EZRA LEVANT ｜ The RCMP's arrest of David Menzies was so egregious, even the legacy media condemned it... sorta
Summary
The fallout of the false arrest of David Menzies continues to reverberate, and the lies about it continue to echo through the New York City Police Department and the media. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republican Guard Corps continues to claim they are not a terrorist organization.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. I do a big post-mortem today of David Menzies' arrest.
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I show you a lot of video clips from other news networks.
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I show you some crazy tweets from a few of the folks who say,
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oh, David should have been arrested. I'll take you through it all.
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I want you to see it with your eyes, though, because so much of this story is visual.
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Can you go to rebelnewsplus.com and click subscribe?
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It's $8 a month. You get the video version of this podcast.
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And on shows like today's show, I think you really want to see it with your eyes,
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Tonight, the fallout of the false arrest of David Menzies continues to reverberate.
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It's January 10th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
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Well, it's been a couple of days, and 15 million people have watched the video of David Menzies,
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politely but firmly, putting two questions to the deputy prime minister of this country
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about a matter of public interest, why the liberal government will not criminalize a terrorist group,
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and the false arrests and the lies about it perpetrated by the RCMP and the New York Regional Police.
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I've watched it, I guess, four times, so slightly less than 15 million individual people.
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and it's a miracle that was all caught on tape.
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I'll just show it to you again, and you'll see why.
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Ms. Freeland, how come the IRDC is not a terrorist group?
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Why is your government supporting Islamo-Nationality?
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I got my credentials here, and you just bumped into me.
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What, I was just scrubbing, uh, Christian Freeland.
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You've been told me I'm assaulting a police officer.
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Because you assaulted me three years ago when Blackface was international.
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There were, there were people who were shuffled off.
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That was a little bit aggressive for what was happening.
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Get that, you got it, you got, you're under arrest.
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Well, I'd like a, I'd like an ongoing record of this.
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Can you give, can you give, can I have the microphone?
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I was merely scrumming Minister Freeland, and a RCMP officer blocked me,
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and evidently this is now a trumped-up charge of assault, folks.
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I came here to do my job, and now I'm handcuffed.
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And meanwhile, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not a terrorist organization.
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And these liberals have the audacity to show up at a vigil for a plane in which almost 200 people were killed.
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They don't want, it is against the law, in Black Faces Canada to ask insensitive questions.
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So, a Canadian government that props up an Islamo-fascist regime, that's okay.
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But if you ask questions about that, that's not okay.
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You're going to have to back up a little bit, okay?
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That's my cameraman, sir. He's not doing anything.
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No, I just want to provide some space so that everybody's safe here, okay?
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It's not often that you see someone arrested for doing journalism.
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But I think the reason it really went viral is because of the lying by the police, the gaslighting, they say,
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where we all saw with our own eyes that David Menzies pushed no one.
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We saw that one of the RCMP officers actually moved behind David and gently made him...
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Like, got himself in the way so David and he made contact.
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And then the insane reaction by that cop to accuse him of assaulting an officer and the other cop coming in and lying.
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And the fact that they lied so naturally and smoothly, like it's second nature to them, like they've done it a hundred times before.
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Of course, arresting a reporter is shocking news anytime.
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But the fact that the police were so abusive and didn't care who knew, I think they do care who knew.
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They just weren't really thinking through the fact that it was all being reported.
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You don't have to handcuff someone to arrest them.
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Once with his hands behind his back and then once with his hands in front of him.
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Did they think he was going to do what, fight six cops?
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Why did they smash his face up against the wall?
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Why did they frog march him with a cop on either side of him to the police car?
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And by the way, given that those were bodyguards for Chrystia Freeland,
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I think maybe that was part of it, is that Chrystia Freeland came walking up with some assistant
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And these cops realized, yikes, we've been smoking or looking at our phones or something.
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They did it more in the manner of a police state.
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And why didn't that one bald cop, the one who was so abusive,
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why didn't he identify himself when asked repeatedly?
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So why didn't he identify himself after repeated questions?
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This isn't the first time that the RCMP have illegally roughed up David Menzies for no reason.
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Here, take a look at this from a couple of years ago when Justin Trudeau went to a Christmas party
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And David Menzies went to ask one simple question.
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Why are you having a fundraising Christmas party when the rest of us are banned from getting together?
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David was jumped by the RCMP bodyguards of Trudeau, beat up, dumped on the sidewalk.
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I don't know if they knew they were being filmed there also.
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I see that the RCMP says they are reviewing the conduct from two days ago.
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We know how that always ends with an exoneration.
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I can't even think of an RCMP self-investigation that hasn't exonerated themselves.
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It's interesting that they're reviewing their conduct in this matter, where David wasn't badly hurt.
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He was embarrassed and he was illegally arrested and imprisoned, but he wasn't beat up.
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They're not reviewing the matter two years ago that I just showed you.
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The RCMP also reviewed their own shooting of Alexa LaVar.
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Remember when they fired a tear gas gun at her?
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Yeah, the RCMP reviewed that and said, oh, we're fine.
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I'm going to stop checking now, but there's not a peep on any of this from the Canadian Association of Journalists, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
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And by the way, not a peep from Chrystia Freeland.
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I've seen online some people say, oh, she must have been terrified by David.
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In fact, as David was beat up, Chrystia Freeland smirked in her smirky way and kept on walking.
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The police were doing this as her agents on her behalf to protect her.
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The police themselves no longer think it's fine.
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David says that they told him we're not pressing charges, but that's not really how it works in Canada.
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You don't need the victim of a crime to press charges, especially when there's so many witnesses to what happened.
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The reason they're not proceeding against David is because nothing happened, not because that victim, that bald cop, he wasn't assaulted at all.
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It's the first time that regime media have contacted me at Rebel News in years.
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I guess they decided they wanted some of those clicks.
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And my favorite part of it was they talked to two retired cops, one of them very senior, a retired Ontario provincial police commissioner.
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Listen to what those two cops have to say in the context of this larger report.
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In a statement, Rebel News says we have retained legal counsel and expect to sue the RCMP, York Regional Police, and Freeland as soon as this week for false arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and assault.
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The deputy prime minister's office says they won't comment on matters of Freeland security, while the RCMP says it's looking into the incident and the actions of all parties.
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He was certainly crowding the minister, but certainly not in any way threatening her.
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And I just thought it was totally unnecessary by the police officer to actually stop and arrest him.
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Menzies has been arrested at least four times while working for Rebel News, which describes itself as a generally conservative media outlet.
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In 2019, he was forcibly removed from an Andrew Scheer campaign event.
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Then again in 2021, following an encounter with Conservative MP Melissa Lantzman.
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And in December 2021, there was this incident involving members of the prime minister's RCMP detail.
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Certainly all the RCMP officers know who Mr. Menzies is as well.
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When the arrest was affected, was it too aggressive?
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I don't know how one person crowds two people on the sidewalk, but he was walking with the microphone.
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But he said, yeah, both cops said this absolutely was not normal conduct by the RCMP.
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Now, the CBC wouldn't bother interviewing senior cops or retired cops or ex-cops because they want to put everything in woke context.
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And the thing about 75-year-old retired OPP commissioners is they're not going to give you a woke answer.
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Let me look at, let me show you the CBC report.
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Now, it's true David has a big personality, but they just use that word because they absolutely refuse to call him a journalist or a reporter, some weird point of pride.
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Rebel News personality, David Menzies, was arrested Monday for allegedly assaulting a police officer
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while trying to ask finance minister Chrystia Freeland questions about the government's decision to leave the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps off the designated terrorist entity list.
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That's actually not a bad report other than they just will not call him a reporter.
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As I think I've told you before, David Menzies is actually the only reporter in our entire company who did go to journalism school.
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That was years ago before they became woke ideological factories.
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He's a member of the Independent Press Gallery.
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He's been writing and doing journalism for, I don't know, close to 40 years, I would think.
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He practices every day as a full-time professional journalist.
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This next video I'm going to show you is from CBC.
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The first part of it is some reporter who is reading from a teleprompter's script and the
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They actually say a man who identified himself as a journalist.
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By the way, they never say a man who identifies himself as a woman.
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They call them transgender women or they just call them women.
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They'll have pictures of blokes, full-out men, sometimes with beards or whatever, and they'll
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But they'll call David a man who identified himself as a journalist.
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See, they won't call Hamas terrorists terrorists, even though it is a legal fact, they're on the
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And they won't allow David Menzies, a professional journalist, to call himself a journalist.
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But it's different from the journalist they interview, Kate McKenna, who's not on a script.
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Take a look at this video for a couple minutes.
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The RCMP is facing criticism for arresting a man who identified himself as a journalist.
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He tried to ask the Deputy Prime Minister some questions yesterday in Richmond Hill, Ontario,
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The CBC's Kate McKenna is following the story in Ottawa, and she joins us now live.
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So, Kate, what can you tell us about this incident?
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So, just to kind of reiterate a little bit of what we saw in that video, we saw that
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Menzies tried to ask a question to Chrystia Freeland when he's blocked by the RCMP's security
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And he responds by saying, well, he was just asking questions and moves to show his credentials
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The full version of the video goes on to show Mr. Menzies being arrested by York Regional
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We did reach out to that police service that said that he was later released for having
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not posed a credible threat to the public, and he was released without conditions.
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Now, David Menzies is a reporter for Rebel News, which is a media organization that prides
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itself on its own website of being outside of mainstream media.
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It presents itself as having a conservative worldview.
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But this move from the RCMP detail is receiving quite a bit of criticism online and from some
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prominent people for how Mr. Menzies was treated by police.
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It was also criticized by the leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Polyev, who posted
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on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying this is the state of freedom of the press in Canada
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Now, it is worth noting that this is not the first time Menzies has been arrested in trying
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In fact, even prior to today, there was already a website that was set up intended to fundraise
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And, you know, it's also happened when he's talked to conservative politicians.
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For instance, he was forcibly removed from an Andrew Scheer event as well as a Melissa
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But Ezra Levant, the publisher of the website, is saying that they are considering legal action
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and they're also fundraising for that legal action on a website that's been set up following
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or not following, but being promoted as part of this this arrest that happened yesterday.
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The RCMP has not responded to a request for comment.
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She accidentally said David Menzies is a reporter for Rebel News.
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And it takes a lot of weird mental effort to fake it and say he's a personality who identifies
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I mean, he does have a personality other than unlike a lot of those government drones.
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Now, the CBC did not make the mistake, again, of calling him a reporter.
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And they certainly didn't make the mistake of calling on retired senior policemen to talk
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They brought on the worst people in the country, political pundits and hacks and journalists.
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Here's some wackadoodle from Montreal who says, no, no, no.
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You see, you have to look at it through a feminist lens because David Menzies is a man.
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Because David Menzies is a man and Freeland is a woman.
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I think there are so many different things that need to be taken into consideration.
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It's true that what we see in the video, he's walking, walking for her.
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He did arrive very fast in a way that can make a person feel, you know, jumpy.
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And if you make a person feel jumpy and they see you there with rebel news that they don't,
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you know, consider you a real journalist, they might escalate more than if they saw a CBC mic.
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That might have been part of the very, because it happens in a snap, a couple of seconds of what happened.
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There is a way for security to make sure that a person leaves an elected official personal space
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while they're asking questions without arresting them.
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There's a third issue that is not necessarily directly related to the video that I just want to put out there,
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is that there are a lot of women in politics who are being arrested, sorry, harassed physically by citizens.
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And there is a question that needs to be asked in terms of if that citizen decides to become a journalist,
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then is the harassment something that becomes, you know, a professional thing that we cannot say anything about?
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There's the issue of the reputation of rebel news and that specific person's reputation.
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And then there's the issue of, is there a way to make sure that, you know, when journalists ask questions to a politician,
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they leave them personal space without arresting the journalist who's being maybe a little bit too, coming too close, too fast.
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And so there's all of those things that could have been unfolded, that could have unfolded differently for sure.
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Yeah, I'll remember when, I'll remember to use that line when they go after, I don't know, Danielle Smith or Michelle Ellsworth.
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And I call him a thug because he says that David Menzies deserved what he got because he was being deliberately confrontational with security.
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He didn't even know they were there until they ran up behind him and bumped into him.
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Listen, I mean, it's, I don't want to do a sports instant replay thing here on the video,
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but you wonder sometimes if the individual in question is deliberately being confrontational with security detail in a way,
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to your point, you know, even alluding to yourself, David, would not be, you know,
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it's clear when it's an accident versus someone who's trying to be confrontational for the purpose of the format that these individuals are engaged in
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and the subsequent fundraising campaigns and social media attention that it garners among a particular audience.
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And we've mentioned it a few times that the conservative deputy leader now of all people,
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then candidate Melissa Lansman was also involved in a similar incident.
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And so when you see a pattern begin to emerge, you do start to question the way that the individual behaves.
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You start to wonder what, you know, how the individual is being perceived.
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I suspect that there's a conversation to be had about whether, you know, the security detail needs to be better briefed about individuals like this,
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if they are going to be getting into these types of sort of clickbaity, if you'll forgive the expression, confrontations with politicians.
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But this is an unfortunate result, I think, of the climate that we're in.
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That's very different than being in the House of Commons with accredited journalists scrumming a former MP to stick with the example that you drew out just a moment ago.
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David wasn't being confrontational with security at all.
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He didn't even know security was there until they grabbed him and said, you're under arrest for assaulting us.
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We have to show David Menzies that we support him.
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We have to send the CBC, sorry, not the CBC, the RCMP and other police investors that they can't do this anymore.
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And we need them to hear it from a judge because they really don't care if David says so.
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You know, the reaction online has been overwhelmingly supportive, I should say.
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I showed you some of the CBC's worst reporting because I want you to know how awful those government journalists are.
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Some people say, well, I don't like Rebel News, but this is wrong.
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But there's been some really weird team police tweets.
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Like here's one from Dwayne Bratt, who's a professor in Calgary.
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And no surprise that they are fundraising off of it.
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Menzies should never have been arrested and roughed up by the police.
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I mean, did he jump out of the bushes or something?
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He was standing on a public sidewalk outside an event, a public event, and a public person came up.
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And he publicly identified himself with his microphone flash, with his credentials.
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I mean, by ambush, do you mean that he simply didn't send in the question in advance?
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Well, I suppose we are activists, but certainly no more than the CBC.
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Well, we are fundraising because we need to hire a lawyer to fight back.
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We don't work for the government like Dwayne Bratt does.
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You know, Kian Bexty, our alumnus, had an interesting point that we have to do journalism on the street because we are banned by the government from official press conferences.
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He said, want to know the reason David Menzies was asking Freeland questions on a sidewalk in the way that he was?
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It is because independent journalists are barred from the parliamentary press gallery by the CBC, CTV, Global News, Radio Canada, Media Cartel.
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I would love to go to press conferences and actually put a question to Chrystia Freeland,
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but they would have the RCMP frog march us off of Harlan Hill.
00:26:59.760
Here's another weird one, and I'm just showing you these because there's so few of them.
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Miro Cernetic, who used to be a reporter with the Globe and Mail, surprised me by saying,
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You don't get to do this with a cabinet minister, man or woman.
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You don't get to ask questions of cabinet ministers?
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Would he say that about Doug Ford or Stephen Harper or any conservative?
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And a lot of what I've shown you is just this Canadian cartel,
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this little clubby journalistic elite that hates rebel news.
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It's like that old movie Heathers about mean girls in school.
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But foreign reporters who have no dog in this hunt, they've covered this straight on.
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Rakshan Fernando did a big analysis in Australia.
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He always has, ever since I saw him in the movies.
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I love how he makes fun of Chrystia Freeland and the irony.
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And maybe the reason that Justin Trudeau is not popular is because of extraordinary moments like this.
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Did you see when Rebel News tried to interview Chrystia Freeland?
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Chrystia Freeland is a significant political figure in Canada, Deputy Prime Minister.
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Of course, you will be familiar, I believe, with her ancestral connections to a little old party called the Nazis.
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I think that's like, I mean, you know, we're still on YouTube.
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And certainly in Parliament in Canada, they did applaud an actual Nazi.
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Have a look at this moment where Rebel News reporter David Menzies wants to interview, or at least doorstep.
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Now, I myself have been on the wrong end of the media numerous times.
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The legacy media can be extremely disruptive and intrusive.
00:29:12.740
This is simply, in a sense, an attempt to interview Chrystia Freeland,
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who you would imagine might be, from her name, an Elphine utopian,
00:29:22.280
governing one of the principalities or shires in a Tolkien-esque wonderland,
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but seems, in reality, to be somewhat affiliated with Nazism.
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Here's a look at her acolytes preventing her from being confronted with a microphone.
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Why is your government supporting Islamo-Nazism?
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It's much more aggressive, isn't it, than what he did.
00:29:52.400
He was sort of, like, rather meekly and in an adorable fedora,
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I'm going to go back a little bit and have a look at that.
00:30:06.980
Like, the moment where he's trying to interview an elected official,
00:30:16.360
Why is your government supporting Islamo-Nazism?
00:30:30.380
So that person there, presumably is a police officer,
00:30:47.060
Okay, but I think we can agree amongst ourselves
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that the Nazis were a bad force in global politics
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due to, among other things, that hideous genocide.
00:31:00.960
Let's just see how the rest of this tape plays out.
00:31:14.120
He knows already that he's gone too far, doesn't he?
00:31:21.820
Like, I think they shouldn't be able to hide behind legal language.
00:31:27.920
If they had to use the sort of playground discourse
00:31:30.100
that they use when they're beginning to retract
00:31:36.520
Uh, it looks like they've got a legal fight there.
00:31:55.620
Sir, earlier when we paid scissor, paper, stones,
00:32:04.640
I mean, that's the most juvenile accusation I've encountered.
00:32:14.140
where they mistakenly called David Menzies a reporter,
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and I guess that will come out as the RCMP review it.
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who said, no, no, no, this isn't about liberals.
00:34:01.980
Hey, the liberal party always supports the CBC.
00:34:12.220
Pierre Paulyev has done two tweets about the subject,
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and then the Conservative Party did another tweet
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So contrary to the false and dishonest reporting
00:35:08.000
Yeah, I think the media is the opposition party
00:35:20.200
your question was typical of CBC, biased again.