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March 4, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
34:36
Truck Convoy Leader Tom Marazzo

Truck Convoy Leader Tom Marazzo shares his stories with RFK Jr.

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Hey everybody, welcome back and I'm really happy to have as my guest today Tom Arazzo, who is a retired Canadian military officer.
He was commissioned as a combat engineer officer.
He was until recently a teacher at a Georgian college in Ontario.
And he is one of the organizers and logistical consultants and spokespeople for the Canadian Truckers Convoy.
And I wanted to talk to you today about doing kind of a post-mortem on the convoy and what you think it meant because it had a tremendous impact obviously all over the world.
I think one of the outstanding features of The event was the reaction, this very, very troubling reaction by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Canadian government and parliament to the convoy.
It was clearly a peaceful demonstration.
This was the principal theme of it.
It was an organizing event.
Feature of the convoy from the beginning, that it was about peace and love and justice and democracy, and yet it was successfully, as it turns out, tarred in the press.
I orchestrated propaganda effort as kind of a A violent, prone demonstration that was threatening to bring down the Canadian government.
I want to say something to you, Tom.
Two years ago when I went to Berlin and spoke to the first great protest against the mandates, I opened up my talk by saying tomorrow in the press they're going to say this was a group of Nazis.
And if you looked out on that crowd, it looked like Woodstock.
It was a Huge, huge picture of Mahatma Gandhi behind me on the stage.
The embassy of the event was a black Ghanian from Africa.
There were religious leaders and Green Party leaders and labor leaders.
And it was a diverse crowd with every color in the rainbow and religious affiliation.
And there were people from every nation in Europe.
I'm obviously declaimed in the global press and the German press as a kind of a neo-Nazi conspiracy.
And in fact, I'm involved in a lawsuit still with the Daily Kos, which is a liberal blog in our country.
It is associated, by the way, with the intelligence agencies.
And the Daily Ghost said that I was in Berlin cavorting with Nazis.
That's a quote from...
They knew it was not true.
They knew it was propaganda.
And, you know, I have a very, very heavy load in our country in proving defamation because I have to prove actual malice, meaning I have to prove they knew it was a lie at the time they wrote it, and they wrote it Yes.
I am in that litigation now, but this is a strategy and it is a propaganda strategy that has been part of the government response from the beginning that anybody The questions of government policies has to be marginalized, vilified, denounced, and destroyed, and discredited as a right-wing racist Nazi.
And that's what they did to you.
I actually saw...
A video of a guy walking through the only, you know, it was all these beautiful Canadian flags and people laughing and dancing and kids drinking hot chocolate and playing on bouncy castles.
People giving truckers, giving food to the homeless, putting up garbage bags every 40 or 50 feet so that they wouldn't create a mess.
It was one guy walking through the edge of the ground carrying a Confederate flag.
And it was amazing how the truckers reacted to them by driving them out and telling them, you know, all of them spontaneously and individually saying, that's what this is about.
A crowd who was wearing a baklava for his face.
So his face was hidden.
And, you know, one has to suspect that he was a deliberate agent provocateur who didn't want his identity with people.
Because he was trying to discredit the entire event by shelling out with that.
And it was really wonderful.
Wonderful how the drugs react.
But it must have been very discouraging to you to have this very idealistic event discredited in a very, very organized way.
Yes.
And we were always on the lookout for what we believe to be provocateurs.
Because we suspected there would be many, many groups out there that would try to pull this kind of a stunt.
You know, when you have thousands and thousands of people all attending a major event like that, but one person misbehaves, the entire story becomes about that one person and everybody gets painted with that same brush.
And we were very, very, very aware of that.
And, you know, sometimes it was a great risk to us because of some of the supporters, but sometimes we...
We had to balance between, do we censor people ourselves or do we allow people to express themselves?
In the middle of trying to be vigilant that there wouldn't be provocateurs within the crowd, because we knew that there would be.
So it was always a risk to us.
And, you know, it did happen.
And that's exactly what the mainstream media attacked.
And, you know, I made a joke about Justin Trudeau the first time I did any media stuff, and they twisted my words completely and went after me And so we knew that we were going to be up against these types of narrative rewriting scenarios.
And so we did a really good job, I think, of blocking the mainstream media from having access to us directly.
We capitalized very well, I think, on the social media or alternate media.
And we were very effective at freezing them out.
So it drove them crazy.
They had to invent their own stories.
And they would take clips from stuff they got off of social media and then twist everybody's words.
So we expected it, but it was very difficult to counter.
And what has been the reaction...
Really, all of Canada is, you know, the most liberal nation, probably outside of Scandinavia, in terms of, you know, the values of tolerance and kindness and justice and a functional democracy.
But, you know, in the United States and in Canada, there's a lot of people Mm-hmm.
But it's really people who have shut off their capacity for critical thought and are categorizing any kind of opposition as right-wing.
Do you think there was any penetration of that group or did it just harden their position?
From my perspective, I think the critical mistake that the Government of Canada made is They use the banks.
They deputize the banks against the Canadian people without any form of due process.
And even the most, I would say, hardened supporters of the COVID-19 mandates, you know, those people that are, you know, calling for heads to roll if you don't get the vaccine.
They want to shut you out of society.
And, you know, why aren't you wearing two masks?
That kind of thinking.
And it's unfortunate because...
You know, there is a large population in this country that fully support everything that comes out of the mainstream media in this country.
But when the banks started to attack people's bank accounts and their credit scores and close their credit cards off, you know, when they attack people's means to provide for their families, that really struck a nerve with a lot of Canadians.
And we're seeing more and more people wake up to the fact that you're incredibly vulnerable to having the wrong think in Canada.
And what was particularly disturbing is the deputy prime minister here, Chrystia Freeland.
She was bragging and almost giddy at a press conference she did when she was talking about the fact that after the emergency act is over, they really have no intention of letting go of this Fintrack system.
How, you know, even though the emergency will end, they're going to hold on to these powers to attack your banking.
And what's even further disturbing to this is how there was a viral video that went around talking about the Canadian Banking Association in a one-stop shop digital ID. And so we've just seen sort of evidence of a social credit score tied to law enforcement and tied to your finances and your assets.
So when you...
Basically, and I just want you to finish what you're saying.
Sure.
I first want to take a step back so that people who don't know what happened, you can outline what happened.
Because we've been saying from the beginning of the pandemic, I've been saying and getting a deep platform for it, You know, this move towards digitalized currency is about controlling conduct and controlling behavior and destroying dissent.
Once we've shifted to digitalized currency, it will give the big bank accounts and the government.
Every transaction will become visible to them.
And also, they have the power now to shut off your bank account.
And people have ridiculed me for that.
And I think for the first time we saw it happen in Canada, Yes.
It's being punished by shutting down people's credit cards and bank accounts.
The same they do in China with programmable currency.
Yes.
And people said, that could never happen here.
But then we saw the most democratic government on the earth.
Yeah.
Just talk about the details of what they did.
I mean, first of all, they shut down the GoFundMe and they just steal $10 million.
Why did that disappear or what?
Well, they convinced GoFundMe that all of those donations from Canadians, Canadians, Americans, Europeans, they convinced GoFundMe that those were proceeds of a crime.
And so GoFundMe acted and they seized that money.
And then, of course, the media backlash was insane.
And the last time I read, there's four U.S. governors that are asking their attorney generals to investigate that.
The actions of GoFundMe.
And so we switched over to a different platform, US-based, which is called GiveSendGo.
And so the premier and his attorney general actually, in a courtroom without any representation by any of us, Through our lawyers or the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, we found out about it in the news that the Ontario Attorney General had seized that money.
And so it's still being frozen right now by the Ontario Premier, not even Justin Trudeau.
This happened at the provincial level.
And so that money is all tied up right now.
And we can't touch it.
It's now considered a proceed of crime in this province.
And these are things that happen without any due process.
We had no legal representation whatsoever in that courtroom when it happened.
Like I said, we found out in the media.
And so even when the Emergency Act came into effect three weeks later...
Cut you off again.
Sorry.
Because there also were other retaliatory moves, right?
Yes.
They were going after individuals' bank accounts.
Yes, yes.
Explain that.
Yeah.
And so actually that started to happen.
Well, there were some of the bank accounts that were frozen from the attorney general under this investigation.
Again, ex parte.
But then when we fast forward, when the emergency act actually happened, there was a list of 42 of us.
And my name appeared on it.
And the RCMP created a list of 42 individuals involved in the convoy in one way or another that were known to police.
I was known to police because the first moment I arrived, I gave the police my name because I was put into an interview.
Not really an interview, but a meeting with Ottawa police and a bunch of truckers.
But when the emergency act came, all of my bank accounts were frozen.
My credit card was turned off.
My spouse's credit rating was attacked and it dropped 109 points.
And, you know, the credit card that I used to pay for my child's medication didn't work.
And because it's on file with the pharmacy and I couldn't even get, you know, heart medication for my child.
And so this was all done without any warrants for my arrest, any charges.
I wasn't prosecuted.
This was because I had the wrong thoughts.
That's why my accounts were frozen.
At no time did I or any of the people involved in this convoy break any laws other than municipal bylaws in the way that we parked the trucks.
That was the crime that we committed.
And if you really dig deep into the Emergency Act, there's three provisions in that act that allowed them to take action.
But none of those applied to what we were doing in Ottawa.
And those things are disruption to international trade, which we didn't do in Ottawa because there's no border.
There's interrupting critical infrastructure, which there was not any critical infrastructure.
And in fact, we kept safety lanes open on all the roads we were parked on.
For emergency services.
And then finally, if they believed you had an intent to commit violence, and the only people that committed the violence were the police themselves.
So it didn't apply to us in Ottawa.
You know, and you can make the argue that the bridge that connects Windsor to Detroit, when they blocked that, maybe, you know, that was blocking international trade and critical infrastructure.
So the Emergency Act, by the standard that was set, applied to them.
But it didn't apply to us in Ottawa.
But we took the most vicious beating.
And we also had all of our bank accounts frozen.
Now, eventually they did return.
My bank is the Bank of Montreal, or BMO. And, you know, I will be leaving that bank, but the problem is, where do you go?
We only have five chartered banks in this country and then a bunch of credit unions.
So where do I go next?
And I think the beneficiaries of the conduct of the big banks, the beneficiaries, is going to be the credit unions.
But, you know, there was no due process.
It's extraordinary.
It's really extraordinary that the government can steal your money.
Yes.
Punish you for criticizing government policies without any due process, without going to court, without charging you for a crime.
It's something out of the mid-ages.
It's exactly the kind of thing that King George was doing.
And even he didn't do this kind of thing.
That prompted us to have a revolution in this country.
Yeah.
But have there been any consequences for the banks in terms of the public perception?
I mean, I would think that the big business interests and the large depositors would now be very, very frightened and insecure about Canadian banking.
Well, we did see indications that some of the big five charter banks, they were starting to feel like they were going to have a run on their banks because it upset Canadians so much, they started pulling out money from their ATMs and closing accounts.
So they got very nervous.
And it's very interesting to us because we made a very important observation.
The Parliament passed the, you know, after debate, the Parliament passed the use of the Emergency Act for Justin Trudeau with the help of NDP, which is typical behavior.
Like, he has a minority government, but with the NDP, he really does have a majority.
They prop up everything that he wants, and they behave like a Liberal Party.
And so we saw that happen, but then the Senate started to debate, and they looked like they were going to vote.
And then he stopped, he revoked the Emergency Act.
We all thought that was very interesting, but we realized that it was the banks.
And I don't have any evidence to support this, but it makes sense to me that when the banks started to see a run on their deposits, they more than likely called up the government and said, hey, you know what, you should really knock that off.
Because it was a big surprise to everybody that he actually revoked the Emergency Act without the Senate completing their debate or their vote on whether to extend it.
So, you know, it's very interesting.
It revealed some interesting things for us, coupled that with mainstream media.
So we made some really interesting observations about that particular incident.
And I think they'll be important to maybe some future steps that we take as, I like to say, decentralized grassroots movements around this country.
We're in a situation where people can see for themselves what's really going on.
They don't have to be told.
There's no one single leadership to this movement.
This is Canadians who've had enough, and they're taking matters into their own actions.
I don't have the power or the influence to start telling people to close their bank accounts with BMO. People just made their own observations, realized that they were in a very vulnerable position, and they take their own actions.
You don't have to tell people that.
Which is kind of contrary to what the behavior we've seen over the last two years with regards to masks and, you know, vaccinations.
Nobody in this country that I know have got the vaccination because they wanted to be safe.
They wanted to be inoculated from unemployment.
And that's why they took the vaccination.
They wanted to travel.
They didn't do it because they felt that COVID was a risk to their life.
They were doing it because they believed that life would go back to normal.
But in the last two years, Canadians are much more less free than they were prior to COVID-19.
And I think the government of Canada has repeatedly proven that.
And same with the provinces.
Well, you know, once the government takes power in the history of mankind, it doesn't have to relinquish power without a demand, without a confrontation.
I think a lot of people in our country were just frightened and said, well, we're not going to do these things.
But if you take a long view, it's very, very dangerous to give the government.
You know, we were contacted at CHD Children's Health Invest.
I was contacted by a bank in this country called the Cambridge Bank in McLean, Virginia.
Put us in touch with them in touch with the candidate truckers because it's a privately owned bank and they said they supported the truckers and it's run by a former United States congressman.
It's a family owned bank.
Great.
They would never freeze people's accounts for political reasons or on orders of the government.
I think there may be a place for institutions like that in the future that people have faith in.
When it comes to money, people don't want the bank telling them that they can't get their money if they vote wrong or if they say the wrong thing.
Yes, and we're seeing evidence of that.
For us, it's a little bit difficult, too, because in Canada, we don't have a lot of options.
You know, the one thing that people have to understand with the Emergency Act is, and I discussed this with Keith Wilson, one of my lawyers that's defending me now against this $306 million lawsuit because of the horns.
Because of the what?
The horns.
So there's a class action lawsuit that was started with an Ottawa citizen.
And she originally sued for roughly the same amount of money that was generated from the GoFundMe.
And they met in court.
Miraculously, she got a court date.
I don't know how she got it overnight.
And wanted basically the horns to stop.
And the judge ruled in favor of stopping the horns.
And we actually abided by that for the most part.
I mean, we couldn't control every single truck horn.
Out there.
Or somebody driving by and showing their support by honking.
But this lawsuit has now grown into a tort case.
Where they have named several of the organizers of the truck convoy.
They've now named me, Danny Beaufort, and a couple of other individuals through their organizations.
And the lawsuit has now grown to $306 million.
And the irony of this is that I don't own a truck and I don't even own a horn.
So why my name is on there, this is all tort law.
And, you know, I have full confidence in my lawyers.
You know, I'm not overly concerned about it, but it's really, it's almost like it's an effort to just waste our time and our energy and not focus on what's really happening out there.
So that's kind of frustrating in its own right.
But, you know, in terms of what options the Canadians have, where do we safely park our money?
We're looking.
We're looking everywhere.
And the issue with the banks, though, is that when they got that order from the federal government, that list of 42 names, they were legally obligated to go and seize those accounts.
If not, they would have been committing an offense.
However, I think they have enough capital and legal means to have challenged it in court.
Right away and challenged the federal government on this type of behavior.
I don't think they did the moral thing by any stretch.
I think they just, without thinking, did whatever they were told and they tested the waters to see how it would go.
And now it's backfired on the banks and people are starting to close their bank accounts in this country, which is a good thing, but potentially it could be a disastrous thing for the Canadian economy.
You know, what is the political fallout?
Was Justin damaged by this?
Is the Liberal Party damaged?
Is the NDP damaged?
What kind of political fallout do you see in Canada?
I see a lot of political turmoil.
And, you know, one of the big challenges that we've had in the last two years is that the Conservative Party in this country for the last two years have behaved nothing like the Conservative Party or their heritage.
They have not behaved like Conservatives.
They have just gotten in line right behind all of the COVID mandates.
No questions asked, no debate.
They've just done it.
But recently they got rid of their leader, Aaron O'Toole.
And they have an interim leader right now.
And so the Conservatives, I think, because they lost in September to Justin Trudeau.
What's happened now is the Conservatives still haven't chosen a formal leader.
They have an interim leader right now.
So they have to go through a leadership race.
It's an election called today.
My belief is as long as the Conservatives behave like Conservatives, the Conservatives would win in a landslide.
And you would see the Liberals get completely decimated.
And I think the NDP would lose the vast majority of their, they only have about 25 seats, I believe.
So you would see a complete upheaval.
The challenge there is, who becomes the official opposition?
So if the Conservatives become, or the government, who's going to be the opposition?
There's not an election at the federal level scheduled.
We have a different system where an election could be called any day in this country.
It's not like in America where there's a four-year election cycle for the federal government or for the president anyway.
But, like, he could call an election any time.
Do you think that most Canadians oppose the emergency powers?
You know, I... That's a really tough question because I'm not a big social media person.
I don't have a large presence on there.
I really don't have a metric to be able to answer that.
Everybody in my circle, everybody that I personally know that is awake to the insanity that we have all experienced in the last two years, they are fully against the Emergency Act.
But there's no really good way to quantify that.
And that's very tricky because if, let's say, we called for a national referendum on COVID mandates today, you really have a hard time telling which way people would lean.
You know, it's a big risk if you were to do a national referendum on COVID mandates because you could lose.
You could literally lose.
In summary, in terms of the fallout of the event, Is it net positive or net negative?
And how would you characterize or describe it?
I would say it's net positive.
We didn't leave Ottawa with Justin Trudeau ending the federal mandates, which is why we were there.
We didn't achieve that objective.
However, Canada, Ontario, the provinces in the world We're given a voice.
We're given an opportunity by the truckers.
Even me, I think the truckers that I'm able to sit here on a call and have this interview with you.
And for, you know, almost two years, I didn't have a voice.
The truckers gave me that voice.
And what I'm seeing overwhelmingly, you know, people said to me many, many times in Ottawa, it's the first time in two years I've been proud to be a Canadian again.
And so more and more and more people are waking up.
And I've had a lot of people say to me, hey, you know, my 80-year-old grandmother, who was a supporter of all these mandates, saw what you guys did, and she's actually reconsidered it and changed her position completely.
So there are thousands of Canadians, and I get these messages every day, thousands of Canadians that have woken up to this finally being not about safety, but about government control and power grabs.
So people really are starting to wake up to that absolute truth.
And they're waking up to it all around the world.
And what I'm really happy to see is that Australia, Australia is the only Commonwealth country in the world that doesn't have a charter of rights and freedoms, which is why their government has been so brutal with their law enforcement and military against its own people.
And so they have been, I think, inspired by the Canadian truckers and same with France, same with New Zealand.
Look at the convoy on its way to D.C. right now, right?
The truckers gave everybody a voice and an opportunity to feel like they were not alone and that they could start speaking out and speaking freely about how they feel.
And the fact that the government of Canada now wants to censor you or criminalize your thinking, you know, that is waking even more people up that were fully in the past.
So I would say it's an overwhelming positive.
How did the truckers inherit the male of leadership in this movement?
I mean, I think 95 or 96% of them were fully vaccinated.
Yeah.
They were the ones to finally revolt.
Well, you know, that's a great question.
And we've often asked, like, how is it that the truckers were able to do it?
And if you really consider the small number, like we had hundreds of trucks, but it's very, very small in comparison to the overall number of trucks in Canada and the trucks that go back and forth between the US-Canada border.
But when they can take their big giant truck and physically park it, literally at the footsteps of Justin Trudeau, it's hard to ignore.
You can't just close your curtains and pretend like you don't hear the horns or see the big trucks or recognize that the city of Ottawa has all of these people there, you know, which is different than a protest on foot.
Because a protest on foot in the wintertime, people are going to protest and then they're going to go home at the end of the day.
The truckers were there, and they stayed.
And they had every intention of staying for weeks on end.
So without the big giant metal objects with wheels, they wouldn't have been able to accomplish what they did.
I think the trip wire for the truckers was the vaccine passport that they need back and forth from the U.S. to Canada.
What would have happened if Justin Trudeau had said to the truckers, come to Ottawa, Let's meet.
Let's talk about it.
Do you think that would have diffused protest?
I think so.
I absolutely believe so.
But he had no interest in that.
And that was, you know, I personally, in some of the media stuff that I did, I personally, I almost begged for him to just come and talk to us and sit at a table.
And we thought that he would be receptive to that because he was...
He sent a delegation to talk to the protesters in the pipeline out west.
He was encouraging or, you know, admonishing the Indian government for not talking to the farmers in India who were protesting for over a year.
So we had a lot of evidence to suggest that he would actually sit in and talk because publicly many times he stated, go and talk to people.
But he didn't.
He outright refused to come and talk to us.
And instead, he went into hiding, but didn't send a delegation, didn't send his deputy prime minister, didn't send any representative of the Liberal government.
Instead, he just closed his curtains, went into hiding, and pretended like we weren't there.
Because we started off as a fringe minority with unacceptable views, and three weeks later, he was invoking the Emergencies Act.
Against a bunch of bouncy castles.
So we believed he would talk, but he outright refused.
How can our listeners support you?
Right now, I think patience will be a virtue to support us.
But just to continue following on social media, there will be more information coming out in the future.
But right now, Tamara Litch is still...
We believe she's a political prisoner right now.
And so she hasn't been released from jail.
Explain how she is.
So Tamara Lynch is one of the original organizers of the Freedom Convoy, you know, the trucker convoy that arrived in Ottawa.
And her, with Chris Barber, started the whole movement and were the original organizers of the truck convoy.
And unfortunately, on the Thursday before the police attacked, she was arrested and denied bail on charges of mischief and conspiracy to commit mischief.
And so she is now still being held in custody and she has a bail hearing with a different judge and we're expecting that she'll be released.
Okay.
So I just want to tell you, Evangeline Lilly set this up and she said, hey, have you heard of Robert Kennedy Jr.?
I said, yeah, because I've had his father and his uncle's photo up on my wall for about 25 years.
So yes, I've heard of him.
Anyways, a big thrill for me to get a chance to talk to you today.
Well, you too, Tom.
The honor is mine and Thank you for your courage and your leadership.
And how can our listeners follow you or support you on social media?
I'm on Twitter under Tom Marazzo, and I'm also on LinkedIn and Instagram, but I'm not a huge social media presence because I kind of felt like what you've experienced, I would just be banned or censored by social media for my unacceptable views.
Is there any website or is there any place that people can go to to support the truckers?
Yes, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, their website, and I believe they're crowdfunding for legal defenses for the truckers.
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