00:00:00.040My friends, a big show today. We're going to talk to Melanie Bennett of Juno News about a new confidential government of Canada memo written by the military about the use of technology for authoritarian suppression of dissent.
00:00:14.620Sounds like they're really telling the story of the lockdowns and the truckers again, aren't they? We'll have the latest from her.
00:00:20.760And I want to show you what Wob Canu is up to. He is the, I'm not going to call him the mayor of Manitoba, but it is a total population of 1.5 million.
00:00:29.540But he's got a lot to say about Donald Trump, doesn't he?
00:00:32.360I'll show you his latest and my reaction to it.
00:00:35.060But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
00:00:38.560That's the video version of this podcast.
00:00:41.160I want you to see it so you can see things like the video I'm going to show you of Wob
00:07:23.780It wasn't just what was done in terms of vaccine mandates.
00:07:27.440and mask mandates and shutting down private establishments, including churches. To me,
00:07:33.380one of the most shocking and underreported aspects of the lockdowns and the Emergencies
00:07:40.760Act and the martial law it entailed was that the Canadian military was used to spy on Canadian
00:07:48.680citizens doing peaceful protests. Never allow anyone to say that the trucker protest was
00:07:54.680illegal. It wasn't illegal. Not just that. Four judges in a row have said it was not a problem
00:08:01.320legitimate enough to have the Emergencies Act declared. But we know for a fact that military
00:08:08.600drones were dispatched to spy on peaceful protesters. Heads would roll if the spying
00:08:17.300target was saying, oh, I don't know, a mosque, a radical mosque, or if it was some other favorite
00:08:23.820political group, but a total lack of interest, let alone accountability, when the Canadian
00:08:29.920military is used against Canadian citizens. Completely outrageous. But so many things our
00:08:36.080military does these days, which is a very short list, I should tell you, is outrageous, including
00:08:41.300the subject of our story today. It's written by Melanie Bennett, one of the stars over at
00:08:47.560Juneau News. And I'll read you the headline, exclusive, Military Intelligence Identified
00:08:51.980digital IDs, central bank digital currencies, as tools of authoritarian control. Military
00:08:59.140intelligence warned liberals that digital IDs, CBDC, were effective tools of authoritarian
00:09:05.180control. I'm not sure if that's a warning or an invitation, but here to talk to us about it is
00:09:10.200the woman behind the story, Melanie Bennett, who joins us via Zoom. Melanie, great to see you again
00:09:14.920and congratulations on this scoop. Thank you. I can't take credit. It wasn't me who
00:09:21.420applied for this particular ATIP. It was a previous colleague, but junior news did take
00:09:28.380over a year to get it. And I do have a lot of experience with ATIPs in this one, I'm told,
00:09:32.240was particularly difficult to get a hold of. So we're quite lucky to get our hands on that.
00:09:36.860Isn't it explosive? Yeah. Well, take us through it because, you know, sometimes like you styled
00:09:43.340the the headline that the army was warning about it but you know on the other hand the army was
00:09:51.160is a tool of authoritarianism i mean i remember in the public order inquiry uh into martial law
00:09:58.100the banter between cabinet ministers about how many tanks should we deploy against the peaceful
00:10:05.620protesters so and i know they've done psyops they've they've planted fake stories on the
00:10:11.660internet, like about wolves or something, just to test us, to nudge us, to run unlicensed,
00:10:18.840unsupervised psychological tests on Canadians. So help me understand this. Is the army recommending
00:10:26.040any of these things? Are they warning against others doing those things? Are they warning
00:10:30.440against the liberals doing those things? What exactly did the army have to say about these
00:10:35.240digital spyware really well this particular disclosure is it does very much read like a
00:10:43.100warning anyone can look at it we've made it available for download at juno news on the
00:10:48.100article you can go and have a look yourself it does very much read like a warning about
00:10:52.380other governments so it does particularly mention china and russia these governments that are using
00:10:58.080what they're calling an authoritarian toolkit which is a combination of multiple digital
00:11:02.680technologies. However, as you read through it, my first impression was this sounds like many things
00:11:10.720that Canada's implementing. This is many things that Canada's actually doing. So a warning, but
00:11:17.480also it's curious that it doesn't contain perhaps an inward reflection. I have to say there's
00:11:25.280multiple other disclosure documents that we may or may not receive. There was many more. This is
00:11:30.600one of 12 that was requested so we may be able to get more information in the future but so far
00:11:35.640this is all we've got now who was the author of this because i think that's important too
00:11:40.940was it a junior analyst just brainstorming was it someone of senior rank you say it was hard to get
00:11:48.140i'm sure you had to go back and forth with the access to information office
00:11:52.120haggling with them over it so it sounds like they were reluctant to release it
00:11:57.160does it disclose who authored it no we don't have that information i i believe the pmo did receive
00:12:05.020it uh so i couldn't say who created the brief unfortunately it it does seem that initially
00:12:12.560they did not want to release this information because it was top secret you can see it on the
00:12:17.240document says top secret it was declassified for reasons that are nothing to do with us it's just
00:12:22.800a stroke of luck that something else happened. The information had to be shared elsewhere,
00:12:27.060and that's how we were able to obtain the information. So again, we may or may not
00:12:32.380receive the rest of the things that we've asked of, but there's certainly interesting things in
00:12:36.320here because what does it include? It includes what I talked about in this article, which is
00:12:42.100kind of the headline as far as I'm concerned, these CBDCs, which is this central bank digital
00:12:46.000currency, and it's where the government has full control of all transactions in a central manner.
00:12:52.060So if the government decides that it doesn't want you to buy meat, so maybe you have a social credit system and it doesn't like what you're up to and limits your traveling or purchasing traveling tickets.
00:13:02.780So that's a danger. But so that's a headlining issue that we've been facing here in Canada.
00:13:08.280But also the digital IDs, right? This combination of this CBDC and digital ID, which is discussed in numerous places within this document.
00:13:19.320And I focused on it because here in Canada, there's been a lot of denial that Canada is engaging in moving forward with these CBDCs or digital ID.
00:13:30.500But it is kind of doing that in a way.
00:13:32.420And I mean, there's some other things in there, which I'm sure we'll cover over the coming days and weeks, like smart cities.
00:13:37.180There's been a lot of talks of smart cities, but all these technologies, often the government is, you know, just denying that we're even engaging in any of it.
00:13:44.220and i mean i remember during the lockdowns and i keep referring to it because i think that was
00:13:49.840where it was a trial run for so many emergency systems including martial law and one of the
00:13:56.860things was the government commandeered cell phone data of who was where to track the whereabouts of
00:14:04.240ordinary people because we're all carrying with us cell phones that have a location factor in it
00:14:12.320a GPS. I mean, it's sort of quaint. I was watching an old episode of the Libranos, the mafia show,
00:14:20.420and Tony Soprano rips out a GPS from his truck because he's disgusted that the police would be
00:14:27.280able to track him. That's so old fashioned. You know, every, I mean, from a digital watch to a
00:14:33.440digital phone to every, there's so many things on a truck, not just a GPS. We are our own spies.
00:14:40.800I mean, we walk around with the spyware on us, and I don't know if it just happened or if we ever hesitated and just blew through that moment, but I think probably 95% of people, maybe 90% of people, maybe not some seniors who have resisted getting a smartphone, are trackable by choices we've made.
00:15:04.040Well, these foreign line governments have noticed and the assessment does say so. So within it, it does warn that any kind of criticism coming from Western nations, not just Canada, it's talking about Western allies, liberal democracies, they call the Western liberal order within this disclosure.
00:15:21.260But it's warning that we can criticize this and we are trying to criticize these authoritarian digital technologies.
00:15:29.720But we don't have much of a leg to stand on because as far as China and Russia and Belarus and so on and so forth, as far as they're concerned, they're saying we're doing it too.
00:15:39.500And, you know, looking into it, when you research these incremental steps at Canada and other countries, including the UK and some places in Europe, that we are.
00:15:48.220And so it makes it very difficult, even within this military intelligence warning.
00:15:53.000It does make it difficult for Western countries to then defend this idea of liberty, this idea of liberalism and the Western liberal order.
00:16:01.540You know, I'm thinking of one of the concepts you mentioned in the story of the central bank digital currency or CBDC.
00:16:09.960It's basically a government version of crypto, of Bitcoin and things like that.
00:16:15.900And the irony is that cryptocurrencies were invented, created, founded in large part with a libertarian spirit to have a way of, you know, a means of exchange that cannot be meddled with by government, that couldn't be inflated, that couldn't be in many ways traced.
00:16:35.060So it was sort of a the ultimate libertarian expression. A central bank digital currency is is such a contradiction in terms. It's like dry water or cold fire or something. And and I to me, the key is that a lot of CB. It's almost a hard word to say CBDCs would allow whoever is the master of it to track it, obviously, to turn it off.
00:17:02.180I could imagine one day, I mean, like, imagine if a central bank digital currency had been in place during the trucker convoy.
00:17:09.680The idea of donating to the truckers would have been impossible.
00:17:13.420The truckers themselves would have had their wallets turned off and suddenly couldn't do anything from buying gas to buying food.
00:17:21.240Their location could be correlated with their spending.
00:18:21.000It's not warning about it for our country.
00:18:23.340But here in Canada, when I was looking into this, I'd heard that Canada was potentially looking at CBDCs in the past, and it certainly was that the Bank of Canada did take some interest in that and was possibly thinking about implementing them and then took a backseat.
00:18:37.980They backed away from it towards something they're calling a stablecoin. Now, a stablecoin is not quite the same. It's still a government-regulated digital coin, but it's backed by fiat, so the Canadian dollar.
00:18:51.100They're calling it a retail stable coin. It is controlled instead by the, rather than being
00:18:58.780controlled by the government centrally, it's controlled by private businesses, but it's still
00:19:02.420regulated by the government. So the argument that I make in the article is that whilst we're not
00:19:07.860going headstrong into CBDC's full government controlled coins that can totally be shut off
00:19:13.940with a kill switch if they want, or shutting off your transactions, they are moving towards this
00:19:18.020stable corn. The curious thing that I found whilst looking into it is that in, I believe it was in
00:19:25.200July of this year, the Bank of England was engaging or had produced a theoretical research paper
00:19:31.960looking into the social benefits, as they call it, the social benefits of collecting data for CBDCs.
00:19:39.420So it's not that they're no longer interested at all. They're certainly interested in at least
00:19:44.980looking into you or researching it and gathering information about it but for now we might be
00:19:50.100moving forward with something called a stable coin you know the money side is important because you
00:19:56.800you know you can't do anything without money every political movement needs money i mean it's just
00:20:03.320it's just the way it is but the the censorship aspect let me quote a paragraph or two from
00:20:09.580your story, you say, perhaps most strikingly, the report says that a monitored citizenry
00:20:16.060will limit their own speech, knowing the authorities can monitor communications
00:20:22.160and modify their behavior, knowing that there are escalating consequences for expressing
00:20:28.800dissent. The most effective form of censorship, it says, is self-censorship. And we know that's
00:20:36.700true even from pre-digital regimes i i know that in the in the soviet bloc people sort of had two
00:20:45.160modes one is with their most trusted friends and family where they could speak candidly
00:20:51.840and the other when they were in public mode when they you know salute fly the flag clap for
00:20:58.200you know the dictators because everyone is spying on everyone else and only when they were sure they
00:21:04.160And even Orwell, to him, the ideal place was to get out of the city and to get into the country.
00:21:13.560I think that is how it always works, is that if you can convince people to be scared and then to regulate themselves, govern themselves, censor themselves, that's a huge win.
00:21:28.940I mean, I guess all all use of force, I mean, even even police, if they can holler at you to get you to do something without exerting force physically, that's a big win to them.
00:21:40.240This talk, what that paragraph says is chilling, is to chill a conversation is the cheapest, fastest, surest way to kill an idea, to make people censor themselves.
00:21:56.060That is true. And it's terrifying that that's in a Canadian military memo.
00:22:01.020Yeah. So that line, when I first read through the disclosure, that is the line that struck me the most.
00:22:07.980I really wanted to get this into the article because it felt like I was reading about Canadians.
00:22:15.020How many Canadians do we report on in the independent media who are coming to us anonymously?
00:22:20.880They work for a regulated industry. Maybe they're a teacher, maybe they're a doctor or a psychologist, and they are coming to us anonymously because they're afraid of speaking publicly. So they're engaging in self-centorship because they know that these institutions are going to come after them.
00:22:37.600And so for me, that was incredibly telling. And even before that, the what wasn't including you go read in the A-Tip yourself, they were talking about how that is deliberately used to control people, because if they know they're being surveilled, if they know they're being watched, then that's when they engage in that self-censorship, which which makes state control much easier.
00:22:58.200Yeah. Well, that's how it was during the pandemic is neighbor spying on neighbor and people putting up a front. There was a lot of deception going on by ordinary people to survive. And I don't know, it was the government downloaded so much of the KGB type stuff to ordinary people, to shopkeepers, to neighbors.
00:23:21.160um i don't know i find it terrifying and i think covid did not disabuse any government
00:23:30.200of being authoritarian if you think about it every single premier who had an election during
00:23:36.860covid times was re-elected the only one who was sacked was jason kenny and he was fired by his
00:23:42.120own party not the general public i'm sure he would have won in the general public as did
00:23:47.060doug ford and and other premiers um justin trudeau was handsomely re-elected there if
00:23:54.280if political success is your test of morality of whether you're right and wrong and in a way
00:24:02.520it is you know did you did you carry the judgment of the people um there was no there were no
00:24:10.660contraindications to being authoritarian. Um, in fact, I remember when, and I know I'm bringing
00:24:17.740this back to COVID a lot here, but that's the last time we had a real imposition of
00:24:22.400authoritarianism in this country. Um, when, when Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland brought down the
00:24:29.520hammer, the center of gravity in the, in the media was they should go harder. Why are they
00:24:38.660being so gentle i mean there were there was a there was a sector of society that wanted to see
00:24:44.120skulls being crushed um i don't think a senior a single politician in canada took away from the
00:24:52.960pandemic experience that they went too far i don't think i just don't think so i don't think they
00:24:58.660regret a thing and why would they they were all reelected by running on a we're going to get tough
00:25:04.080platform i mean for a while there doug ford had a rule that you can't be out on the streets it was
00:25:08.880only when the police said we're not going to enforce that but by the way in quebec they did
00:25:12.240enforce that in quebec they had a they had a curfew in different it was different times
00:25:18.180different periods from 10 p.m to 5 a.m was crazy i don't know i'll push back on that because as far
00:25:24.580as i understand blaine higgs was a darling for a while because he was you know hearing the public
00:25:32.140voice on um trans issues for youth but he didn't win and my understanding in new brunswick my
00:25:39.800understanding is because of the stance that he took during covid so maybe new brunswick has
00:25:44.080something to teach us okay well i'm let me study that more i wasn't think i was thinking of the
00:25:48.620other provinces well let me give you an example speaking of the atlantic remember that fella uh
00:25:53.980jeff evely i think was his name who there were fires in the atlantic and so there was a there
00:25:59.380was a rule passed a law that you could not go for a walk in the woods and what was defined as the
00:26:05.700woods or the forest was not clear could you go for a walk in your own forest what's what's a forest
00:26:11.380and what's just a bunch of clump of trees it was not clear it was just as junk sciencey as any
00:26:18.420covid rule there was no science behind it it just showed that the government was serious and by the
00:26:23.320way their fines were like 25 grand for going for a walk now that was uh recently struck down the
00:26:29.900justice center for constitutional freedoms took that one to court but that happened just a year
00:26:34.160ago so i i i assert that as proof of my thesis that governments far from learning their lesson
00:26:41.180learn the lesson that that that canadians maybe crave that heavy hand you know we got our
00:26:48.880independence through evolution not revolution our canada day celebrates peace order and good
00:26:55.200government it's not like the fourth of july which is called independence day um i don't know maybe
00:27:01.340we just really love being abused because we certainly vote for it well canadians don't like
00:27:06.840to make too much of a fuss this tall poppy syndrome that's for sure and i think these the
00:27:10.760governments are aware of that i think you may have a point there as well i don't know i just i thought
00:27:15.680It's a very interesting report, and I'm really glad to have you on to talk about it.
00:27:19.040Folks, you can get it at JunoNews.com.
00:27:21.380As I like to tell everybody, and I should be embarrassed to say it, but I'm not,
00:27:24.840I have two subscriptions to Juno News,
00:27:27.000and it's just because I'm very bad at clerical things like signing up just once.
00:27:31.820So I actually have two subscriptions, but I recommend it.
00:27:35.240And, in fact, last night I had the good fortune of being out in Vancouver
00:27:38.360when the founder or co-founder of Juno News received the Justice Center's George Jonas Award.
00:27:44.640so that was a pleasure to be there. Melody, before we let you go, I want to talk to you about a
00:27:49.520different story, and I know you have done some excellent work about Islamification here in
00:27:55.220Canada, including in the school system, and I saw a tweet, and I forwarded it your way because I
00:28:00.280thought it was so interesting. Saudi Arabia is reissuing school books, textbooks, to take out
00:28:07.760the anti-Semitism. This is after 50 years of teaching officially anti-Semitism in their
00:28:15.320textbooks. And I remember, I don't know, I guess it was about 30 years ago when the negotiations
00:28:20.760for peace were proceeding under Bill Clinton. And one of the demands by Israel was to take out
00:28:25.980anti-Semitism and Jew hate from the school books. And that was dropped. And the other side said,
00:28:32.720oh, that's just performative. That's just to placate the street. No, no, no. That's what
00:28:37.320causes it. That's planting seeds. So they never removed that. And, and, you know, a generation
00:28:43.600later we have Gaza where the majority of people supported the murder. And I think that's because0.97
00:28:48.740if you teach people from a tender age to hate and want to kill Jews, well, it's going to stick.0.95
00:28:53.920And it's amazing to me that Saudi Arabia literally made the decision. Saudi Arabia of all places0.97
00:28:59.780decided to undo that and go the other way.
00:29:54.860So a fair amount of money to continue producing these Islamophobia documents and plans and strategies.
00:30:04.640I just don't know which ones they are yet, so I'm still looking into it.
00:30:07.280But it's a substantial amount of money.
00:30:08.860And so our government is continuing to give these organizations, which the U.S. and others have identified as potentially having affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood, who are probably the one of the most prolific extremist Islamist organizations wishing to expand in North America, at least other places across the world as well.
00:30:33.260So I thought that that was very unexpected that this is coming from Saudi Arabia.0.91
00:30:38.600And if they're doing it, then why can't we do it?
00:30:45.880I mean, the Abraham Accords was derailed after the October 7th terrorist attack.0.85
00:30:51.420But I feel like it's back on track in a number of ways, including Lebanon, which has basically said we accept Israel as a neighbor and we have a common interest with Israel in getting rid of Hezbollah.0.84
00:31:01.360That is startling progress, I think, to me. I think a lot of the Islamism we see in the West is from the West. I mean, this move that I find just infuriating of mass performative Muslim prayers on public sidewalks and streets and especially in front of churches, that doesn't happen in Saudi Arabia or the UAE.0.95
00:31:26.200In those countries, you pray in a mosque. You don't have territorial domination, especially in Montreal, literally outside the great basilica there, the big cathedral. I think the radical Islam is now in the West, and the moderating Islam is places like Lebanon, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman. It's really incredible.
00:31:49.100Anyway, we're getting a bit off the far afield, but it's great to catch up with you.
00:31:53.280I'm a big fan of your work at Juno News.
00:31:55.960And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, you are a finalist, if I'm not mistaken, in the Independent Press Gallery Awards.