Andrew Lawton’s The Freedom Convoy reveals how the 2022 Ottawa protest—spanning three weeks with $10M+ in crowdfunding (later shifted to cash/crypto)—exposed media bias, from CBC’s violent framing to GoFundMe shutdowns. Decentralized leaders like Tamara Leach and Chris Barber faced arrests while Pat King, a peripheral promoter, remained detained, suggesting targeted crackdowns. The convoy’s resistance to police barricades and Trudeau’s Emergencies Act, which froze accounts (including U.S. firms) without due process, highlighted state overreach, yet establishment figures stayed silent. Independent outlets like Rebel News (400M views) countered mainstream narratives, proving dissent thrives when legacy media fails—The Freedom Convoy stands as a corrective to demonized history. [Automatically generated summary]
He has written a new book called The Freedom Convoy, The Inside Story of Three Weeks That Shook the World.
I really do think they shook the world.
And Andrew Lawton was one of the good guys covering it honestly from the street level, not sneering at it from on high like this CBC.
We're going to go through it.
We're going to spend some quality time with Andrew and I hope it'll convince you to buy the book.
For those of you who don't know, we have a video version of this podcast.
It's the main way we do things here at Rebel News' video.
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You tell me, do you think Andrew Lawton and his book about the truckers would ever be featured on the CBC?
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today's podcast.
Tonight, a feature interview with our friend Andrew Lawton, who's got a new book out on the Trucker Rebellion.
It's July 1st, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you.
You censorious bug.
Well, it's Canada Day and what an interesting time it is.
You know, I remember growing up, and so many of the national symbols were so closely fused to the Liberal Party's partisan symbols that always irked me.
The color of the flag, red.
The color of the Liberal Party flag, red.
They were branding everything.
It was an obvious tactic, and it was a very smart one.
They were trying to own love of country, own patriotism.
The Charter of Rights was theirs.
It was Pierre Trudeau's.
And in a lot of ways, that's noble.
They were doing it for votes, but if they really were in love with Canada, that's a wonderful thing.
I think the apogee of that was after the near miss of the separatist referendum in 1995.
Seriously, within 1%, half a percent, Quebec barely voted against separation.
Jean-Cretchen was spooked by that and spent hundreds of millions of dollars labeling everything he could with a Canadian flag and the word Canada.
And I think that was the height of liberal patriotism, even though it may not quite have been real.
It was a political tool.
Like I say, it was fused.
They basically said, if you love Canada, that means you're a liberal.
If you're upset with Canada, that means you're not just a conservative, you're anti-Canadian.
What's so interesting about the last six months is that the symbols of Canada that for so long were associated with the Liberal Party have been effectively and authentically appropriated by Trudeau's critics.
I think I told you that when I went down to the Trucker Convoy in late January, I couldn't believe I would see people spontaneously breaking out in the national anthem on the street.
Like just a couple of guys walking down the street with the Canadian flag, and they would break out in Ocan.
I've never seen that in my entire life.
And though I acknowledge that much of the Canadian patriotism in 1995 during the separatist referendum and thereafter was very genuine, of course it was.
There was an awful lot of orchestrated, manufactured, astroturf nationalism and patriotism then.
What was so different about the truckers was that they genuinely meant it.
No one was coordinating them.
No one was funding them.
And then when they looked for some manifesto, some thing that symbolized who they were, it was Canada.
They couldn't believe they were living in a Canada where you were essentially locked in your house under house arrest.
In Quebec, where there were so many trucker protesters from, there was actually a curfew from 10 p.m. till 5 a.m. every day.
Trudeau's strong and free.
Well, where did the freedom go?
The Charter of Rights that Trudeau Sr. talked about, where was it now?
It was fascinating to me how the Truckers chose patriotic symbols as their flag.
And it's incredible to me how the Liberal Party and its allies have in response not sought to retake those symbols.
No, we are the party of the Charter Rights.
No, we are the true Canadians.
But rather, they've abandoned those symbols.
As we've shown you, our friend David Menzies, who went to Ottawa in anticipation of Canada Day, they've literally fenced off Parliament Hill.
So you can't celebrate Canada Day.
No one else can, but ha ha, the truckers can't.
We won that one.
If you're too unruly, if you shout, oh, Canada, that's a $1,000 fine, according to Ottawa Bylaw Services.
So instead of trying to retake Canadianism from the truckers, they've turned against it.
I never in my life would have thought anything about it.
And it's with that little preamble that I would like to introduce to you my friend and our guest for a feature-length interview today.
Of course, I'm talking about Andrew Lawton.
He has a new book out called The Freedom Convoy, the Inside Story of Three Weeks That Shook the World, and indeed it did.
Joining us now via Skype.
It's Andrew Lawton.
Andrew, good to see you again, my friend.
And congratulations on the new book.
Thank you.
Great to be with you as always, Ezra.
I appreciate it.
Well, I appreciate you taking the time.
And folks, by the way, we'll have a link under this video where you can order the book directly.
Now, the book has done very well even before it was officially on sale.
I think it was one of the top best-selling books in Canada, am I right?
Yeah, we got up to number two.
We were behind the Justin Trudeau picture book.
So at least I was in good company.
But I was very fortunate and very grateful.
And I think it speaks to just how many people were really keen to have accurate and honest journalism about this pivotal chapter in Canada, which, as we know, was so hard to come by.
The only way you could was through independent media.
Yeah, you're so right.
I could feel it in the moment.
I could feel the enormous advantage of everyone on the convoy having a cell phone, everyone on the convoy Facebooking and tweeting and TikToking.
And it was so large in number and so grassroots that it overwhelmed temporarily the power of the legacy media who were snide and snippy and condescending to it.
But that was in January and February.
Andrew, I think what we've seen since then is a revisionist history where the legacy media, the government media have tried to regain lost ground and rewrite the history and say, no, it wasn't peaceful.
They were insurrectionists.
And no, it wasn't ordinary people of all backgrounds.
It was racist, sexist, homophobe, white nationalists or something.
So that's why I think your book is so important.
We, and I mean, we people who are sympathetic and honest about what the truckers were.
It's up to us.
It's up to you to write the history because otherwise it's going to be undone by the CBC and the Toronto Star.
I would agree with that.
And there was a moment, and I actually referenced it in the book, where I talk about this impromptu speech you gave on the back of a flatbed truck that very first weekend.
And you looked at all the people out in the freezing cold on Wellington Street with their phones up, and you said, You're doing journalism.
You're the journalist.
And I'm paraphrasing your comments, but there was something that I found fascinating covering this on the ground for True North because that was how this book started.
It was actually from me being there covering this and seeing this significant divide between the coverage of this in the mainstream media and what I was seeing on the ground.
And in the several days that I spent at the Convoy then, and also when I went back later, I found that my audience watching online, what they liked the most wasn't even all that difficult to do.
They wanted me to just walk around with my phone and stream live video because it was so difficult to come by a pure, unadulterated, unfiltered sense of what was happening.
And that was, I think, the great shame on this.
And the book does take aim specifically at how Canadian mainstream media coverage really misrepresented or failed to understand the convoy.
Yeah, you're so right.
People were so alive and alert to the misrepresentations and the twisting of the truth.
They just, those raw, live streams of footage were so valuable to them because it didn't even matter what your chatter or commentary was.
They could see with their own eyes and ears in a live, unedited, raw format what was going on.
That was some of our most popular stuff, too.
We had a few journalists walking around with different battery packs.
It was very cold, but they would do two, three hours Viva Fry from Montreal.
He would do four hours of just walking, and you could tune in and then come back and then tune in later.
And that was superior to the billion-dollar broadcasters of CBC CTV and Global News.
Just a guy in his.
Go ahead.
Yeah, and it was interesting because some of them were covering this from their offices on Spark Street or Wellington Street, looking down.
Others went out into the mix.
But it was interesting.
The mainstream media would travel in these teams of four, where there'd be the reporter, a camera person, a producer, and a bodyguard, a security guard, just so they could go out.
And again, there were a lot of people that were heckling and shouting rude things to the journalists.
And I condemned that when it happened, and I condemned it in the book because, you know, even if you don't like these people, all you're doing is feeding into the misrepresentation because then all that they have to show on TV is pictures of you guys hurling obscenities at them.
But it also spoke to the feeling that they needed security to go out into the midst.
Where Rupa Subramania, for example, who's joined the team at True North, she's a shorter, petite woman of color that just walked around pretty much every day talking to people and didn't encounter any of these issues.
I walked around.
I'm a big guy, sure, but I walked around alone and didn't encounter any issues.
I know your reporter, Alexa Lavois, went around and, as I understand, didn't get assaulted by anyone except by police.
That's true.
I was going to say, the only violence, there was not a single trucker was charged with violence.
The only violence they had was a hoax.
They tried to pin some apartment arson on the truckers.
It turned out to be a hoax.
The only violence that weekend was done by police.
The only violence to journalists was done by police.
And as you point out, shooting our dear friend Alexa in the leg at point-blank range, not an accident, an act of violence.
I want to disagree with you on one thing.
You say um, and I take your point about those journalists are going to have the final cut on their video.
So if, if you're swearing at them, that's what they're going to show, that is newsworthy.
And i'm not sure if swearing is the most effective way, but heckling I support.
And the reason I say that is for two years we had all been shut up and shut down.
Parliament was basically canceled and then they did some of it by video.
There were no town hall meetings, there was no way to feed back to the government or to the media.
We just had to lie back and passively take it for two years.
And and those truckers were the first time anyone said, you know what we're gonna have a say now and no, we're not gonna stay six feet separated, and it was the first.
You had two years of pent up desire to talk back to power, to speak truth to power, and I take your point, you're not gonna, it's not pragmatic to swear at a CBC reporter because they'll just get their back up and and show you swearing.
But I I support being able to heckle back at journalists who heckle the people.
So maybe I think you and I are probably in general agreement on that uh, from from a pragmatic point of view.
But I understand why people were mad at the CBC liars and I think when you know these journalists went out with security guards, I think that was their own projection.
Uh, no one was violent, no one was threatening to be violent.
That was the journalists trying to feel like like victims.
Anyhow, don't mind me, I just felt like weighing in.
I want to get back to your book, the books called the Freedom Convoy, the inside story of three weeks that shook the world.
Now, when I first read your subtitle that shook the world, I sort of thought that's a big thing to say, but I thought no no, no.
This was the most news coverage that Canada has received around the world, probably since that 1995 near miss of the referendum.
I can't think of a time when the world's eyes were as riveted on Canada, our own journalists.
Not only did countless American media hits, but in the Uk Australia Germany, the whole world was fascinated and it wasn't just for a day, it was for weeks.
I think the truckers did shake the world, or at least the west.
We saw echo trucker convoys in Australia and the United States and the Uk.
I think it really did inspire the world.
What do you have to say about that?
Very much so, and it's interesting.
The subtitle is probably the because for the longest time the book was only available for pre-order, so all people could do was literally judge a book by its cover.
And the trolls latched on to the subtitle more than anything else because they said oh, shook the world, whatever.
And I really do mean that because, for starters, the idea of Canada Style protest, that was a term I had never heard before january, february of this year, and if you look and I did a little bit of an audit when I was writing the book that term was appearing in news coverage around the world, the associated paras, Reuters, Canada Style protest, because people were doing convoys to Canberra and Australia, to Brussels and Belgium, to Wellington, New Zealand, to Washington Dc quite a Large one in the U.S.
New York Times in Canada00:05:21
So, the idea that people in other countries, who, by the way, oftentimes had had larger anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine mandate movements and protests than Canada did, they were looking to Canada and saying, you know what?
These truckers are onto something.
We're going to do it.
Just look at the standing ovation former President Donald Trump received at CPAC in Florida when he talked about the truckers taking a stand and just everyone, Americans walking up.
I mean, for the longest time, when I went to CPAC a decade ago, and you're a Canadian, you're kind of treated as this weird little outsider, this novelty there.
They don't know anything about Canada or Canadian news.
But in this case, they were looking and saying, yeah, these Canadians have got it figured out.
And also, I will say, foreign media coverage oftentimes did a better job than Canadian media.
And I'm talking about Fox News in the U.S., GB News in the United Kingdom, some Australian outlets as well that were doing a better job.
Even the New York Times, to its credit, reported accurately at the end of the convoy that police were arresting people at gunpoint.
And all of the Canadian media pounced on them and said, How dare they?
That's wrong.
You can't say that.
You shouldn't say it.
And it was true.
It was completely true.
You know, I'm so glad you mentioned that.
And I take it that's in your book.
I mean, the New York Times is, for a liberal, that is the highest heights of newspaperology.
It's the biggest, it's the richest, it's the strongest, it's the most opinion-leading.
And so, and I don't, I forget the name of the New York Times journalist, but if I'm not mistaken, she was a former war correspondent.
Like, she was not some junior kid, she was a very seasoned journalist.
The New York Times, you can disagree with their editorial slant, I do, but they hire the best people, you know, they hire the best liberal journalists, but they are the best.
And so I think it was Canadian liberal journalists were sort of excited.
Wow, the New York Times is coming to Canada.
They normally ignore us.
Wow, we're in the big times.
Oh, but you're not with our narrative that these truckers are evil and violent.
And you're right.
That New York Times reported that cops had their guns drawn.
And I just remember Canadian media party type after media party type saying you must apologize, you must retract.
Would be nice if you came up here and reported.
She was on the streets.
They had a picture.
They had a picture of it.
And it was the epitome of that old Chico Marks.
Who are you going to believe?
Me or your own eyes.
And it wasn't just that she was right and they were wrong.
I mean, because by the way, you can make mistakes or you can miss something.
But the fact that as a collective, all these Canadian journalists thought we must correct the New York Times.
It's our moral duty to take them to task on behalf of whom?
On behalf of Justin Trudeau, on behalf of the police.
Like you could, they revealed themselves that they were on a team and they couldn't stand it if there was a dissenting voice.
Tell me more about the I just think this is the big point here is that the media coverage of this was simply fraught with all of this political jockeying where some of the Canadian intelligentsia didn't like the message that that coverage sent that the police crackdown was heavy-handed.
They didn't like having to face and confront the reality of what people who supported the truckers were saying, which is that why are they bringing guns to a bouncy castle fight?
Yeah, you know, and even what we talked about earlier, our own Alexa Lavois being shot in the leg.
If any other journalist in the country was shot by police for peacefully covering a news event, that would have been huge news.
That would have been something the Canadian Association of Journalists, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Penn Canada, Amnesty International, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, that would have been something that would have revved them up.
I didn't see any coverage outside of the independent media of Alexa being shocked.
I mean, that is how adamant the media is on Team Trudeau.
Yes, and a lot of the journalism advocacy groups, the civil liberties groups were silent on this.
And to be fair, I mean, the civil liberties groups in Canada were generally strong on the Emergencies Act, but the press freedom groups, I didn't see Reporters Without Borders coming to my defense when I was pepper sprayed or Alexander.
Yeah, she was hit with a tear gas canister.
And in fact, a lot of them parroted what police said, which is, no, we didn't use tear gas.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, listen, I want to get into the book.
Tell us what some of the chat.
I don't want to give it all away.
And like I say, the book's available on the Amazon link under this video.
I encourage people to get it.
Get it because I haven't read it yet, Andrew, but I'm sure it's a great book.
I know you're a great journalist.
But even if you weren't, quite frankly, I think it behooves conservatives to buy a book by a conservative writer.
We have to support conservative books.
Now, if you're talking to Andrew Lawton, you're talking about one of the best journalists out there anyway.
So it's going to be, it's a good read.
I just know that before even cracking the spine.
But there's so many books out there pumped out that just are repeaters of the soft left message.
Behind the Scenes of Convoy Conflicts00:15:13
We have to support a non-revisionist history of what happened.
Because if we don't, all of the amazing, authentic, grassroots, organic gains of that month will be lost.
So anyhow, get us into the book.
Tell us some of the chapters.
What are the kind of things you covered in the book?
Do you have the table of contents in front of you?
Take us through the chapter headings.
So, okay, let me, well, I'll actually, I'll pull it up as I'm speaking.
It's funny.
I didn't know if I would need to do the homework here, but I'm not putting on a spot while I buy myself time.
No, no, no, you don't have to do that.
I just thought, like, tell me some of the themes.
You don't have to read.
I mean, I am curious, but tell me some of the themes and some of the subjects you cover.
So I will say that the story was naturally a story of three acts.
You had how the convoy came to be and got to Ottawa, what happened in those critical three weeks when the convoy was stationed in downtown Ottawa.
And then you had those pivotal few days at the end when Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, the police came in and did the crackdown, and then this protest was disbanded.
And this was obviously me writing this afterwards, but knowing that the story was in some way still evolving.
And it was very challenging in some ways because I'd have gotten to chapter 13 or whatever and some news story would come up that affected something that was in chapter nine, for an example.
So you'd have to go back and at a certain point, and you know this as the author of many fantastic books, at a certain point, you have to hit send and you have to publish it.
So it's not meant to be the real-time living tree of all the news that's happened since.
But what it is, is a book that traces the origins of the convoy, goes behind the scenes.
And when I say behind the scenes, I don't just mean a recap of what happened on day one, day two, day three, but actually does some journalism to understand how this thing came to be.
How was it fueled?
Where did the money come from?
How was it spent?
Where did the food come from?
A lot of people didn't realize that they had this network of command centers in downtown Ottawa hotels and they were running catering out of them.
They were running an IT department.
They were running security.
They had medics.
They had a dispatch system.
I mean, a lot of these details that really, I think, spoke to the level of sophistication that wasn't really visible at the street level.
So the book talks about the behind the scenes.
Talks about some of the jockeying for not power, but the jockeying to be the official leader and the official organizer that took place between a lot of the organizers and spokespeople and the way that the media would take certain people and say this is the spokesperson, but the convoy people would look up to others.
And that was something we saw right through to the end.
And I would also say there's a great chapter, and this was published as an excerpt at The Line, which is an independent media outlet in Canada, that looks at the behind the scenes of the negotiations, the back channel negotiations between convoy organizers and the city of Ottawa, which were actually beginning to bear fruit just before the Emergencies Act came into play.
And I think people will look at that and look at the timing and say, okay, maybe there was, maybe the Emergencies Act came at that moment for a reason.
Yeah, isn't that interesting?
You know, you raised some good points because we know that $10 million was raised very quickly through GoFundMe, but under direct pressure from liberal politicians, they canceled it.
And then another, I don't know, around 10 million was raised through a rival crowdfunder called GibSend Go.
That fraction of the time.
Yeah, but that was sort of frozen out.
So I don't even know how much money actually got to the truckers.
It's my sense, and you correct me if I'm wrong, that really very little money flowed to the truckers and it was mainly self-financed.
It was thousands of ordinary people saying, I'll pay for my own gas.
I'll pay for my own food.
I'm doing this because I believe in it, not because I need, you know, a thousand bucks to do it.
So I think a lot of money was raised, but it never actually made it to the truckers because of the government.
But it's amazing that the truckers continued as long as they did showing just how authentic it was.
So you're right to some extent.
But where I would challenge it is that one of the big themes that we saw in the convoy is that anytime the state tried to turn off the tap on something, there was a deluge from somewhere else.
So when the government said we're going to seize your fuel, everyone showed up to Ottawa with Jerry Cansel, the diesel, slip trust.
When the government froze the money, people started showing up with cash and boatloads of cash.
And crypto, yeah.
Yeah, people were coming up and shoving $100 bills into truckers' hands.
They were shoving $10 if that was what they could afford.
And it's impossible because it was cash to really get an up-to-date accounting of how much money went through.
But it was hundreds of thousands of dollars at least of cash that was donated when all other avenues were frozen out.
So a lot of people did dip into their own pockets.
And there were also private e-transfers that were sent to people.
And some of those, of course, we know ended up being with accounts that got frozen.
But the $10 million in a lot of ways was not where the convoy's power was coming from.
And I think the government really thought that there was a head of the snake they could cut off.
Oh, yeah.
And that wasn't the case.
Well, that's very encouraging.
And it's funny because, of course, cash, you know, can't be tracked, can't be traced.
And we hear about central bank digital currencies that could be tracked and traced and, frankly, could be turned off from a central switch.
So, you know, it's a reminder of the power of cash.
If you're trying to do something subversive or dissident, you'll never beat cash.
Even crypto is less.
I mean, crypto is easier to transfer, I guess.
You know, coming back to who's who in the leadership, I always, again, I mean, we had someone embedded, we had a reporter embedded in the convoy.
Mocha Bazirgan went across Canada and Celine Galas, same thing.
And, you know, they would get memos or notes or recordings, but I think I don't know if there was anyone who was the boss of the whole thing.
Tamara Leach was more like a mother figure or an inspiring figure and a motivator.
She was a very early, and I'm not taking anything away from her as a leader, but as you say, not everyone was following, and then there were different rival, you know, trucker whisperers.
Give us a little bit of who's who in the zoo there.
I really like Tamara, and it pains me to see how she's been bullied by police and the courts.
But there were some people involved who I thought were entryists, maybe even feds.
Like I think of Pat King, who was so abusive in his comments and so reckless, I couldn't help but think that's a narc.
That's someone who is here to discredit.
Because every national security and police organization and left-wing group in the country said, this is the opposition.
This is the enemy.
Obviously, they want to infiltrate.
Obviously, and this isn't just speculation on my part.
We had two people at the Coots trucker blockade in Alberta.
We had two reporters there.
And there were police informants in the room, we later learned.
So, of course, CSIS and the RCMP and police forces had people in the organization.
Tell me what you know about who was actually leading things as much as they were led.
So I think that you're right.
And Tamara Leach was certainly the fundraiser and she was the spiritual leader and she was very prominent.
I mean, Benjamin Dichter as well.
And so far as the official Freedom Convoy board of directors, the nonprofit that was set up to handle the money, he was the spokesperson designated for that.
And you had other people like Chris Barber, who was actually a cross-border trucker himself and one of the two that really came up with this idea.
And you had all of these people.
And I think that they all played a role.
And one of the interesting things that I uncovered is that to a lot of the people on the ground, though, in fact, I'd say to almost all of the people on the ground, they were not in a hierarchy.
They were not part of an organization.
They were part of a movement.
They showed up because they liked what was happening.
They saw it on TikTok, on Rebel, on True North, on Instagram, and they wanted to be a part of it.
They weren't there because anyone told them.
They weren't there because there was money in it for them.
They were just there.
And I mean, there was an interesting story in the book where at one point, Tamara Leach and Keith Wilson, the convoy's lawyer and some of the other organizers, had arranged and agreed with police that they were going to get trucks to move off of Rideau and Sussex, which is this normally high traffic intersection just east of downtown.
And they had agreed with police, we're going to clear that out for you so that we can concentrate on Wellington Street.
And there was this one night where people went down, Tamara Leach, Keith Wilson, they went down to the intersection, they got the truckers on board.
The trucker said, okay, we're okay to move on to Wellington Street.
And police brought in a front-end loader to move the concrete barricades that they had blocking Wellington so that trucks could get on Wellington.
Well, the people there protesting, part of the convoy, saw this machine and thought police are trying to move in.
Police are trying to move in and empty the streets.
So protesters, about a thousand of them, surrounded the front end loader and started singing O Canada.
And then they started tweeting about it and more people came.
And before you know it, they had to abort this operation because no one could control the momentum that these people had when they felt that the convoy needed their defense.
And that's the, I think, the great magic of this is that Tamara Leach was a leader, was an organizer.
Keith Wilson was a lawyer.
But ultimately, they couldn't tell anyone to do anything.
And they were aware of that.
Isn't that interesting?
Well, I admire Tamara Leach.
don't know her well but anyone who was jailed as she was a few days ago because she appeared in a selfie photo is still i will say just until until july 5th behind bars for another bail hearing yeah and i'm uh somewhat familiar with her bail conditions she's not to communicate with certain other people she's in a selfie not communicating at a gala dinner for herself i was at that dinner it was basically a non-stop stream of people who wanted a photo with her so Smile, click.
Smile, click.
So she happens to be in a photo with someone else.
Police in Ottawa issue a nationwide warrant for her arrest.
She's arrested, put in shackles, flown to Ottawa for that, for being in a selfie.
I believe she's a political prisoner.
I admire her for that.
You mentioned a couple names, including Benjamin Dictor.
I have to tell you, it irked me that he decamped for Florida and hasn't come back since.
It almost feels like he's worried about being arrested like the other leaders were.
I don't know.
I didn't like the look of that.
Do you have any?
What does your book say about him?
So I spoke to as many people as I could.
And some of them, as you're aware of, I wasn't able to because of bail conditions.
I did interview Ben in the book.
And I believe what he had said is that it was the lawyers that had advised him to get out because they didn't want all of the people that were in a position to speak for the convoy to be arrested.
And that was the fear there.
And, you know, I haven't heard anything that is distrustful to him from the other organizers I spoke to in the book, although I think people were, when it happened, a little bit raw about this when they saw it to Merrill Leach and Chris Barber ending up in handcuffs and him not being there.
But other people weren't arrested either.
I mean, Tom Morazzo, again, someone that's very well regarded by the other organizers, former Army captain, he was not arrested himself.
So I almost wonder, and again, this is pure speculation on my part.
And I understand people raising questions about who might have been an informant and that.
But I also think it's a great tactic, if you are police, to sow that distrust among people and to really say, we're going to leave this one alone.
We're going to leave this one alone because it really does start to make people point fingers at each other.
Well, I know a little bit more about Pat King, who bizarrely remains in jail.
And I don't think he should be in jail, but I do know that he is.
I mean, I think he's disreputable.
And I'm glad that the truckers distance themselves from him not too far into things.
Let's pull back.
No, and if I may jump in there, and I'm sorry to cut you off, Ezra, the Pat King thing was fascinating because I agree with you.
I think what's happening is an injustice.
But I also point out that I don't have any time for him.
I don't actually think he adds anything to the discourse.
So I don't defend him because I think there's value in what he says.
I defend him because I think everyone is entitled to due process.
But this idea of organizers distancing themselves from him did not come late.
It came early, early, early.
Certainly he was involved at the ground level and he used his platform to promote the convoy.
You can't separate him from the convoy story, but I really did delve into it.
And a big part of the book early on is what role did he have?
And he was there.
He was a booster.
He was a promoter, but he was never an organizer.
Right.
I think that's true.
You know, you have a guy like Pat King.
You have a few of wilder protesters and you give the hate media exactly what they want, the Justin Lings, the CBCs.
You give them the caricature that they want.
And I guess that's what you were talking about at the beginning of our conversation.
Don't swear at a reporter because then they will use you as an emblem of the larger protest, which was very friendly, family-friendly even.
But it was clear to me that most journalism being done about the truckers was bad faith journalism.
And not just journalism.
You have this whole fake industry of, you know, hate finders.
Oh, they're full of hate.
They're insurrectionists.
They're a criminal threat.
We have to get our spies on this.
These aren't just protesters.
These are people who want to overthrow the government.
And look, they even typed up some manifesto about a new government.
They wanted the governor general to get involved.
These people came within an inch of a revolution.
I mean, it sounds so absurd, but I think you have dozens, probably hundreds of people in the Canadian establishment, whether they're professors or think tankers or security analysts or certainly reporters who are all not saying, oh, it's a protest.
We know what those are like.
There's protests in Ottawa every week.
Stunning Omissions In Coverage00:02:47
We love protests when it's on our side, like Black Lives Matter, like environmentalism, but a grassroots, mixed race, different walks of life, trucker convoy.
We can't just call that a regular protest.
We have to call it something far more malign.
We have to do what the CBC did, say it was organized by Vladimir Putin.
I mean, so there's being against something and criticizing something, but then there's also this extreme game played by the establishment to say, no, no, this wasn't just a protest.
This came within an inch of toppling our country.
Of course we needed to invoke the Emergencies Act.
This was like our January 6th storming in the Capitol building.
We came within an inch of that, people, an inch.
That, to me, is the real threat that was revealed by the truckers.
This group of Canadian establishment deep staters who would literally outlaw dissent if they could.
Yes, and there's a line in the book.
I can't remember, but I remember that people have been tweeting about it in the last couple of days where I said something along the lines of, you know, the one big contribution to freedom that the convoy brought us was revealing how far the state will go to crack down on those who seek freedom and those who strive for freedom.
And that was, I think, in terms of legacy, one of the significant parts of it.
But to go back to the point you were making there, Ezra, there was no denying the media love to look at the one-offs and extrapolate to the whole.
So one guy has a Confederate flag and almost certainly an instigator, just given the video you see of how people reacted and what he did and hiding his face, almost certainly an instigator, but that becomes the protest.
Some guy waving a swastika flag somewhere.
That becomes the convoy.
And if we're going to play the game of plucking out the individuals, why not pluck out the indigenous woman who said they don't like vaccine mandates because indigenous people know what it's like to have the government force unhealthy medical treatments on them and she can just never trust government-mandated medicine.
What about the indigenous or the person of color that she identified as a black indigenous person of color, a woman who's fully vaccinated and completely pro-choice on abortion and on vaccine mandates and says, my body, my choice means my body, my choice.
What about the trucker that fell in love with a protester?
What about the young families that got together for the first time because they've been living under two years of restrictions?
All of these people were real people I met for whom the convoy meant something very significant.
It was very meaningful for them and it was very liberating for them.
And those stories were lost.
It's only the stories of the Haiti-Haiti white supremacist hate mongers who, by the way, really didn't exist.
Run on the Banks00:05:58
Certainly not in the numbers the media was saying.
They were the ones you'd see in the coverage.
Yeah.
You know, there's certain things that were so stunning.
You're right about that.
There's certain things that were so stunning about that time that they were stunning in itself, but equally stunning is how they were so gently criticized, if at all, by the media, by other institutions that are normally on guard.
And I'll just list one, which is the Emergencies Act orders to the banks and to the insurance companies to seize and freeze funds of anyone without any due process, literally just whoever the police named.
And insurance, too.
It actually applied to American banks doing business in Canada and American insurance companies.
So if you were an American trucker with an American insurance company, but you drove into Canada and you were part of the protest, you as an insurance company were ordered under law to cancel his trucker insurance.
If you were an American bank, I mean, there's plenty of American banks in Canada that are regulated and they were specifically listed under this.
So this was an outrageous thing for Canadian banks, but it actually reached into the U.S.
I don't think any American banks actually followed the rule, by the way.
I think every American bank said, we're stuck here because if we freeze our customers because they're a trucker without due process, we're going to get in an enormous amount of trouble with our banking regulator, with our Congress, with our Constitution.
We'll be sued to the end of time under the First Amendment here in America.
Yeah, the liability waiver in Canada didn't protect American banks against liability in their country.
So imagine you're, you know, Citibank or Wells Fargo or whatever.
There are a lot of American banks that do business in Canada.
And imagine you've got some little banana republic tyrant now saying, hand over these truckers and their money, but you also live in a rule of law country like America.
No, I don't think any American banks actually obeyed the Emergencies Act.
I don't think any American insurance companies did.
So credit to them for waiting out the tyrant.
But putting aside that American little anecdote, to seize and freeze bank accounts is such a shocking thing.
I am certain that billions of dollars left the country from people saying, oh my God, we've seen this movie before, whether it's Venezuela or Russia.
We're just going to move our money out to the States.
I think there was a bit of a run on the banks.
That's how ordinary people reacted.
But where was the Chamber of Commerce?
Where was some bankers?
You know, there's a lot of bank consumer watchdogs.
Where were the editorials against this?
I think, where was the opposition?
I think that it was so muted.
No judge spoke out against it.
No law professors or very few.
The media in general was those truckers deserve it.
They're a menace.
Go harder.
I mean, maybe I'm missing some really powerful establishment objectors to this.
But it wasn't just atrocious in itself.
It's the reaction to it that was atrocious.
The general reaction from Canadian establishment society was good.
Finally, we're cracking down on those truckers.
What do you think?
I would agree to some extent, although I do think there was a bit of a pivot because all of a sudden, it, to a lot of people, was no longer just about the truckers.
Remember, there was a chill there, which was the intent.
I mean, in the end, the government only froze the accounts of a couple hundred people.
I say only.
I think one was too many.
But there were people that didn't know if the account was going to be frozen if they donated $10 to the GoFundMe campaign or $10 to the Gifts and Go.
You had people, I mean, True North is supported by donors, and I had people emailing me saying, I'm scared that I can't donate to True North because my account is going to get frozen.
So it sent this chill across the country, which was, I think, exactly the point.
The government wanted to tell people: no, no, no, we're in control, not you guys, and we're coming after you.
And there was that press conference given by the Ottawa Police acting chief where he said, you know, once this convoy is done, we're still going to come after you.
We're going to review the footage.
And if we see you were involved, we're coming after you.
We're putting financial sanctions.
We'll lay charges.
And it just became punitive.
And I think ordinary Canadians, forget about the establishment types.
Ordinary Canadians were seeing that and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Yeah.
And even a lot of people who were not fans of the convoy or had soured on the convoy the longer it went on were not at all fans of or supportive in the least of the Emergencies Act and the measures that were brought in.
So I think there were people that just wanted anything.
They hated the convoy.
They wanted the government to pull out all the stops, go in, crack skulls.
But there's a silent majority, I think, that understood the government was going too far.
Yeah.
You know, it's amazing.
All the things that people accused Donald Trump of being a dictator, a censor, a thin-skinned bully, a violator of civil liberties.
He actually didn't do those things.
Trudeau did those things.
And I think it was the, I mean, the lockdowns were already the worst civil liberties fiasco in Canadian history.
But that Emergencies Act was so particularly and acutely outrageous.
I think that was one of the darkest moments in Canadian freedom history.
The book is called The Freedom Convoy.
Congratulations on The Freedom Convoy00:04:52
The author is Andrew Lawton.
The subtitle, I love it, The Inside Story of Three Weeks That Shook the World.
I think it's true.
Andrew, congratulations on this book.
Folks, I encourage you to buy it.
What an interesting history of an interesting historical moment.
The link to the book is under this video, or you can just go to Amazon.
Congratulations.
I understand you had an audio book coming out too for folks who love to listen to a book while they drive or while they're doing other things.
Is that right?
Yes, we have an audio book coming out.
Hopefully that'll be in the next few weeks.
And obviously, the paperback edition is out now.
So I would appreciate it if you'd buy one for yourself and buy one for someone in your life that is against the convoy, but actually hasn't been exposed to the truth.
And I think you'll both find things in there you can learn from.
Right.
Well, you know what?
Congratulations to you.
And I'm pleased that you got it out so quickly.
I think, I mean, I think it actually may be the first trucker book.
Is that right?
Yeah, it is.
And I mean, the month of April was a bit rough.
I didn't see much of my wife, which to be honest, I think she might have actually appreciated, but we'll go there in another episode.
But we got it out.
And I think as well, it's not just a recap.
There is a lot of new information in there, which I think was important to telling this story.
But I expect there will be more to come.
And you know what?
I welcome it.
Well, you know what?
I want to say, I mean, I love Rebel News.
It's something I helped create, and I feel a tremendous paternity to it.
And I love our work.
And by the way, covering the truckers was our finest hour, if I may say.
It was like we were preparing for that moment our whole lives.
We had 400 million views and impressions in the month of February, which is as much as we normally get in an entire year.
That was our time to shine.
But I must note the other independent journalists who were there in force also.
You, you mentioned Rupa Superman, who's now with True North as well.
I'm almost running out of names.
You know, there is some people.
People I had never heard of.
They were streaming it on their YouTube channel.
It was tremendous.
I met more independent journalists there than I have in the last five years.
Yeah, you know what?
Sorry, I just, I'm blanking out because there are a half dozen.
And it was everyone's time to shine.
I mentioned Viva Friday, David Freiheid is his real name, who just live streamed for four hours.
And he's a lawyer by training, so he was very thoughtful about what was happening.
So the fact that we had 400 million views, and I bet you you had a ton, and all these other independent journalists combined, I dare say that amongst us, we had as much viewership as the mainstream media because people simply didn't trust them and they weren't doing the real work.
So that was not just something we did in the moment, but all of us had been practicing and training and perfecting how we do it and learning how to live stream.
And so I think that was a great moment for independent journalism.
And I think that your book is as authoritative.
I haven't read it yet, but we've been talking about it.
Your book is as authoritative as anything to come out of it.
In fact, I dare say, if later this year we see some book from some CBC hitman hired to smear it, I think that your book will do better than the BS book from the CBC.
It'll be more trustworthy, and it is a greater and more accurate record of what went on because the CBC, although they surrounded that Parliament Hill in their offices, they refused to go down and out into the street and dirty themselves with the regular people.
And that couldn't have been clearer.
So many groups have abased themselves in the last two years.
Politicians, of course, opposition politicians, of course.
But I think the media has perhaps lost more credibility than anyone.
Andrew, congratulations on the book.
Thanks for spending Canada Day with us and good luck.
And I hope you hit number one.
Thank you, Ezra.
Happy Dominion Day to you and your audience, too.
Right on.
There you have it.
One of our favorite guys, Andrew Lawton.
The book, one more time, is called The Freedom Convoy: The Inside Story of Three Weeks It Shook the World.
Do you agree with me that it's important to support conservative authors when they publish books that run counter to the mainstream narrative?
Do you agree with me on that?
If you do, then please click the link under this video and support Andrew.
And I always find it emotionally satisfying when a book goes to number one on the Amazon list because, of course, it shows that you're not alone.
So if you click that link, I think that'll, you know, I don't know how many people have to buy a book to nudge it up there, but maybe you'll be one of them.
Well, listen, thanks for spending your holiday with us today.
And until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.