The fog of war takes over Ukraine
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Summary
As the fog of war sets in, the Ukrainian conflict heats up, and so does the propaganda war playing out on social media. Today, we re talking about Putin s aggression, and the unbelievable propaganda that we re being inundated with from all sides.
Transcript
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The fog of war sets in, the Ukrainian conflict heats up, and so does the propaganda war playing
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out on social media. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
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Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into the program. So before we get to the meat of the
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program today, I'm going to talk about the conflict in Ukraine. I'm going to talk about
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Putin's aggression, and I'm going to talk about the unbelievable propaganda that we are being
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inundated with from all sides on social media. Before, I just want to mark today. Today is
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March 1st. Today marks the end of the ill-conceived and liberty-restricting vaccine passport regime
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in Ontario. Let us never return to this dark place in our history where we had a two-tiered
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society, where we restricted and prohibited citizens from participating in society, participating
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in our community based solely on their vaccine status. Ryan O'Connor, a lawyer who's friend of
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the program we had him on last week, he wrote this. Today marks the end of the rational and
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anti-science mandatory vaccine passport in Ontario, which only existed because unelected medical
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officers of health lobbied for it. Never again should Ontarians be denied access to our community
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based on their vaccination status. Amen to that. Let us never return. Okay, let's get to Ukraine
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because I haven't really done an in-depth analysis on the show. So I want to paint a picture of what is
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going on on the ground in Ukraine. And let me just preface this all by saying it's kind of tough. It's
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kind of tough to be in a situation, trying to report the news, needing to base your reports on
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legacy media reporting. As you know, I have a very healthy skepticism of legacy media. They deserve
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every ounce of skepticism. And so many of the reports that people are putting out today are easily
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debunkable, often debunked. So much of the stories that have been circulating, that have gone viral,
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turned out not to be portraying the thing that they were told to be portraying. It's really hard
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to even get basic facts down because again, we are in the fog of war. We don't know who to trust,
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whose numbers to trust. The Russians are claiming one thing. Ukrainians are claiming something very
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different. And without being on the ground yourself, without having all of the information available at
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your fingertips, it's hard to parse through. So for this report, for this timeline, I've tried to rely
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on what I think are the most sort of straight media outlets, the ones that can be trusted,
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mostly the BBC. I find the BBC to be very straight. And yes, I know that they are funded by British
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taxpayers. However, I generally speaking find that they can be trusted. Same with places like
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Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. So that is what we've based our timeline on, and I'll go through
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it now. So this all started on February 21st, last Monday, when Putin declared the independence of
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two Eastern Ukrainian separatist regions. So Russia now recognizes the Donetsk People's Republic and the
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Lunask People's Republic as independent and separate breakaway regions of Ukraine. Let me just note that
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most of the people, many of the people who live in these regions are in fact Russian speakers, and
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they would probably, many of them would identify as being Russian in the first place. So first that
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happened on Monday. By Wednesday, it was very apparent that we were, that there was going to be a war,
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that Russia was going to invade, and that that invasion happened late Wednesday night here in
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North America, February 23rd, or Thursday morning, local time on February 24th. We saw a bombing
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campaign in civilian areas in the city of Kharkiv, as well as Kiev. We're talking about carpet bombs being
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dropped in civilian areas beginning on February 24th. So Russia quickly took control of the territory of
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Chernobyl, and began launching attacks onto Kiev from the north of the city. So as of today, as of
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recording, the city of Kiev is still being held by Ukraine. That being said, there is heavy military
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fighting that has continued just outside the city of Kiev, mostly concentrated in and around the airport
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area. The airport is incredibly strategic and important because you, as you know, there is military
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supplies being flown in from all over Europe and from the West to support Ukraine. So Russia wants to cut
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that off, cut off that bloodline of arms of military equipment, of resources to try to cut off the
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Ukrainian, cut off the Ukrainians from outside support. So that is where the fighting has heavily
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concentrated. Now, there have already been peace talks that have taken place and have failed. So
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peace talks were scheduled to take place between Ukraine and Russia. They were announced on the 27th,
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and they did in fact take place on the 28th. They were facilitated in Belarus, but we were told
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that those negotiations have failed. No ceasefire. So the war continues. As of today,
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Tuesday, March 1st, there is a huge convoy of Russian vehicles that is now advancing on Ukraine's
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capital. It was 50 miles outside the city. It's now much, much closer. Last night, there were reports
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saying that it was a five kilometer long convoy. Reports on a Tuesday morning are now saying it is a
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27 kilometer long convoy of Russian military vehicles heading towards Kiev. And just as I am recording
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this, I got a notification from the Wall Street Journal saying that Russia said it would attack
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intelligence facilities in Kiev and urged residents to leave, signaling a massive strike on civilian
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areas may be imminent. So again, this is Putin's aggression. His Russian military is advancing. It is
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hitting civilian targets. He's openly saying that it is hitting civilian targets. There is no disputing
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that, no doubt about these facts. As for the death toll, again, this is tough to verify, but we did our best.
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So on Monday, Ukraine reported a civilian death toll of 352. Later that day said that another 11 people
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were killed by Russian strikes in the city of Kharkiv. The Russian defense minister on Tuesday
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morning claimed that more than 5,710 Russian soldiers had been killed by Ukrainian forces since the start of
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the invasion. That number, however, has not been confirmed or verified by Russian officials. Ukrainian
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President Vladimir Zelensky has accused the invading Russian forces of engaging war crimes, noting that
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16 children have been killed so far, another 45 injured due to Russian bombardments in the first
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four days of fighting. Gruesome, horrible, horrible stuff. The Daily Mail is reporting that there have been
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war crimes that have been committed. The International Criminal Court is set to open a probe investigating war
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crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine after invading Russian forces bombed the city of Kharkiv.
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A rocket landed. This is the way Daily Mail describes it. It's such an odd way of describing it. A rocket
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landed in front of the civilian public administration building in Kharkiv on Tuesday morning. By landed,
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I think they mean detonated, exploded, bombed, and it destroyed a road outside as well as blowing
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windows out of the building itself. So again, we're seeing cluster bombs in civilian areas. We're seeing
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accusations of war crimes. We're seeing the mass killing of civilians, including children. Gruesome,
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gruesome stuff. The situation is truly bad. There is not, I don't have a single good word for Vladimir
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Putin. I believe that he is a tyrant. He is a megalomaniac. He is fueling this war and he is,
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with all likelihood, a war criminal, full stop. Okay, now that I've established that point,
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I've established the fact that Putin is a very terrible man. He is loathsome and he is very much
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at fault here. I want to now talk about something that you will not hear in legacy media, because like I
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said, all of those reports is what you hear day in, day out from the legacy media. If you're following
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this conflict at all, you already know all those things. I wanted to reestablish those points because
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it's incredibly important to establish that the overwhelming bad things that are happening and the
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crimes are being perpetrated by Russian military, by Vladimir Putin, against Ukrainian people who by
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and large just want to be left alone. They want to be peaceful. They want to live their lives and they
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don't want to be under Russian control. Okay. So, so, so all of those things you can hear about
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every day, every minute, every second from legacy media journalists. But I want to talk about something
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now that you will not hear from legacy media. You won't hear from your pundits, your politicians,
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your policymakers, or your journalists. And that is that we are being inundated right now with outright
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propaganda. Everything that you see on social media is propaganda. You cannot trust what you see.
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Images are being distorted and doctored. Footage is being described in the exact opposite manner of what
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and the reports on the ground are often confusing. They're inaccurate. Sometimes they're flat out
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wrong. Sometimes we're even seeing video game footage and clear memes from comedians being reported
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as fact. Again, this is all propaganda. And sadly, the propaganda that we are seeing, and we're seeing
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just so much, it's emotional driven. It's, it's there to manipulate you, to get you on board, to get you
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in line with this thinking that you're either all in, um, you're either with us or you're against us.
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Anyone who is not completely repeating the narrative that, that Ukraine is good. Everything Ukraine is
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doing is right. They're just, they're moral crusaders. They're the embodiment of all of our
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fights for freedom, for all that is good in the world. Anyone who deviates ever so slightly from
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that narrative is, is just flat out accused of treachery and treason, as I will demonstrate
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in this show. And sadly, many of us in the West know that we are being the victims of propaganda.
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And yet they share the reports regardless, because the propaganda helps the side that they like. So
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as long as the propaganda is there to support, uh, the people that we like, the side that we're on,
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then we're just a-okay with sharing propaganda. Keep in mind a couple of years ago when ISIS was
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waging its war across Syria and Iraq, we were repeatedly told and warned that they were using
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propaganda. They were creating these videos to make themselves look very savvy and cool and make
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war look like fun and show these men, um, leading their way, uh, to an Islamic caliphate. The whole
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thing was designed to manipulate young Muslims from all over the world and convince them to drop their
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lives and come over and fight for this Islamist caliphate. It was propaganda. And we knew that.
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And every time they shared a video, it was preface saying, this is propaganda. Well, with regards to our
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era and this time that we're living in digital media and social media, that hasn't changed. And we're
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watching and we're watching a war. We're watching a conventional war unfold. There's propaganda anywhere,
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except for we don't have those warnings. We don't have those warnings because the propaganda in large
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part is being used to promote the side that we're on the Ukrainian side. And so all of this has
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culminated in elites in our society, whipping themselves into a mass hysteria and a moral panic.
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Again, everything is based on emotion and emotional images are being used to manipulate us and overwhelm our
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capacity to think for ourselves, to reason and to think clearly any form of deviation ever so slightly
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from the media narrative. Any sign of dissent gets quickly equated with being treacherous, being
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treasonous, being pro Putin, uh, pro Russia, being a shill, being a propagandist. So we should be aware
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of that. We should maintain our healthy skepticism of the legacy media, our healthy skepticism of the
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Trudeau government and of Chrysia Freeland, and avoid the temptation to jump in and to join the
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propaganda. So we here at True North put together a little montage of some of the leading examples
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of this propaganda, because from day one in this war, what we've been seeing on social media is again,
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just being inundated with these scenes, with these images, with these pictures, with these videos,
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some of them seem like they could have been scripted and set on a, uh, film set in Hollywood.
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They're just so outright, uh, propagandistic in their nature, and yet they're being shared
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broadly by, by respectable people in our society. So we have a couple of examples of that, some of the
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sort of main stories that you may have seen circulating that have unfortunately turned out
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to be true. And again, you can just see how emotion is driving the way. So here is that montage.
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The evolving world and trying to feel about the
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In the mansions, where are all these mansions ceased?
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I see that my family members, my team members are saying that we are crying.
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I want to key in on one of those stories, which was the image of the tank driving over a car.
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I think it had over 10 million views, tens of millions of views on social media.
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We were told that this was a Russian tank just recklessly endangering human lives
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They pulled him out and apparently he was a-okay and alive.
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Well, it turns out that that story just simply wasn't as it appears.
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So it has been debunked by both USA Today and France 24.
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France 24 is one of the largest and most respected news outlets in Europe.
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These videos do not show a Russian tank running over a civilian.
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So they do a very thorough bit of research and basically concluded that the video does not show a Russian armored vehicle driving over a car in Kiev.
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So to verify these videos, authenticity, they used geotagging, geolocated the exact place and the date that it took place.
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It happened in the center of the city of Kiev, which, as I mentioned, Kiev is getting bombed.
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But there is no military presence on the ground in Kiev just yet.
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There's a convoy heading there and they'll probably be there very soon.
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But this was circulating from several days ago and there was no military presence on the ground.
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It says, is it a Russian tank or Ukrainian vehicle?
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It said, next, we examined the military vehicle involved in the collision, as several journalists and open source investigators claim.
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The armored vehicle is a Strela 10, a model of anti-aircraft missile launcher used by the Ukrainian army.
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There are other clues that suggest a vehicle is Ukrainian.
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For example, there is no large letter Zed painted on the side of the tank, something Russian military has used since the start of the conflict as a distinguishing mark to differentiate their equipment from similar Ukrainian models.
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Moreover, this type of surface to air missile launcher isn't designed for close combat in an urban environment.
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Rather, it is used to support retreating troops, according to Rob Lee, a doctoral student at the Department of War at King's College London.
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And so they continue to just paint the chaotic scene on the ground.
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So they're trying to figure out why this possible crash happened.
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So it says, why did the Ukrainian armored vehicle run over a civilian car in part of Kiev?
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Other videos shot moments earlier provide some answers to this question.
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We've chosen not to publish them due to their shocking nature.
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It shows soldiers dressed in Ukrainian uniforms chasing and shooting at the driver of a military truck, which you can see below in red seconds before the armored vehicle crushed the car.
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So the man driving the military truck was also wearing a Ukrainian uniform.
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But soldiers could be heard speaking in the videos, explained that he was suspected to be a Russian saboteur disguised as a Russian soldier.
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Minutes before the incident occurred, Ukrainian deputy minister Anna Miller posted a message on Twitter saying that the Russian army has seized Ukrainian army vehicles and are headed towards the scene.
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So all this is just to say it's a chaotic scene in Ukraine.
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But before we just start sharing videos, sharing tweets, saying that we know exactly what is going on.
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Because, again, the tank driving over a car was not a Russian tank.
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It was a Ukrainian tank, according to fact checks and reports on the ground.
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Tuesday, March 1st, we have the UN General Assembly down in New York.
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And the big news coming out of the UN General Assembly is that world leaders have walked out of a speech given by the Russian foreign minister.
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So let me just first by saying that the UN is a pretty toothless organization.
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The whole idea of an organization trying to maintain world order and global order without having the threat of force, like you can sit there, you can threaten countries to your heart's content.
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If you don't have a military to back it up, you are completely useless.
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And that is what the UN is proving itself to be.
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It is basically just a club for elites to hang out and enjoy their power and their stature in society.
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If you're being generous about the United Nations and you and you believe in the good that can be done through dialogue and conversation,
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you can say that the purpose of the United Nation is to have meaningful discussions to try to avoid war, right?
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If we all get together, we listen to each other, we sit in a room together, we try to understand each other.
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We try to make sense of what's happening in the other person's world to try to understand their motivations and what's driving them.
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Maybe that will avoid the calamity of war because war is a truly terrible thing as we are seeing firsthand.
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Well, if that is the purpose of the UN, and again, you'd have to have a generous reading of the situation to see it that way.
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Well, then these world leaders have completely undermined the purpose of the UN by walking out and refusing to listen to a Russian give a speech.
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What are they doing? What are they accomplishing? It's performative theater, it's virtue signaling, it's empty rhetoric, empty gestures,
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which is completely what we have become accustomed to from leaders in the West, from our world leaders.
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They don't want to listen to Russia. Well, congratulations. Congratulations, United Nations.
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You've solved this crisis, you've achieved world peace by refusing to listen to those whom you don't agree with.
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What a farce of an organization. Next, we're seeing over-the-top praise, almost godlike treatment of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
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So, first off, we started seeing lots and lots of images and lots of people sharing photos of him supposedly on the front line.
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We were told, wow, this man is so heroic. He has taken off his civilian clothes, he is putting on his combat gear, and he's going to the front line.
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What a hero, what an absolute saint of a man this is. Well, it turns out that those photos that people were sharing of him on the front lines
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weren't really photos of him on the front lines. Well, in fact, according to routers and a fact check,
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those are not current pictures of Vladimir Zelensky on the front lines. No, those were old photographs of him.
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They were taken several months ago, back in December 2021. They were staged, they were taken by his own photographer in the province of Donetsk.
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They're not, they're not recent. They're not depicting him fighting today against the Russians. So, the verdict from routers,
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foul checked, is that this is miscaptioned. Pictures of him are old, haven't been taken back in 2021. And now you'll see people
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showing them on social media. There is a little disclaimer saying that what you're, what you're seeing is manipulated footage.
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Basically, it's not, it's taken out of context. Well, let's not let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
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Charles Adler, a radio host with Global, he, he, he, he really takes the cake for the most over the top praise.
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Finally, a leader conquering the hearts of democracy loving people worldwide.
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His name is Zelensky, the Lion of Kyiv. Here in Canada, the anti Zelensky, Jason Kenney,
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a poster child for political shrinkage, exploiting the suffering of Ukrainians with another clumsy sales pitch.
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So, what a, what a weird comparison, sort of creepy calling this guy the Lion of Kyiv,
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conquering the hearts of democracy loving people worldwide.
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Okay. Okay. Charles Adler, you can continue your man crush over there.
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And talking about crush, this is a tweet that was making the rounds.
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Unbelievable. As of, as of Monday afternoon, this thing had nearly 20,000 retweets and 200,000 likes.
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Okay. I'll, I'll read you this tweet. It is so embarrassing.
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Breaking. Every woman in your life now has at least a small crush on Vladimir Zelensky.
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And there's absolutely nothing you can do about, uh, fact check. Not true.
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No, not true. Not, not every woman has a crush on this guy.
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By the way, this woman, this super serious policy analyst is a PhD candidate studying,
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apparently focusing on US military industrial complex.
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And she's a senior staffer at the UK parliament.
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And this is her insightful analysis, all about how women just love this guy, apparently,
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according to her and the 20,000 people who retweeted her.
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Okay. Andrew Coyne over at the Globe and Mail likewise is adding his praise.
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He's saying what the Ukrainians are doing is the most heroic goddamn thing I've ever seen in my entire life.
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Okay. Andrew Coyne, again, just so overwhelmed with emotion.
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It's so hard to be reasonable when you're just inundated with this kind of emotion.
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And what is, what is Andrew Coyne talking about?
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Well, it's the report that many Western countries are sending weapons to Ukraine.
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The Russian military spends 10 times as much and they have at least two times,
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maybe two or three times as many military personnel.
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Many Western countries, including the UK, Germany and Belgium, have rather than sending in their own troops,
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They're sending lots and lots of weapons, automatic rifles to Ukraine,
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where they're apparently just handing it out willy nilly to anyone on the street.
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While we had a report over at True North, I spoke to sources, multiple sources,
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including people on the ground in Kiev who described the situation as chaos and anarchy.
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Sources saying armed bandits are looting and murdering with impunity.
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It says the situation in Kiev is, quote, not as black and white as the media is portraying it, unquote.
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A source on the ground in Kiev who spoke to True North through a translator said on Sunday,
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people are more scared of the armed citizens than of the Russian military, said the source.
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So again, so the ones on the ground in Kiev are the civilians who have been given military weapons
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to defend their city while some of them are engaging in bad behavior, looting and killing people.
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So the source was a senior who lives right in the center of Kiev.
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He and his wife said they're more scared right now of the looters with the guns.
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The old man has a military rifle out just in case.
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Now the source sent several photos of both dead bodies on the side of a road in Kiev,
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noting that the picture depicts a family that got killed when they were mistaken for Russians.
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The source also sent two videos, which were also circulating on the messaging app Telegram,
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Now just questioning anyone in one case, shooting people they deemed suspicious, very scary stuff.
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So again, there are unintended consequences when you just hand out weapons to tens of thousands of people.
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There was a report as well that they were letting people out of prison who had military experience.
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So Russia is so Ukraine is so desperate for manpower, so desperate for help in terms of people on the ground to fight this war.
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They are letting people out of jail, including bad guys, giving them guns and just hoping for the best, hoping nothing bad will happen.
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Well, there is definitely going to be unintended consequences.
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And the source also said that they just can't trust Western media, that the propaganda is out of control,
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and that it's hard to get a clear picture of what is going on.
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Joe Warmington, my colleague over at the Toronto Sun, had a great piece today saying that it's not an easy time for Canadians with Russian roots.
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Joe went down to a Russian area in Toronto, spoke to members of the Russian diaspora, Canadians who are originally from Russia,
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They won't let you write fair things about us, said Alex standing outside a Russian bakery in the area of Steeles and Bathurst.
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Tatiana, the owner of a nearby gift shop, echoed the sentiment.
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But you can see why Tatiana and Alex would feel otherwise when our governments have passed decrees cancelling Russian vodka,
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And there's even talk about banning Russian hockey players.
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Leaders should also be reminded not to punish our Russian Canadian friends for the political decisions made in another country that they have no control over.
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Whenever our political leaders are talking about despotic governments and terrible decisions happening in China or Iran,
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they always go to painstaking efforts to make sure that they're drawing a distinction,
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not talking about Chinese people, talking about Xi Jinping and the communist government,
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or not talking about the Iranian people, but talking about Rouhani and the regime and the mullahs.
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However, in this situation, you see political leaders just throwing out Russians, kind of accusing all Russians.
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Melanie Jolie, the foreign minister in Canada, condemns Russian invasion.
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She says Russia is solely responsible for this crisis.
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They have chosen deception, intimidation, and manufactured a crisis based on lies and false flag operations.
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So again, making no distinction, making no effort to distinguish between Putin and the Russian people,
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and just sort of throwing it out, the Russians, the Russians, the Russians.
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Now, I want to focus back a little bit on Canada and what is happening,
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because I don't think Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau should get a free pass.
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I don't think that the way that they are handling this is very good.
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Now, you won't get this again from Legacy Media.
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Here's Andrew Coyne just really openly endorsing Chrystia Freeland.
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He writes this on Twitter, ringing lines from Freeland.
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There are moments in history when the great struggle between freedom and tyranny comes down to one fight in one place,
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So, one week after Chrystia Freeland went on a rampage to freeze people's bank accounts
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without any due process, without a court order, without the rule of law,
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not based on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms whatsoever.
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Now, all of a sudden, she's drawing a black and white line saying,
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freedom versus tyranny, you're either with us, against us.
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And apparently, now Chrystia Freeland is on the side of freedom,
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not just on the side of freedom, but representative of that whole side of freedom,
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according to Andrew Coyne's ringing endorsement there.
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We've seen lots and lots of people praising Chrystia Freeland,
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So, here's another piece I had over at True North.
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Freeland posts and then deletes a photo of her holding a Bandera movement scarf
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So, yes, Freeland was caught holding a pro-Nazi banner at a Ukraine protest.
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You will not see this being covered in the legacy media.
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Unfortunately, I want to go through this story in some depth
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because I think it is incredibly, incredibly important.
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So, our finance minister, who also happens to be the deputy prime minister,
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she's a former minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland,
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she was photographed on Sunday with a scarf that promotes a far-right Ukrainian national movement
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So, remarkably, Chrystia Freeland posted the photo herself on her own social media accounts,
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apparently ignorant of the radical far-right movement the scarf represents.
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And she's clearly holding up this scarf, this black and red scarf.
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Well, she obviously realized that that was a very bad idea because of what the scarf represents.
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but she found a different version of the picture where she was not carrying the scarf,
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which again is sort of a tacit acknowledgement that she should not have been posting that photo with the scarf.
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So, let me tell you a little bit about the scarf.
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The red and black flag, the red and black on the scarf,
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has historically represented the Bandera movement in Ukraine.
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who was a nationalist Ukrainian politician during the Second World War.
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He is accused of war crimes and leading atrocities against Jewish and Polish people in Ukraine during the Second World War.
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Let me note that he is an incredibly polarizing figure in Ukraine because some love him.
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They view him as a national hero who fought and helped achieve Ukrainian independence,
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whereas other people again see him as a Nazi collaborator, a war criminal and a Nazi,
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Euronews described Bandera and the UPA movement as Nazi collaborators and war criminals.
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It says, Bandera and the UPA are controversial for several reasons.
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Critics point to the mass killings of up to 100,000 Jews and Poles,
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and the fact that the UPA cooperated with Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II.
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How would she know that she was holding this scarf and what it meant?
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Let me just remind you that Chrystia Freeland is Ukrainian.
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As you can see, she posts in the Ukrainian language.
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She presents herself as being incredibly politically savvy.
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She was considered persona non grata by the Russians because of her involvement in Ukraine political scene.
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So she's incredibly well-versed in Ukrainian politics and culture.
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And yet you're telling me that she didn't realize what she was holding.
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She didn't realize what this banner represents.
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Chrystia Freeland is either very, very stupid or more likely she thinks you're very, very stupid
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and that she can get away with holding up a banner that may be popular among a certain segment of the diaspora,
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of the Ukrainian diaspora, and get away with it knowing that no one in the media will hold her to account.
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Well, that's pretty much exactly right because no one in the legacy media is covering this aside from True North,
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And again, just to underscore how prominent the idea of the Bandera movement,
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it is very, very well-known for people who follow Russia and Ukrainian politics.
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So back in 2017, there was a sort of glowing profile on Chrystia Freeland in iPolitics,
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in the political journal iPolitics, talking about how she'd become Canada's foreign affairs minister.
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And the Bandera movement is specifically mentioned in this piece because at the time,
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powerful Russian interests were accusing Chrystia Freeland of being pro-Bandera movement.
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So I'll read you a bit from this iPolitics piece.
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Some voices close to the Kremlin will predictably disparage Freeland's appointment.
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In addition to being a critic of the current Russian government, she's also of Ukrainian heritage.
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Some Russian voices like to accuse Canada's government of being enthralled to a powerful Ukrainian diaspora.
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In 2015, a spokesman for the Russian government-owned oil company Rosnaft claimed that Canadian sanctions against Russia's energy sector
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Stefan Bandera was an anti-Soviet Ukrainian partisan who was allied with Nazi Germany for some time during the Second World War.
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Of course, it doesn't help that Chrystia Freeland's own grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.
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This is reported by the Ottawa Citizen back in 2017, back before they got the $600 million grant from the Trudeau government,
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Chrystia Freeland's granddad was indeed a Nazi collaborator in Ukraine.
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He was the chief editor of a Nazi propaganda newspaper during the Second World War.
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The Globe and Mail reported that they reached out to Chrystia Freeland's office and they denied it.
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They denied that her grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.
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But the Globe later reported that Chrystia Freeland did, in fact, know about her family history.
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All of this creates two major problems for Chrystia Freeland.
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I will walk you through both of them right now.
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The first problem this creates for Chrystia Freeland is the tremendous double standard in the eyes of Canadians.
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So just weeks ago, just weeks ago, Justin Trudeau and his allies in the legacy media,
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they relentlessly smeared every single Conservative MP as Nazis.
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Because one still unidentified provocateur crashed the protest,
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was there for a short period of time near the protest before quickly disappearing.
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Justin Trudeau infamously accused a Conservative MP of Jewish heritage, Melissa Lansman,
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of, quote, standing with those who wave swastikas.
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They happily smeared an entire group of working class people and Conservatives
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because of the actions of one individual who was there with that despicable Nazi flag.
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Well, in the case of Chrystia Freeland at the Ukrainian rally in Toronto,
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she wasn't simply spotted at the same rally as a Nazi.
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She was literally holding the flag that represents a Nazi movement.
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Now, the second problem this presents for Chrystia Freeland is a problem with her image abroad.
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So Chrystia Freeland and the Liberals right now are opening themselves up to smears and propaganda from the Putin regime.
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So when Putin announced his invasion into Ukraine, the justification that he gave was to denazify the country.
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He said that there is a Nazi element in Ukraine and they are there to denazify the country.
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Make no mistake, Putin's war efforts rely on propaganda,
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which presents the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian military and Ukraine's allies in the West,
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including Chrystia Freeland, as supporting an extremist far right Nazi movement in Ukraine.
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And that is what Chrystia Freeland just fell into.
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So when a prominent Western leader is photographed with a banner that represents a Nazi movement,
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she is naively playing into Vladimir Putin's hands.
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So Chrystia Freeland can scrub her own social media to her heart's content.
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But the reality is a photo of her carrying the black and white scarf, the bandera scarf,
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is making rounds on social media and is being used on other news sites.
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Here it is being used on an NPR affiliate showing Chrystia Freeland with that flag.
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This is a significant misstep by Chrystia Freeland.
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And if we had a free press, they would be covering this.
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They will be covering it because it's newsworthy.
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And again, Chrystia Freeland is falling into the trap of Putin and his propaganda.
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But the problem is here in Canada, you cannot trust the legacy media.
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And this war that we're seeing play out on social media is simply amplifying that fact.
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We're being heavily inundated with propaganda from all sides, from both sides, from all sides.
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Try to verify, try to vet every single thing that you're seeing because there is a heck of a lot of fake news out there.
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I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.