00:04:21.380And that ricocheted around in my mind as I headed out there.
00:04:25.440As I went out there, I had thoughts about who is this man and why would he allegedly turn against his own community.
00:04:33.480But let me start with my on-the-scene reports.
00:04:37.040Listen to this. This is a bit of a scene-setter when I arrived at the burnt church.
00:04:42.580Another week, another fire burnt to the ground in Canada.
00:04:46.460What's that? More than 100 now that have been attacked with arson or vandalism.
00:04:51.620I'm in Saint-Simon, New Brunswick, a very small village.
00:04:56.240This was the largest wooden church in the province, built, completed in 1917.
00:05:02.900in the wee hours on Monday a motion detector went off and a man was arrested for arson
00:05:11.140although the alarm went off quite quickly it being a wooden church it was consumed very quickly it
00:05:18.040took four different fire stations to respond alas as you can see behind me the whole place
00:05:24.140is burnt to the ground there is one building there a building involved with funerals that
00:05:30.000is unscathed the fire was so hot other buildings like that one over there and you can see behind
00:05:36.720me a house the fire so hot and across the street i was talking to a few members of the church
00:05:44.960one of them agreed to go on record with me and we'll have her remarks soon she's sort of the
00:05:50.720co-president of the church uh others didn't want to be on camera it's a very small town
00:05:56.160they're shy but one lady lucy is her name lives just down the way she said another church was
00:06:02.880burned about five years ago at caraquette bah if i'm saying the name of the little village correctly
00:06:07.920and i apologize i'm probably not here i'm going to lift my camera up a little bit to look over
00:06:14.560the fence and you can see what a terrible terrible fire must have been utterly consumed by flames
00:06:21.360you know uh the number of churches that are burned is staggering and sometimes it's a it's a pattern
00:06:30.760sometimes it may just be a random arson but when the total number of churches that are either
00:06:37.660vandalized scorched a little bit or utterly burnt to the ground is exceeding 100 it's a crisis it is
00:06:47.040a pattern and it's egged on in my view by public leaders it started a decade ago when justin
00:06:57.360trudeau's right-hand man gerald butts remarked that the arson and destruction of churches was
00:07:07.200quote understandable that's what he said because of he blamed the churches for certain misbehavior
00:07:16.720in residential schools and to him that was an opportunity to smear and besmirch catholic
00:07:24.240churches and he didn't condemn them he rather egged them on a hundred churches later it's still
00:07:31.200happening gerald butts is in new york working for mark carney's old company the churches keep burning
00:07:38.320all the time the disinformation that's whipped up about the churches is it to blame uh police
00:07:48.560arrested a man 68 years old on in on monday for the arson he's a local man gil millet he was born
00:07:58.940here raised here lived here his whole life that seems to be an odd demographic for an accused
00:08:07.240arsonist people here are puzzled by that they wonder if it was mental illness the
00:08:14.320young man who allegedly burned the other church was also explained by locals as
00:08:20.720having mental illness there's a lot of that mental illness going around it's
00:08:25.900odd though that it only strikes Christian churches not Jewish synagogues well0.97
00:08:30.980actually I suppose that's happening more these days or Muslim mosques and that's
00:08:35.080a thing too, isn't it? If there were 100 mosques that were burned, I think it would be front page1.00
00:08:40.680news. There would be a national inquiry. The RCMP would set up a task force directly focused on it.
00:08:47.200There would be CSIS agents working on it. There's none of that here. But what you do have is another
00:08:54.780church burnt to a crisp. I mentioned earlier that I was having an issue with AI or artificial
00:09:02.180intelligence. I was using an app on my cell phone by the company called Anthropic, and I had an AI
00:09:09.660helper. And as I was traveling, I would say things to the helper like, give me all of the information
00:09:16.220you have about the history of this church, or tell me more about the town of Saint-Simon.
00:09:21.680And the reason I like that is because I just talk to the app, and I can use plain language,
00:09:26.620and it would read it back to me. It was very helpful. And then I said something that I thought
00:09:31.840was pretty normal. I said, tell me everything you know about the accused man. It seems like
00:09:38.880an ordinary question. And I was shocked with the reply. The AI lectured me and said, don't you make
00:09:46.520the accusation that it's an immigrant? What? I didn't say anything. I wanted more information.
00:09:53.080You can see the text of this AI scolding me. And I chirped back and it sort of apologized. It was
00:10:01.240very weird. As it continued, I asked another time, show me the Facebook page of the accused
00:10:08.640arsonist. And again, it snapped back at me saying it would not muckrake and that it would not share
00:10:16.480that information, even though that's in the public domain. Anyways, I was fighting with the AI. It
00:10:21.880didn't want me to do certain searches. It was very curious to me. Anyhow, I continued on. Here's
00:10:28.060another commentary i made on the ground and remember i didn't know anything about the accused
00:10:35.020other than the ai didn't want me to ask too many questions take a look behind me you can see a
00:10:42.080neighbor's house it must have been incredibly hot the flames i mean it's just 30 or 40 feet away
00:10:48.880from the fire i'm guessing they had to move out of their house now uh i'm here a couple days late
00:10:55.360because this fire happened in the wee hours of monday and i didn't hear about the fire till
00:11:00.640tuesday i flew here on wednesday but it's difficult to get to monckton um and so i drove here tomorrow
00:11:09.440the accused appears in court for a bail hearing i'm guessing he will get bail everyone he knows
00:11:16.240him he lives in the the town here it's a very very curious thing we don't know much about him
00:11:22.960here's an interesting anecdote i was doing some research on this fire and the accused
00:11:28.560on my way out and i was using as a search engine i was using one of the ai tools called
00:11:36.240anthropic their search uh ai agent called claude and i said do a search on this accused arsonist
00:11:46.480and the ai app refused to do so uh here i'll show you a screenshot of that bizarre statement
00:11:55.580by the ai tool refusing to let me search for details about the man charged with arson uh in
00:12:04.840another request i had made to the same ai agent uh the ai scolded me and said i'm not to blame
00:12:14.320immigrants for it. I hadn't done so. I had no intention of doing so. I had heard that the
00:12:21.200accused was local. But isn't that crazy how, at least in that AI regime,
00:12:30.340they're obviously very sensitive about this news and they don't want people to report on it.
00:12:37.080So who is he? Who is Gilles Mallette? Who is the man that AI so insisted I not invade his privacy by looking at his public posts on Facebook?
00:12:50.000Well, my friend Sheila Gunn-Reed, who does her own research, doesn't delegate it to some AI agent,
00:12:58.340she simply went on Facebook and said, as I found it, and I didn't know that until after I got back,
00:13:04.980you can see Gilles Malet, 68 years old, and he has styled himself an indigenous warrior.
00:13:13.460That's him wearing a shirt that says, Warrior Up.
00:13:17.480He posts about his friend who has been put in jail, he says, for her anti-pipeline activism.
00:13:26.680So he at the very least sympathizes with illegal actions of not participating himself.
00:13:33.920And he identifies as a variety of indigenous people, including wearing an Inukshuk necklace, which suggests he's not just Indian, but he's Inuit.
00:13:46.120it. I don't think he is those things. I think he is as Akkadian as the rest of the people I met