Juno News - January 14, 2024


Canadian military full of white supremacy, patriarchy, official journal claims


Episode Stats


Length

25 minutes

Words per minute

172.5934

Word count

4,352

Sentence count

227

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Canadian Military Journal, the official publication of the Canadian Armed Forces, is dedicated to exposing white supremacy and white supremacy in the military. In this episode, we speak with three veterans who served in the Armed Forces about their experiences with white supremacy within the organization.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 You may have seen yesterday at True North, my colleague Cosman Georgia published what
00:00:13.500 I thought was a tremendously researched story. One of these hidden in plain sight reports.
00:00:19.060 It was based on the Canadian Military Journal, which is the official publication. It's more
00:00:24.300 academic in nature, but the official publication of the Canadian Armed Forces. And while it's not
00:00:30.240 a product, it's not a communications product of the Department of National Defense,
00:00:34.440 it is official and it is where the military gets a lot of its theoretical and practical material from
00:00:41.960 clearly. Because what we saw in this issue is it was dedicated to unmasking and exposing patriarchy
00:00:49.180 and whiteness and white supremacy. I believe we have the table of contents for you here. 0.58
00:00:55.220 This is one issue, the summer issue, getting to the root of the problem. There is an article about
00:01:01.120 interrogating whiteness and power in the Canadian Armed Forces. There's an article about whether
00:01:06.280 supporting military families is reinforcing patriarchy. There is an article about gender
00:01:13.360 identity and military culture. There are articles about women's experiences, feminism, and the
00:01:19.900 military. But the bulk of this is saying that the military is upholding white supremacy and patriarchy.
00:01:26.480 This idea that the military is clearly behind and you wonder why they're having so much difficulty
00:01:31.880 with morale because they're telling all the men and all the white people that, well, you guys just
00:01:36.860 don't really matter. You are you people don't want to be too gendered about this. I wanted to get some
00:01:41.480 veteran perspective on this because, again, I've heard so many members of the Canadian Armed Forces.
00:01:46.840 My father is a veteran and I know many people in my family and in your families and many of you
00:01:52.420 listening have served in the Armed Forces as well. I wanted to welcome into the show Tom Marazzo,
00:01:57.560 who you've heard from on a number of occasions, a former captain with the Armed Forces and also the
00:02:01.960 author of the People's Emergency Act, as well as Andrew McGilvery, who's the president of Veterans for
00:02:08.020 Freedom. Drew and Tom, it's great to talk to you both. Thanks for being with us here and thanks
00:02:13.260 for your service. I mean, let me just ask first and foremost here, how does this publication and how
00:02:20.420 the military has gone on this issue make you feel about your service, this body that you devoted a
00:02:25.720 chunk of your lives to? I'll start with you, Drew.
00:02:27.440 It's pretty alarming. I'm one of the guys who was going to put in 25, 30 years. I joined because I
00:02:39.920 was a patriotic Canadian. I grew up in Scarborough, which is located in Toronto, a very multicultural
00:02:47.480 neighborhood. Then they're pushing this stuff and they're forcing it on the troops. Then I look back
00:02:52.200 in my 12-year career and I say, why did I do this? This isn't the institution. This isn't the country
00:02:57.800 that I signed up to defend and ultimately was willing to risk my life for. It's completely
00:03:03.900 disrespectful to the troops and the soldiers that are still in there. This has been a trajectory
00:03:11.200 they've been going down for the past couple of months. It just is what it is, unfortunately.
00:03:16.120 And I'll put the same question to you, Tom.
00:03:19.320 Well, I do find it completely offensive, to be perfectly honest. My time in the military,
00:03:27.380 and I did 25 years total, I was a reservist and I was a regular force member. The vast majority
00:03:34.640 of people that join the Canadian Armed Forces are rural members, some small towns, but the vast
00:03:42.400 majority of people that join are Caucasian males and females of a Christian ethnicity or Christian
00:03:52.140 descent. And, you know, they're very patriotic Canadians. And, you know, this idea of whiteness,
00:04:04.400 like it's how do you justify the concept of white supremacy when your entire unit that you're in,
00:04:11.000 let's say, as an example, your entire platoon or your company or even your regiment, when the vast
00:04:16.760 majority of the people in there are Caucasians who are, you know, come from a Christian background.
00:04:23.800 And I'm not suggesting that everybody's religious. I'm saying that their religious morals and ethics
00:04:30.100 and their values derive from a Christian upbringing in a largely Christian society.
00:04:35.700 So where does the white supremacy come in when you look around and everybody's white? Like, 0.65
00:04:42.020 who are we supremacists against? Like, it's kind of offensive to sit there and say that there's this,
00:04:49.940 you know, racism or deep dislike for somebody who doesn't look like you based on your skin color
00:04:59.880 in the Canadian forces when the reality is that anybody who's done basic training knows your
00:05:05.920 personality is stripped down to the bare essence of who you are as a Canadian and you're rebuilt as
00:05:12.680 a soldier or a sailor or an airman. You're not rebuilt as a Christian or a Muslim or you're not from India 0.98
00:05:20.540 or whatever. Like, these things are very blurred to paint this very nefarious picture that doesn't make
00:05:27.400 any sense. Because from, you know, as far as I'm concerned and everything I was ever taught in the
00:05:32.160 military, you're a soldier first. That's what matters. And can you be relied upon to defend the
00:05:40.520 lives of your brothers and sisters in arms? Nobody's looking at your ethnicity. Nobody's looking at your
00:05:46.660 religion. Nobody's looking at your whiteness. They're looking at, you know, in the case of the army,
00:05:53.080 they're looking at a guy who or girl who's, you know, camouflaged. And are they competent and willing
00:05:59.800 and able to do the business of war, the business of violence, not the business of social engineering? 0.97
00:06:07.720 And this is what a lot of this crap that we're seeing is all about. It's not about warfare. It's 0.88
00:06:12.460 not about defending Canada. It's trying to hypnotize certain portions of Canadians to vote liberal.
00:06:19.460 And I hope we can get into that discussion as well. Yeah. And I, but I wanted to ask, because you
00:06:24.820 raised, I think, an important point there. I mean, my understanding of this is not someone who's served,
00:06:29.560 but someone who's had family members who have, is that uniformity was always a very core part of the
00:06:36.000 military. And it was meant to basically be exactly what you've just described there. Your role has to be
00:06:41.460 the uniform, not who you are as an individual when you're serving. And I think it was two years ago that
00:06:47.320 they significantly dropped the standards on uniformity where you could have dyed hair and
00:06:53.460 face tattoos. No offense to people with dyed hair and face tattoos, but well, I mean, a little bit,
00:06:58.280 I'm okay offending a little bit of the face tattoo crowd. But the thing about that is that here we have
00:07:03.440 the military. And I understand why, because if you have no recruitment and you have no people there,
00:07:08.740 I understand the impulse to just start dropping all these barriers. But I think it has an inverse
00:07:13.240 relationship because all of a sudden you change it so much that the people you want in there are
00:07:17.900 saying, I don't know if I want to be a part of that anymore. But it seems like the military has
00:07:22.340 gone along with this very woke academic idea that everyone needs to be this celebrated individual
00:07:28.740 snowflake, which is a complete reversal. Correct me if I'm wrong here, Drew, but of what the military
00:07:34.760 has always been about and what it needs to be to be a success at its goals.
00:07:39.620 Yeah. So ultimately there's, there's a guy named Andy stump who does a podcast called cleared hot.
00:07:45.920 And when he was asked about diversity in the seals and he felt that they were, you know,
00:07:51.080 did they lose anything by the lack of diversity and his answer, which I remembered verbatim because
00:07:57.140 it was the perfect answer. He said, well, I don't know. He goes, are we aiming for diversity or are
00:08:02.480 we aiming to achieve a standard? And that standard is dictated to us by what we encounter on the
00:08:08.320 battlefield. And the battlefield doesn't give a crap about diversity, which is ultimately the best 0.61
00:08:13.520 answer I've ever heard. And it's, it's when you get into, into uniform, you, you get discriminated 0.90
00:08:22.500 against generally in three ways. Okay. It's your element. So either army, Navy, or air force,
00:08:28.740 your trade and your rank. And that's just to build a spree to core and there's banter and that sort of
00:08:34.660 thing. No one cares about the color of your skin or what's between your legs. We care about what is 0.99
00:08:41.260 between your ears. So all of this stuff that's happening with academia and what they're doing,
00:08:46.380 it's being funded by the government. And what we're, what's worrisome is we're seeing a similarity
00:08:51.940 between, uh, what's happening, what's happened in China with the CCP and what's happening here.
00:08:57.840 And how I, uh, what I mean is that in China, uh, the, their military is beholden to the party.
00:09:05.500 It's beholden to the CCP and not the state. And we're starting to see that here in Canada
00:09:10.360 is that the Canadian forces is becoming beholden to the liberal party and their ideology and not
00:09:15.860 the state. This idea that we're seeing, I, cause the, the, the, the whole, like we're a systemically
00:09:21.980 racist institution that goes back a couple of years now, this article that, or the series
00:09:26.920 of articles from the summer that a true North reported on yesterday. Was this really a creation
00:09:32.740 of the last couple of years? Or did you start to see this, both of you near the end of your
00:09:37.400 service? And I don't know what years you left, but had, had you started to see shades of this
00:09:41.560 trend then, or has it really just been a blunt instrument as of late?
00:09:45.680 Yeah. So I, I can, I'll speak to that just ahead of Tom, cause I know he got out a while
00:09:51.540 ago. I, I just got out just over two, uh, just over two years ago. And we lose Drew, I
00:09:58.440 hear him. I don't see him. I don't see him either. It might, it might come back. I mean,
00:10:02.300 there's a snow storm in Ontario. All right. Well, I'll go to you first, Tom, while we're
00:10:08.600 getting Drew sorted out. So in the early nineties, like I left the military in 2015, but even in
00:10:15.440 the early to mid nineties, we had this, uh, training program. It was called sharp. It
00:10:20.720 was an acronym for sexual harassment and all these things. And we had to undergo a
00:10:25.380 lot of this training, but it was interesting because the, the training was put on by non,
00:10:32.480 um, non veterans or non, uh, currently serving military. They were, you know, academic think
00:10:38.300 tank people coming in and trying to reshape the culture of the military. Yet none of the
00:10:45.100 people who were responsible for creating this training ever served in the military. So
00:10:49.840 they don't understand the culture, you know, and what I found really interesting about, um,
00:10:55.420 your colleague in the article that, that was, was put out, you know, you've got these academics
00:11:00.280 who are academically tied to the defense academy in Kingston. Yet I see no evidence that they
00:11:06.720 actually ever served in uniform. So how is it that they are trying to reshape currently the
00:11:12.820 culture of the military? We're in, in the past, they've never even been part of it. And this
00:11:17.320 is a problem when academics try to get involved in a culture that they don't fully appreciate
00:11:22.600 because they haven't even so much as done basic training. Now I've done basic training once in
00:11:27.760 the reserves. And then as an officer, I had to redo it. And yes, there are training evolutions you go
00:11:33.280 through. Um, annually, there are some things, but it's never been as obvious and egregious as it is
00:11:40.780 right now, where they've gone so far to attack things like, you know, even masculinity. I mean,
00:11:48.100 I'm sorry, but we need, we need aggressive men and women in uniform who do the business of violence. 0.94
00:11:56.160 Okay. And I find, you know, you, you raise the example of the, uh, you know, the tattoos and the
00:12:03.240 dyed hair and the, even the nail polish and earring in my day, that was absolutely unheard of. Okay. You,
00:12:09.400 you had to be focused on the business of war, not the, the, the business of social engineering,
00:12:16.260 like we're seeing right now. And yes, this has slowly been creeping in over, over years,
00:12:22.380 but since this current liberal government has gone in, they have completely terraformed the
00:12:27.320 Canadian armed forces into something very, um, non, non-serious, non-serious. I mean,
00:12:34.260 if Canada were to go to war today, who in the hell would be intimidated by the fact that the
00:12:39.660 Canadians are now coming? And I want to leave this one last point. Um, you know, Rommel had said the
00:12:45.760 perfect military, the, the most deadly military in the world would have been German officers, 0.83
00:12:51.700 American equipment and Canadian soldiers. And I don't think that equation holds true
00:12:57.920 any longer, unfortunately. Yeah. And, and to your point about masculinity, I, I'm not sure any
00:13:03.040 Afghan, Afghan girls that had an education for the first time in their lives, uh, because of the 1.00
00:13:08.500 Canadian military and other allied forces there. I don't think they were complaining about toxic
00:13:12.380 masculinity when the soldiers came to town, uh, against the Taliban, just to give one recent
00:13:18.100 example here. Uh, drew, you, you got cut off by technology there. We were talking about kind
00:13:22.580 of when this started and I'm curious about your experience here. Yeah. So I got out just over,
00:13:27.320 uh, two years ago and the anti-racism in DEI training was just starting to trickle in. Uh,
00:13:34.400 you know, I was someone who was told that, uh, I had to go into the communist style struggle
00:13:39.160 sessions where they said, Oh, y'all white men, bad, not even be putting on by better or sort of
00:13:44.100 current military members. It was being put on by, you know, government, you know, they're bureaucrats
00:13:49.460 and stuff who were coming down and doing this training in academia. And, and really in six years,
00:13:54.240 we have seen three instances of right-wing extremism or white supremacy in the calf. It was,
00:14:00.140 uh, Patrick Matthews, Boris, Mihalovic, and then the proud boy incident in 2017. That's three incidents
00:14:06.800 from my last year at the recruiting center in Toronto, we saw three instances of attacks on
00:14:12.540 our recruiting center. Two were by, um, uh, I guess when I say jihadi type attacks, and one was done
00:14:20.280 by a left-wing, uh, Antifa woman. And the media wasn't down there reporting on those, but you can
00:14:25.620 sure believe if it was some sort of white, white, uh, supremacist attack on our recruiting center,
00:14:30.580 they would have been down there reporting it. So they've been pushing this bogus narrative for a
00:14:35.280 while. And you can talk to any current serving member where Al's at an all time low because of
00:14:41.700 these commie style struggle sessions is being forced on them. That's not what the job of the military is.
00:14:47.720 If you ask an infantry, their job is to close with and destroy the enemy. They don't care who's beside
00:14:53.660 them as long as they're well-trained and they can trust them with their lives. So this has been coming
00:14:58.000 and it's going to continue to come. And there's no pushback from senior leadership, uh, within the
00:15:04.800 military. I have an email chain saved that I had with the vice admiral where he was telling me to
00:15:09.720 read anti-racist by Ibrahim X. Kendi. And I read it and I pushed back him and said, this goes completely
00:15:17.260 against the ethos of the Canadian armed forces. So we're going to continue to see this and we get
00:15:23.460 all sorts of tips and emails from serving members telling us the stuff that they have to go through.
00:15:28.860 And that's why they're, uh, the attrition rate is three times the regular rate. And that's why
00:15:34.200 guys like me who, uh, released earlier getting out because it's just, uh, it's just nonsense. And
00:15:39.780 it's, uh, we're not like a, the Canadian forces in the passport office. Okay. We are completely
00:15:44.860 different entity in society. And, uh, there's just so much creep, uh, that's stuff that's crept in from
00:15:51.820 the likes of, you know, Barbara Perry and, um, the Ontario technical Institute. And they, they just
00:15:58.040 gave a bunch of money to a man named Andy Knight, who was at university of Alberta professor, who's
00:16:02.940 going to study white, white supremacy in the Canadian forces. So it's just a false and bogus
00:16:08.860 narrative in my opinion.
00:16:10.320 Is your sense, Tom, that the military leadership have bought into this, or are they just basically
00:16:16.820 taking their marching orders from cabinet and government or seeing the writing on the wall
00:16:21.520 and, and that this is the way things are going?
00:16:24.540 Yeah, absolutely. I do believe that the senior leadership of the Canadian forces has bought
00:16:29.340 completely into this. And, you know, I tweeted about this yesterday where, you know, there was,
00:16:34.660 um, the American veterans and currently serving members have created this declaration of accountability
00:16:40.940 where, you know, um, there, there's a group of over 200, I believe 230, uh, currently serving in re, uh,
00:16:50.240 retired American veterans who want accountability against the joint chiefs of staff for all of their
00:16:56.160 actions, uh, during COVID. And, um, you know, my tweet was actually about the same thing is that the
00:17:03.580 Canadian armed forces members, um, had the same, have the same duty. I mean, you learn this in basic
00:17:10.380 training in the first week when you're covering military law, you as a subordinate, uh, rank when
00:17:17.600 you're trained, have a duty to report a crime if you witness it being committed. And if so actually
00:17:23.860 lay charges. And that doesn't matter if the person committing the crime is of a higher rank than you,
00:17:29.120 you've got a duty to take action because, you know, it's a professional organization with its own,
00:17:34.820 uh, body of laws. It's got its own criminal justice system. It has its own mechanisms to deal 0.95
00:17:39.860 with these things. And the fact that it right now, the currently serving military members have never
00:17:47.380 taken their superior officers to task tells you, it speaks volumes about the, the state of, um,
00:17:54.980 buy-in from senior leaders who are protecting their careers, not the integrity of the institution of the
00:18:02.920 Canadian armed forces, but they're protecting their careers. They're not risking their pensions or their
00:18:07.720 livelihoods or their reputations on pushing back against this ideology. And I think that that in
00:18:13.740 itself is a massive leader of failure or a failure of leadership on, on behalf of, let's say,
00:18:20.680 Lieutenant colonels and above, or even majors who are the first rank of senior officer. Very few instances
00:18:26.400 we've seen this. Um, I can think of one major that did a video in uniform where you push back against
00:18:32.720 the actions of the senior leadership of the forces, but that's the only example I can come up with.
00:18:38.320 And, you know, I believe some people should stay in and fight from the inside, try to make it better.
00:18:44.000 But the reality is that the best people are going to get out of the way. They're going to leave the
00:18:48.160 military in the garbage is going to percolate to the top and they're going to occupy those senior
00:18:53.280 positions within the Canadian forces. And they will remain beholden to the liberal party of Canada, 0.93
00:18:59.760 Canada, not to Canadians, not to the institution of the Canadian armed forces. That's where their
00:19:06.400 loyalties are going to lie in their next promotion. And their next promotion is going to be contingent
00:19:11.600 on how woke you are and how much you abide by this gender ideology and all these other things,
00:19:17.600 right? I mean, we, we have quotas, 25% of all the occupations we want to fill by women. 1.00
00:19:24.080 That's not based on capability. That's based on this bizarre quota of what your gender is and what 0.83
00:19:31.360 your skin color is. It's not based on capability. And the, you know, up until recently, the fundamental 0.91
00:19:41.040 idea was that your capabilities were what earned you the position within the Canadian armed forces.
00:19:46.800 You know, you don't have the right to join the Canadian armed forces. You have the right to apply.
00:19:52.080 You don't have to be accepted, but to be accepted, you have to meet a minimum standard. And Drew could
00:19:56.560 probably talk about what's happening now with the CFAT score, which is the Canadian forces
00:20:01.040 aptitude test. So, you know, I do think that there's some nefarious things happening so that
00:20:06.880 senior officers can get promoted into more advanced positions than they currently hold.
00:20:11.760 Well, yeah. And obviously if we are embracing diversity and DEI and anti-whiteness 0.97
00:20:17.600 and anti-colonialism and all of this, which you clearly are, we see this in the documentation,
00:20:22.640 it stands to reason that that's going to become at the core of hiring and promotion practices. And
00:20:28.880 I mean, obviously, no true meritocracy really exists. There are always biases and nepotism and
00:20:35.600 things that can seep their way in. But the idea that senior military strategists or people who are
00:20:41.120 supposed to be strategists are going to be decided based on how many diversity checkboxes you can
00:20:46.400 tick isn't really all that far off, is it, Drew? I mean, and you think, I mean, this is the whole
00:20:50.880 point of that intersectionality idea that these academics who have never served, as Tom points out,
00:20:56.080 are talking about here. It said, oh, well, yeah, this guy may have led, you know, 20 successful
00:21:00.640 campaigns, but oh, this one's a transgendered indigenous person in a wheelchair. This is our
00:21:04.880 our new admiral. No, exactly. And I'll just touch base on one thing that Tom said is the difference.
00:21:11.520 So we know and we're, I guess, partnered with the American guys who put forth that military
00:21:18.880 accountability document. The difference down there is they actually have senior officers who are signed
00:21:24.960 on to this, guys with credibility and who are known within the community. With V4F, we're at over 3,000
00:21:30.800 members. We have a handful of four ringers, so either captain navies or colonels, but we've never,
00:21:37.760 we haven't had any sort of major general or admiral push back and step up. Now, General Mason has been
00:21:45.120 doing some good work. He's been speaking out against sort of the wokeness effect in the CAF, which is great,
00:21:50.480 but there needs to be more senior officers and senior NCOs who speak out about this stuff.
00:21:57.120 And that's, sorry, what was your question again, Andrew? I guess I lost my train of thought.
00:22:02.720 I can't remember. Your answer was good enough, but I was basically just asking about whether
00:22:06.320 diversity, diversity hires are going to become the new norm with how things are going. And,
00:22:11.920 you know, the general, the vice admiral, all these leaders are not going to be people that were
00:22:16.960 these, you know, brilliant tacticians and strategists and operators, but are actually just going to be
00:22:22.080 people that are chosen for these intersectional diversity categories.
00:22:25.760 Yeah. So you're a hundred percent spot on. So when I was in recruiting, so I was a military
00:22:30.720 career counselor, I would really sign off, the guys sign off on the files to get them
00:22:35.280 sort of approved and onto the competition list, which has been watered down. But at that time,
00:22:40.640 women who were applying to the Canadian Armed Forces didn't have to pass the aptitude test to be 0.75
00:22:45.920 able to be approved and put on the thing. So they had lowered the standards there for women just to get 0.99
00:22:52.560 them on the list and how they actually select applicants, but that's a whole nother story.
00:22:58.240 It is now, this is something that we released on our social medias yesterday,
00:23:02.640 is for just under 50% of the trades in the Canadian Armed Forces, they've waived the requirement to pass
00:23:10.080 the Canadian Forces aptitude test. And that aptitude test tests you in three things. It tests you in
00:23:14.080 math, it tests you in English, tests you on your spatial awareness. And based on your scores,
00:23:19.760 it will dictate to us, the military career counselors, what occupations you're good for.
00:23:25.360 That's not even happening anymore. So 47 trades no longer require that aptitude test. Now I talked to
00:23:30.880 our source at CFRG, Canadian Forces Recruiting Group Headquarters, and he said that this is being done
00:23:37.600 for two reasons. One, to help push through the 2600 permanent residents who've applied to the Canadian
00:23:45.600 Armed Forces, and two, to help meet what we call EE employment equity quotas, which I believe is 25%
00:23:54.000 women. These are the goals, 25% women, 15% visible minority, and I think it's four or five percent
00:23:59.520 Indigenous. So they're lowering the standard of the troops in the military to help achieve the 1.00
00:24:08.000 their DEI targets, which is, you know, it's unacceptable. You never lower the standard,
00:24:14.480 especially when people's lives are on the line. I mean, that used to be when this came up with
00:24:18.800 firefighters years ago, this used to be the most obvious pushback on this, which is, you know,
00:24:23.520 someone like me doesn't drop 100 pounds if the firefighter is a woman. So this is, I think,
00:24:28.640 the painful reality here. Well, I'm glad you gentlemen are speaking up about this. Thank you for your
00:24:33.520 service and for your time today. Drew McGilvery from Veterans for Freedom and Tom Marazzo, also
00:24:38.320 from Veterans for Freedom, but also the author of the book, The People's Emergency Act. Thank you very
00:24:42.160 much, gentlemen. Thanks, Andrew. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:24:46.800 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
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