists are silent.
I guess with the exception of one or two, like the Glenn Greenwalds of the world, who've really come out as vociferous defenders of free speech.
But most of the Democrats are completely silent about this, completely unconcerned, apparently, that the shoe could be on the other foot one day.
And that if you have a Ted Cruz as Secretary of Defense, Democrats could be rooted out of the military or attacked.
By the way, that would never happen because Ted Cruz is a constitutional conservative.
Republicans seem to take the separation of politics and the military rather seriously, but Democrats seem to think the military can be deployed in the service of their ideological ambitions to crush their political opponents.
You're so right.
I just went on the Navy's homepage today because, for some weird reason, the U.S. Navy is using some cyber security excuse to spy on rebel news.
I found that really creepy.
I went to the Navy homepage.
First thing I saw is the 60-day standdown to root out extremism.
And I just thought, you know, that's what the left accused the right of: McCarthyism.
We don't even know what extremism is.
And every single, I mean, it's transforming the military into like a palace guard, into a personal gang of the leader.
And I mean, I saw Ted Cruz wrote a scorching letter to the Secretary of Defense, but I haven't seen much more criticism of it.
I find it terrifying.
Again, the issue here is how they define extremism.
I think that conservatives and liberals would agree that we don't want violent extremists in the military.
Major Nidal Hassan, who carried out the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, was an Islamic extremist in the military.
And I think everybody would agree we don't want Islamic extremists in the military.
I think there would be broad agreement.
We don't want white supremacist extremists in the military.
But the military is already one of the most diverse institutions in America, probably the most diverse institution in America.
So it's the last place you'd expect to find white supremacists.
It doesn't mean there isn't racism in the military, and it doesn't mean that you don't have white supremacists who join the military or people who become white supremacists after the military and they abuse the military skills that they've learned and so forth.
But I don't think there's any disagreement.
We don't want violent extremists.
But what Democrats seem not to care about is that the military is going after people solely for their views.
If you just have views that are a little off the wall, let's say, I'm not even talking about you watch Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
Suppose you have very radical left-wing views.
Suppose you have some rather strident right-wing views.
Are your views alone enough to get you drummed out of the military?
Is that what the military is supposed to become?
And again, you have an officer corps that is already more left-wing, already partial to big government, very much centered around Washington and its priorities.
And that officer corps was never quite comfortable with President Donald Trump.
A lot of the retired generals and admirals of the last several years came out against Donald Trump, said that he should be removed as soon as possible.
That was Admiral McGraven, former commanding officer of the Navy SEALs.
The rank and file, the enlisted members of the military tended to be much more supportive of President Trump.
And that's where you saw soldiers showing up at Trump speeches with MAGA hats and that sort of thing.
So the military has really struggled to deal with a lot of the political divisions in the country because, of course, Americans are Americans in uniform or out.
And some of those divisions do show up within the military itself.
But to have the Pentagon going after the major conservative news outlet in the United States and on a spurious basis, making up this nonsense about diversity, they could have responded simply and said, pregnant women serve with distinction in the U.S. Armed Forces and left it at that.
And they could have given the facts of the policy, as I did to you, that I know, again, from my wife's experience, where she's been through three pregnancies in the Navy Reserve, and pregnant sailors and soldiers and so forth serve with distinction.
They don't go into the front lines of combat.
That was a remark Trucker Carlson made.
He said, we're sending pregnant women to fight our wars.
Well, we're not really.
When women become pregnant, they are assigned different duties.
So my wife, who's in helicopter maintenance, she's not going to be climbing on top of a burden anymore, straddling a rotor and tugging a wrench because it's just a little hard.
But she'll take a few months off from doing that.
But she can still do other things.
And the military has become more and more accommodating, even under, and especially under President Donald Trump.
This is something we want our military to be.
We want our military to be a place where women can advance.
And it is a place where women advance.
And it's a place of diversity in our country.
It's not a source of extremism in the United States.
But what's happening is the Biden administration is turning the military into a political weapon.
And there seem to be a lot of officers and senior enlisted people who are eager to comply and who are eager to show the new boss just how compliant they can be.
And maybe that's because there was talk of using the military to suppress some of the Black Lives Matter riots last summer.
So the military feels it was politicized already.
I don't think Donald Trump ever politicized the military, by the way.
That was Democrats accusing the military of being political for suppressing riots that never should have taken place in the first place.
I mean, when the National Guard had to be called out in Washington, D.C. to stop a mob from overrunning the White House, I think that was a good use of military resources.
And it's only because Democrats were encouraging these people that those mobs were there.
But Democrats said that was a politicized use of the military.
Okay, that's their view.
I don't think it was.
But it does seem that that message has disturbed enough people in the military that they seem to be overcorrecting now and going out on a limb in public on social media accounts and on the Pentagon website and from the podium at the Pentagon and attacking the opposition and opposition media voices.
It's really a dangerous juncture.
And Ted Cruz is making a noise about it.
I wish more Republicans would, but we'll see what comes of what Ted Cruz is doing.
Military Overreach And Opposition Attacks00:01:27
I think he's asking some very important questions that the military will have to answer.
Yeah.
Well, I'm glad Ted Cruz is doing it.
Of course, Canada is so far gone you wouldn't even believe it, thankfully.
You know, there is no silver lining to it.
And the fact that they're not just looking at extremism within the ranks, whatever extremism means, but they're spying on journalists even outside of America.
I mean, that's very troubling to me since we're the target of it.
We'll keep you posted on that story too, Joel.
Thank you so much.
Great to see you.
There you have it, Joel Pollock, Sr. Editor-at-Large at Breitbart.com. find this story very strange because of course it is touching us here at Rebel News in the manner of speaking as well.
with this boy.
Do you think of those spy memos?
What do you think of that?
I think it's crazy.
I think it's really creepy that military contractors were hired to spy on us in the States.
But, you know, there's no accounting for, well, you got $160 billion sloshing around.
A lot of stupid things happen.
But for the Canadian Special Forces under Hajit Sajan to pay foreign contractors to spy on us, what do you think of that?
And you think we're the only ones?
That's the show for today, my friends.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, TV at home, good night.