What Is The 'Canary Mission' And Why Are US Officials Using It To Attack The First Amendment?
Testimony yesterday that the US Administration relied on the shadowy, Israel-linked Canary Mission to identify students for harassment and deportation raises serious questions about its stated commitment to the First Amendment. Is this "woke Right" just a mirror image of the "woke Left"? Or worse? Also today, Netanyahu hangs around for a THIRD day to tour the Pentagon.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Good.
There's a few problems left.
Let's work on them.
Yes.
One keeps recropping.
It's a bipartisan issue.
It seems like people in power tend to want to control the information that gets out that might diminish their power.
And right now, people in power, I think they're called Republicans, and some of them claim they're constitutionalists, and some call themselves libertarians and all that.
But we want to talk a bit about the First Amendment and how it's enforced and what they're doing, especially in relationship to the Palestinian determination to do harm to the Palestinians.
And that is the Palestinians are at fault.
I mean, they've caused every problem we've ever had in the Middle East.
And their opposition actually take the position that just forget it.
They're not a people.
Just get rid of them.
They have no rights to where they live.
And lo and behold, their living quarters shrink more than ever a lot in the last year.
But it's always because they're favoring one group over another.
But it's infiltrated into our society because it means that if you take a position right now, this is the way I understand it, if you take a position which is a public position, or if you're a teacher or a writer and say, you know, we think the Palestinians are getting a bum wrap, you know, and that they're being mischaracterized.
And even that, just to say that you support them is a dangerous thing to do.
I mean, especially now that the shift away from having stupid open borders and letting anybody and everybody come in to the point where anybody who looks like they might know a Palestinian, we better be careful with them because they're causing all the trouble.
And that means that you have our government, since the governments have way too much control over our universities because we finance them.
And if they don't do the political things they're supposed to do, then they take the money away or badger them.
So I think this whole issue and this concern about how the Palestinians are retreating is a First Amendment issue.
That's top of the list of our concerns that we should have.
Yeah, and the reason we're talking about it today, because this has been an issue for quite some time.
Now, there are a couple of groups.
One is called the Canary Mission, and the other is called Betar USA.
What both of these groups do is they operate within the United States, and their goal is to dox, which is to release the identities and to defame anyone who participates in protests either against genocide in Gaza or against Israel's behavior or against the U.S. relationship with Israel.
And lest people be confused, many of these protesters are American Jews themselves who are getting caught up in this.
So the reason why it's news today is that a blockbuster piece came out and it's basically everywhere, but we picked the one from Politico if you put that one up.
The Trump officials have admitted now, this is sealed records in a court case that's been unsealed.
And this is from Politico.
Trump officials used shadowy website to target pro-Palestinian academics for deportation.
Court records show.
Now, go to the next clip, a little bit more detail.
As the Trump administration identified pro-Palestinian academics to target for deportation, it relied heavily on an anonymously run pro-Israel website that has been criticized for doxing, according to newly unsealed court documents and testimony at an ongoing trial.
To support President Donald Trump's deportation drive, the Department of Homeland Security assembled a, quote, tiger team of intelligence analysts who built dossiers on about 100 foreign students and scholars engaged in pro-Palestinian activity, the record shows.
And the information that they used to build those dossiers, Dr. Paul, came from this group, which runs around taking pictures of people.
If a kid speaks up in a college classroom and says, well, what about the Palestinians?
They take his name down.
And in fact, why don't we just take a break and listen to Glenn Greenwald?
This is back in May, April or May, I think, when first we started hearing about this group, although it's been around for some years.
But Greenwald, for this next minute, five seconds, I think does an excellent.
You might want to put your earpiece in, Dr. Paul, and listen to what Greenwald has to say.
He gives a great explanation of what these groups are up to.
Now, again, the government, Marco Rubio is not finding these people.
Homeland Security is not finding them.
ICE is not finding them.
ICE isn't even looking for them.
They're here legally.
They only become illegal when Marco Rubio secretly revokes their green card or their visa because they criticize Israel.
So how do they know where to find these people?
There are two incredibly shady Israel groups, pro-Israel groups connected to Israel.
Typically, their funding is completely anonymous.
There's been reporting on where they get funding.
Who they are is even anonymous.
One of them is the Canary Mission, and they have been now for a decade.
If a student expresses in a classroom criticism of Israel, they take the student's name and they put them on a website that has been highly funded so that it's the first Google result.
If you enter that student's name when they go apply for work, it'll be, here's a list of all the anti-Semites on American campuses.
While they're doxing students and professors and putting their name on the internet, these cowards will not say or identify themselves who's behind this mission, this canary mission.
That sounds to me profoundly anti-American that they'll take these names.
They'll put them on a website.
And so when you go to apply for a job, a kid just graduates from college.
He goes to apply for a job.
Obviously, the employer is going to Google the person to see what's up with them.
The first thing that comes up because of this Canary mission, the money they spend, the first thing that comes up, oh, Joe Smith, oh, he's a raving anti-Semite.
He's probably a domestic terrorist.
Is the kid going to get a job?
No way.
And all the kid did was maybe say something about Palestine, something that's completely protected.
That in and of itself would be a huge problem.
But the fact that the U.S. government relies on this organization to decide who to kick out of our country, that's a huge scandal and a huge problem.
Yeah, I think this represents an example of a unit of government, a government of sorts, and that they're insecure with their position.
They may have a lot of responsibilities, but they're not confident that they're on the right track and they have to protect it and they're willing to bend the rules.
And, you know, the whole thing is the justification of lying and distorting things in order to maintain power and control because you're doing the Lord's work and you're sorting out the truth.
And I think it's insecurity that drives a lot of this, but it's also a complication of the setting stage is government intervention.
Our intervention in it.
Why are we so much into the detail of worrying about what some student is going to say because he came into this country?
But once again, in a free society, in a society that we consider, it's going to be much more open.
People could come.
They could be students, but there would never be a challenge like this and say, well, they're getting benefits.
They get scholarships.
They get this.
The college gets money.
So if you invite people in saying the wrong thing, let's just take the money away from the people.
Pick it away from the students.
But that would be almost absent completely if people came.
People came before we had all this student support.
They've come into our universities.
And yet the more we get involved, the bigger our empire becomes.
And the more we have at risk, you know, and the power we have, whether it's military power or monetary power or financial, the more likely it is that we're going to come up with a scheme that we're going to protect ourselves because we don't want people even thinking about eroding the power and confidence that the people have now who have been justly elected.
And yet the situation, I see the conditions as being very, very instrumental in a negative way.
And that sets the stage for these groups to come up and say, well, the problem is we have too many people in here.
Well, we did, you know, in the former administration, most people agree that that was allowing some really bad people coming in.
But that doesn't mean that anybody who criticizes one country, that they're the bad people.
And anybody who says something good about Palestinians, they're bad people and they have to be punished.
So that's over the top and it needs to be pointed out.
Remember in the last administration, Dr. Paul, we had this very similar problem, which is that the Biden administration at the time was putting a lot of pressure and working together with other non-governmental organizations to silence Americans who expressed disdain about the COVID response, about how people were being locked down, about the remedies that they were promoting for the disease.
And you remember that the Twitter files came out and it showed how involved the Biden administration was in silencing Americans who had views that they didn't like.
And so the Trump administration came in on the heels of a backlash and they said, we're going to be the pro-First Amendment.
We are going to be the anti-censorship administration.
Well, it turns out they're doing the exact same thing.
They are using the power of the U.S. government to silence people, Americans and foreigners, because Americans are caught up in this as well.
Silence Americans and foreigners, anyone in this country who says things they don't like.
They are doing the identical thing.
And that's what a lot of people call the woke right.
They're just like the woke left, but they have a different set of things that you're not allowed to talk about.
But it's the same.
The problem is not what they're talking about.
It's the use of state force and coercion to silence people, regardless of what they talk about.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And, you know, the slogan that we've used and I think tells a lot, and that is when empires get big, that truth is treasonous.
You can't talk against the empire.
Well, you might say, well, we're not talking about treason under these conditions.
We're talking about a lot of nonsense going on.
And somebody might use the word treason.
But truth is certainly unwelcome, you know, under these conditions.
And there's a lot of people that don't understand exactly what's going on and why this is happening, how the money is used.
And then ultimately, like I started off with, the real serious problem is the destruction of the First Amendment.
You know, they justify it for, you know, patriotic reasons.
You mean, you're not going to send these people out?
What kind of a patriot are you?
You know, this whole idea of what the definition of patriotism is gets so distorted instead of emphasizing what liberty is all about, you know, with the absence of violence, this whole thing opens up the door to people who are determined to have more power, more influence, and more money.
And they seem to control a lot before the people wake up.
And you already mentioned COVID.
It took a while, but the people did wake up.
That's why we have to maintain a maximum amount of freedom that we can and also maximize the freedom of people to use the First Amendment to express ourselves.
Even things you don't like hearing.
Right.
Let's go to the next clip, a couple more from Politico, and then I'm going to actually, there's an article from one of our old friends that I'll bring up in a second.
But if you go to, is that the next one?
Let's go to the next one, actually.
No, go back one.
Sorry.
Running all around here.
Forward one.
Immigration lawyers and pro-Palestinian activists have previously suspected that immigration authorities were plucking the names of academics from the Canary Mission site and seeking to revoke their visas with little independent research.
But the depositions, this is what we're talking about, reveal for the first time how broadly Trump officials relied on the website.
Testifying at the trial Wednesday, i.e. yesterday, Homeland Security official Peter Hatch, and I highlight this, acknowledged the site's significance to the Trump administration effort, but said any information taken from the site was independently verified.
Right.
The other thing the article mentioned that I didn't clip here is that Stephen Miller, who's a top Trump official and one of the ones in charge of deporting people, he was at every one of these meetings, very, very heavily involved.
Interesting Depositions Revealed00:09:33
He's an extremely, extremely pro-Israel person, by the way.
Now go to the next one.
We'll close this section out.
Canary Mission says its goal is to expose anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment on college campuses.
It posts photos and social media profiles of pro-Palestinian academics and logs their protest activities.
But here's the interesting part, Dr. Paul.
If you go to the next one, I did a little bit of searching earlier today, and I found a great article from an old friend of ours.
You will remember him well, Jim Bamford, great researcher, great researcher.
And actually, you recalled something as we were talking about his effect on Walter Jones.
That's right, the book he wrote exposing what was going on in the Middle East in Iraq.
And Walter, who represented thousands and thousands of military personnel in North Carolina, and he got hold of the book, and Walter drove back and forth from North Carolina, and he listened to books.
And that was Jim Bamford's book.
And Jim knows about this.
He got to know Walter very well.
But that was a conversion.
And that's when, although Walter was already a good friend of mine, we talked and gabbed, but we just didn't talk about or argue or recognize any differences because we just were friends.
But after he read this thing, he was very interested.
I was fascinated by the fact that he would ask questions.
That was one thing That I was told a long time ago by Leonard Reed that, you know, if you're informed, you don't have to worry about shouting and yelling and grabbing people by the shirttail, that people will eventually ask you questions.
Sometimes, sometimes they don't do the opposite.
But so I always was delighted with his approach because he wasn't a wishy-washy convert.
He was very dedicated, and he still looked after a sad loss for us to lose him.
And Bamford gets the credit for writing a terrific book exposing the lies that led us to the Iraq war.
But in this case, he's writing an article in The Nation actually in 2023.
So he was way ahead of the curve.
He said, who is funding the Canary mission inside the doxing operation targeting anti-Zionist students and professors?
Now go to that next clip.
Now, this is where it gets pretty interesting, actually, because if anyone would know, Jim Bamford would know.
And here's what he writes.
Like its campus spy operation, Israel on Campus Coalition, Canary Mission acts as a key intelligence asset for the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, i.e., the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, a highly secretive intelligence organization that is focused on the United States and the Shinbet Security Service.
That's their other intelligence service.
Not only is it intended to silence anti-Israel dissent, its list of names is also used to prevent those individuals from entering Israel and attempting to visit family.
Now, he goes on to talk about several Jewish Americans who were prevented from visiting family in Israel because they were caught up in this.
So it's not just Palestinians.
Now go to the next one.
Now, this is still from Bamford.
Very important because he's established that it is acting on behalf of a foreign power, the Israeli Intelligence Service.
And then he goes on to say he's talking about the secrecy of who funds it.
He said there's a key reason for so much secrecy.
Those Americans who are financially supporting Canary Mission were potentially committing serious crimes, acting as agents of a foreign power.
They were financing a clandestine foreign organization with ties to Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, an Israeli intelligence agency, which was using Canary Mission to identify, detain, and deport Americans entering the country, like Laura Alexem and Professor Catherine Frankie.
And I think one of those is Palestinian, and the second one is a Jewish professor.
So very, very interesting when you look at what is really behind this.
It's Israeli intelligence.
One question that crossed my mind as you were talking about this is: do you think there's any way American taxpayers' money and American governments could be sending larges to Canary the Canary mission?
Directly or indirectly, yeah.
That's always possible.
We even have to be suspect because what they do, they have to have expenses, and I think it's a legitimate thing, you know, just to be in the open is where do they get their money if they get the money from a government.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Well, it's worrisome.
This is not good, this attack on the First Amendment.
Again, regardless if you like what they say or you don't like what they say.
But anyway, I guess we should move on to our second topic if you think we're about done here.
And this is Bibi was in town.
He was supposed to leave.
He decided not to leave.
He's going to stick around a little longer.
He had, I think, at least two meetings with Trump.
But now here's Dave DeCamp writing in anti-war.com that he's not done.
Heg Seth hosts Netanyahu at the Pentagon.
He says it was, quote, an honor to be part of the war against Iran.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hekseth hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said it was an honor.
Before holding a private meeting, Hekseth and Netanyahu spoke to each other in front of reporters for a few minutes and praised U.S. and Israeli forces for conducting the 12-day war.
Hekseth is all in for this war.
His best bosom buddy Bibi was there.
Go to the next one.
And this is how Netanyahu is a master at buttering people up.
Netanyahu told Hegseth that Israel was grateful for the support and that the war was, quote, like the roar of two lions, referring to the U.S. and Israel.
I've seen some pictures of Tel Aviv, Dr. Paul.
There was a lot of damage.
There was some roar going both ways.
And from what I'm told, and I actually talked to Colonel Doug McGregor the other day on the phone, and he said that the Israelis were begging, begging anyone to stop the war after the first couple of days.
So anyway, he's hanging around.
He's not leaving.
He may come down here.
Actually, we'd love to have him in the studio.
That'd be really interesting.
But you never know.
You never know.
Well, yes, it's easy to read and see what they're doing on the negative information we get on Palestine, the Palestinians.
But the other side is all the very positive bias stuff on their enemies.
And that's the way they present it to her.
But I think that right now, sometimes politicians overreact, like when the Democrats wanted to demolish Trump.
Well, we'll fix him.
We'll impeach him.
And that became a badge of honor.
But now, maybe this is an overstatement because I think some people, including a lot of Jewish people, a lot of Jews even in Israel, would just say, should we put him at the top of the list and make him a hero and give him the Nobel Peace Prize?
And maybe somebody will laugh and say, hey, that's over the top.
Besides, only people like Kissinger can do that.
Exactly.
So anyway, I think it's the fourth meeting he had with Trump since he's been in office, only six months.
So I don't know.
Maybe they should rent a place in D.C. rather than just Blair House.
Who knows?
But I'm going to close down if you think we're ready.
And I'm going to just close by once again letting you all know that last clip.
If you can go to that very last one, we'll skip a couple of these clips and just hit the end.
Get those tickets, guys.
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We're very happy with how things are going.
We're very happy with the lineup so far.
We have some.
I have two really cool announcements to make next week that I'm really excited about.
But even if I didn't have those, Dr. Paul, we've got such a great group.
We've got Ron Paul.
We've got Doug McGregor.
We've got Max Blumenthal.
We've got Nassim Nicholas Talibu.
I think he's one of the most important thinkers of our time.
We've got Anya Parampil, Max's wife, and a great reporter on her own and a great filmmaker on her own who will be speaking.
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Snatch up those tickets.
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If you don't, I will personally apologize to you.
So over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very, very good.
You know, Hegseth, you know, was excited about his visitors.
He's a visitor.
They came.
And he was impressed.
And we're to believe that Netanyahu stayed over as a sacrifice of his important time to spend his time here.
But anyway, the whole thing is that He was doing this at the same time.
Transfer of Wealth in War00:03:02
I would have thought of a different headline about his coming here to and say, after more money, you know, that whole thing is.
But the headline said, Hexa host Neyahu at the Pentagon.
That's okay.
It says it was an honor to be part of the war against Iran.
And I want to put, to be a part of the war against Iran and the American taxpayer.
Exactly.
That's the headline.
So there should be more in that because just think of how many lives would be saved if we had not committed to a non-war since 1945.
Yeah.
It would be amazing.
And there's been so much wealth created.
And fortunately, in spite of all the economic problems and monetary policies and all the wars going on, we still have a lot of wealth.
But I think people are starting to recognize that wealth is being diminished, it's shrinking, and people know there's inflation and we have these things.
But so far, they're able to get away with this.
And that, to me, is something that the American taxpayer needs to wake up.
More and more people are waking up.
But it makes no sense, you know, for the American taxpayers to suffer in addition to all the suffering that we place on other people.
And, you know, I think that it's important to realize that foreign aid and foreign help and intervention and participating and making the world safe for democracy is all really comes down to a farce.
And they do this and say that we're going to do this.
But, you know, the simple answer to this is if you can accept the notion that foreign policy and military support is money taken out of the pockets of poor people in this country and given to rich people in poor countries.
So there is a transfer of wealth.
There are some people helped, but exactly the people that are being helped are opposite of what they would like you to believe.
So I do not believe that intervention for aggressive reasons and initiating force and control and power and money has any value at all.
If there is a need to defend oneself and defend liberty, that's a little bit different.
And that is what we'd have to do to limit it.
And the founders fully understood that, and that's why they put the restraints on us slipping into war easily.
Unfortunately, the prohibition against slipping into war easily has failed.
And the American people need to wake up and reassess that principle, just as they have to reassess the principle and demand protection of the First Amendment.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.