The Candice Malcolm Show - National Post whitewashes a Nazi slogan to defend Chrystia Freeland

00:00:00.000 The legacy media has finally acknowledged that Canada's Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland

00:00:04.000 held an extremist banner at a Ukrainian rally last weekend. But rather than seeking to hold

00:00:08.700 Chrystia Freeland accountable for holding the banner, they seek to hold True North

00:00:13.080 accountable for reporting on it. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:21.160 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. So as you recall earlier this week,

00:00:25.660 True North broke the story that Chrystia Freeland was at a Ukrainian rally. She was photographed

00:00:30.020 holding this red and black banner. The banner represents the Bandera movement, a far-right

00:00:34.800 extremist Nazi movement in Ukraine. It's named after Stefan Bandera, who wasn't just a Nazi

00:00:40.580 collaborator. He was a Nazi. He led this militant far-right group, a nationalist group. They worked 0.74

00:00:45.820 with the Nazis. He had his own hand in carrying out Adolf Hitler's Holocaust. He was responsible 0.93

00:00:50.640 for killing upwards of 100,000 Jews and Poles in Ukraine during the Second World War. As despicable 0.77

00:00:58.620 as you can possibly imagine. And yet here is our finance minister, Deputy Prime Minister,

00:01:03.580 not just holding the banner. She posted this photo. It was posted on her own social media,

00:01:08.420 on Twitter and Instagram on Sunday afternoon. By Monday morning, her or her staff deleted that photo

00:01:13.900 and found a more sanitized version of the same photo where she was not holding this controversial

00:01:18.860 flag. So True North reported on it. I suspect at the time, I speculated that I didn't think that

00:01:24.100 the legacy media would pick it up, right? When a conservative goes to a trucker rally and some

00:01:29.000 provocateur shows up on a different side of the rally, there for 10 minutes with a Nazi flag,

00:01:33.460 every single conservative and every single trucker at that rally is smeared in the media

00:01:37.420 as a Nazi. Justin Trudeau said in the House of Commons that the conservatives were standing with

00:01:42.040 those who wave swastikas, a complete fabrication, completely untrue, a smear and a lie. But the media

00:01:48.020 happily repeated it. And on the contrary, when we have a liberal politician holding up a banner

00:01:54.640 that to people who understand, to people who know what this means, it can represent and signify

00:01:59.840 an allegiance to a Nazi leader during the Second World War, same era who worked with Adolf Hitler,

00:02:05.360 who murdered scores and scores of Jews in Eastern Europe. It's unconscionable. I didn't think the

00:02:10.660 media would pick it up. So I have some good news today to report, which is that yes, the media

00:02:14.500 has picked up the story. Unfortunately for everybody, the way that the media spin this

00:02:19.880 story, it is absolutely unbelievable. So I'm going to go through this piece in the National Post

00:02:24.900 pretty carefully and explain absolutely everything wrong with it. So the National Post, Tristan Hopper,

00:02:29.880 just to say it straight off the bat, many conservatives still consider the National Post to be a reputable

00:02:35.120 newspaper. They still believe that it is the conservative alternative to say the Globe and Mail,

00:02:40.100 CBC or the Toronto Star. Well, this episode of the Candace Malcolm Show, this article in the National Post

00:02:45.440 tell us, sadly, that that is just no longer the case. The National Post is no better than the Toronto Star

00:02:51.560 or the Globe and Mail. They're shills for the liberals. And this piece demonstrates why. Okay, so here it is,

00:02:57.300 National Post. Did Chrystia Freeland pose with extremist symbols? Or is it Russian disinformation? 1.00

00:03:03.680 The headline asks. And then the sub headline here sort of answers that question. It says,

00:03:07.980 a classic KGB disinformation smear is accusing Ukrainians and Ukrainian Canadians of being

00:03:13.240 far-right extremists or fascists or Nazis, Chrystia Freeland's press secretary says. So they ask a

00:03:18.940 question in the headline, and then there's Chrystia Freeland's press secretary in the sub headline,

00:03:23.900 answering the question, saying, no, it's not extremist. It's just Russian disinformation.

00:03:28.020 And anyone who's sharing this story must be sharing Russian disinformation. So like I said,

00:03:33.780 I'm going to read through this piece pretty closely. So here we go. Canadian Deputy Prime

00:03:38.600 Minister Chrystia Freeland is being assailed with online accusations that she posed with far-right

00:03:43.580 symbols at a pro-Ukraine rally in Toronto. But the symbols may not be as far-right as critics claim.

00:03:49.960 And Freeland's office is saying the whole thing reeks of Russian-sponsored disinformation. So again,

00:03:55.480 if you're reporting on this, if you're talking about this, it must be Russian-sponsored

00:04:00.200 disinformation. Okay, let's keep reading. On Sunday, Freeland joined several thousand

00:04:04.720 demonstrators at a pro-Ukraine rally in downtown Toronto. In a photograph her office subsequently

00:04:09.400 posted on Twitter, Freeland can be seen holding up a red and black scarf bearing the slogan Slava

00:04:15.560 Ukraini or Glory to Ukraine. Observers were quick to note that red and black were the official colors

00:04:20.580 of the Ukrainian insurgent army, a nationalist partisan group active during the Second World War.

00:04:25.120 Although the group fought against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, a faction led

00:04:29.740 by Stefan Bandera would ally itself with German forces and became an active participant in the

00:04:34.200 Holocaust, directly killing thousands of Jews and an estimated 100,000 Poles. It's why red and 1.00

00:04:40.340 black flags remain a favored symbol of the Ukrainian far-right. The colors are a prominent feature of an

00:04:46.260 annual torch-lit march through Kiev held by far-right nationalists to honor Bandera. A widely circulated

00:04:53.200 photo by the Canadian right-wing site, True North put it, Freeland posed with a pro-Nazi banner.

00:04:59.500 So you can see here that Tristan Hopper uses similar facts to what we had in our True North piece

00:05:04.640 to verify and validate that Chrystia Freeland was in fact holding a banner that most people would 0.79

00:05:09.300 associate, most people in the Ukrainian community would associate with Bandera, who was a Nazi, who

00:05:14.280 participated in the Holocaust, and that those colors, that banner, are used during an annual torch-lit

00:05:20.220 march, a neo-Nazi march through Kiev held by far-right nationalists. So he verifies our report.

00:05:26.660 He verifies our report. He smears us as being a right-wing site in the context of a story talking

00:05:31.720 about the far-right being Nazis. So he kind of puts us one step away from Nazis. He's saying far-right

00:05:37.440 is Nazis. This is a right-wing site, not far-right, but right-wing. So right next to Nazis. The whole thing 0.63

00:05:42.660 is a smear. And then he goes on to say, People's Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier put out a tweet

00:05:48.760 Tuesday accusing Canada of having a Nazi as a prime minister. And he showed the same photo and

00:05:55.020 he later tweeted our piece. Now, I just want to point out the fact that I myself was critical

00:05:59.640 of Maxime Bernier for using this language. I put out this tweet. I said, We now have two federal

00:06:04.600 leaders who smeared the other side as Nazis. Our political discourse in Canada is reaching parody

00:06:08.840 levels. And there's this funny meme, Everyone I don't like is Hitler, an emotional child's guide to

00:06:14.360 political discussion. And I quote tweeted Maxime Bernier there because he claims that Chrystia

00:06:20.460 Freeland is a Nazi. And to clarify, I wrote another one. I said, My report yesterday illustrates that

00:06:24.380 Freeland is callous and reckless with her support of sketchy groups in Ukraine. She's playing into 1.00

00:06:28.580 Russian propaganda. And she's a blatant hypocrite. Not that she's a literal Nazi. We shouldn't stoop 1.00

00:06:33.520 to their level of rhetoric. Yes, Justin Trudeau and the liberals love to smear all of their opponents

00:06:38.220 and everyone they disagree with. As Nazis, I don't think their opponents should stoop to that level.

00:06:42.100 I don't think that people like Maxime Bernier or the head of the conservative party should just

00:06:45.960 turn around and accuse them back of being Nazis. I don't think that's productive. I don't think

00:06:49.340 that's helpful. And yet the way that Kristen Hopper frames it by putting my piece out saying that I

00:06:53.820 accused her of being pro Nazi, and then Maxime Bernier accused her of being a Nazi kind of puts

00:06:59.060 it as if we had the same opinion, even though I distinctly condemned Maxime Bernier for making that

00:07:03.740 accusation. But don't expect that level of accuracy or nuance from this report from a lazy

00:07:09.260 journalist over at the National Post. Okay, so to keep going here, Tristan Hopper writes,

00:07:13.740 soon after its posting, the original photo was deleted and replaced with an image of Freeland

00:07:18.500 without the scarf. So again, he acknowledges that Freeland deleted the picture, which to a point I also

00:07:24.900 made on Twitter, this is a tacit acknowledgement that she shouldn't have been taking pictures with

00:07:29.200 that red and black scarf. The red and black scarf represents a far right movement. It represents

00:07:33.480 an actual Nazi. And Chrystia Freeland is at fault for posting that original picture and for being in 1.00

00:07:39.200 the audience and holding it in the first place. And just I want to interject. Some people say,

00:07:44.000 oh, she didn't know what she was doing. She's naive. Give me a break. Chrystia Freeland is one of the 1.00

00:07:47.740 most knowledgeable people about Ukraine, Ukrainian politics. She spent much of her life, much of her

00:07:52.540 career in Ukraine. She's a Ukrainian speaker, a Russian speaker. She's incredibly intelligent. She went to

00:07:57.020 Harvard and Oxford and was a Rhodes Scholar. She knows exactly what she's doing. She's written

00:08:01.580 multiple books on the subject. Don't tell me that she's naive and she didn't know what she was doing. 1.00

00:08:05.260 She knew exactly what she was doing. Okay, let's get back to Tristan Hopper and the National Post

00:08:09.700 and their pro-liberal spin. It says, Freeland's office confirmed that they removed the original

00:08:14.860 photo after it began to be circulated by accounts critical of the scarf's presence. A photo was taken,

00:08:20.460 tweeted, and later replaced when it was clear some accounts were distorting the intent of the rally

00:08:25.680 and the photo, read a statement by Freeland's press secretary, Adrienne Vupcha. She added that the

00:08:30.360 origins of the scarf were unknown. Okay, so fair enough. Include a statement from the deputy prime

00:08:36.380 minister and her spokesperson. The piece then moves on to quote a director of the Canadian Institute

00:08:42.160 for Ukrainian Studies. So this individual, Natalia Kachenko-Friesen, told the National Post that the

00:08:48.360 red and black symbology for Ukraine long predates its adoption by extremist groups. She noted that the

00:08:53.740 red and black banners can be seen in paintings dating back to the 17th century. Okay, now this part's

00:08:59.780 truly, truly unbelievable. This is one of the most unbelievable things I've ever seen, this paragraph

00:09:03.580 right here. So the same scholar, the Ukrainian-Canadian scholar, her name's Kachenko-Friesen,

00:09:09.700 she defends the concept of blood and soil. So she says, the black represents Ukrainian soil, 0.83

00:09:14.980 while the red symbolizes blood. So blood and soil. Although Kachenko-Friesen, a scholar of Ukrainian

00:09:20.760 folklore, said it's not traditionally understood as blood in any violent context. Okay, so they're allowed

00:09:26.200 to say blood and soil because it's not blood in a violent context. She says, blood is life and blossom

00:09:31.520 and not as blood loss in battle, she said. Red and black remain common color scheme in traditional

00:09:37.180 Ukrainian embroidery. So let's just stop and acknowledge how absolutely incredible this is.

00:09:43.120 Tristan Hopper, the National Post, defending the concept of blood and soil. Blood and soil,

00:09:48.400 you can't make this stuff up. Remember when those loser white nationalists were marching with their dumb 1.00

00:09:53.200 little tiki torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, back in 2017. Do you remember their creepy chants? 1.00

00:09:57.960 Do you remember what they were saying? They were saying, blood and soil, blood and soil. And back

00:10:02.040 in 2017, we were uniformly told by the legacy media that that was a Nazi chant. Here's what that looked

00:10:08.340 like. Now at the time in 2017, this is how the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing group,

00:10:24.020 this is how they describe that chant, blood and soil. They write this, blood and soil, possibly the

00:10:28.700 most disturbing of all chants heard in Charlottesville. This is the English rendition of Nazi Germany's most

00:10:33.720 fervent chant, Blut and Boden, originally devised as a 19th century German national slogan,

00:10:39.520 popularized by Nazi ideology. The phrase is intended to invoke patriotic identification

00:10:44.140 with native national identity. And based on the foundation of virulent antisemitism and racism,

00:10:50.180 it later became a key component of Adolf Hitler's program seeking to expand territory occupied by the

00:10:55.720 Germans. That was a major factor in the Holocaust. The slogan has been adopted by the alt-right,

00:11:00.400 particularly its openly neo-Nazi element to emphasize its own nativist and illiminalist

00:11:06.840 agenda. So blood and soil, we all agree, is a creepy Nazi slogan. Very, very bad in the context

00:11:13.260 of people using it in North America. And yet, however, here's the National Post twisting itself

00:11:18.720 into a pretzel to say it's okay when Chrystia Freeland is holding up the same banner, the same National

00:11:24.460 Post, by the way, the same newspaper, National Post back in 2018, had an article condemning

00:11:30.220 the use of this phrase, blood and soil. Here is this article, how the violent Charlottesville

00:11:34.480 rally unmasked key players in Montreal's alt-right. On August 11th, the Montrealers joined a torch

00:11:40.440 march through Charlottesville, blending into the crowd that chanted blood and soil. So it was

00:11:46.200 despicable for its use in North America a few years ago. But when Chrystia Freeland participates in it

00:11:52.420 in 2022. Well, it's no big deal, because really, the red doesn't represent blood. It represents

00:11:58.320 flowers. Okay, National Post, what a joke, willing to defend blood and soil to protect their gal.

00:12:05.260 Chrystia Freeland, I've never seen anything like this before. Okay, it continues, they find more

00:12:09.740 experts to accuse groups like True North of spreading KGB propaganda. So I'll continue to read.

00:12:15.720 It says, Marcus Kolga is a Macdonald-Laurier fellow who runs Disinfo Watch, a website tracking

00:12:21.680 foreign disinformation narratives. He was also at the Sunday rally, not far away from where the

00:12:26.660 scarf was taken. Kolga told the National Post that anyone touting the photograph as evidence of any

00:12:31.700 Nazi sympathies among the Canadian federal government are unwittingly participating in an active Russian 0.61

00:12:38.180 information operation. One of the narratives that they, the Russian Federation, use is to smear critics

00:12:43.280 as being fascists or Nazis, he said, adding that it's something that Soviet sources were directing

00:12:47.820 at Ukrainian Canadian community as far back as the 1970s. So again, Chrystia Freeland would know all

00:12:53.220 this, right? She would know that this flag is used as propaganda by the Russians, that she shouldn't

00:12:58.360 be holding it, that as far back as the 1970s, they use this line of thinking, and they use this line of

00:13:04.360 propaganda to smear Ukrainians as being far right Nazis. And yet, it isn't Chrystia Freeland's fault for

00:13:11.300 being at the rally, holding the flag, taking a picture and posting it. No, no, no. Anybody using

00:13:17.340 this as evidence is unwilling. Anyone sharing this information, anybody posting this, anybody writing

00:13:22.560 about it, groups like True North, who Chrystia Freeland described as being right wing. We are the

00:13:26.740 ones that are participating in the Russian information operation, not Chrystia Freeland.

00:13:30.840 See how that all works? See how nice that always works out for the liberals. They're never at fault.

00:13:34.980 The people who are trying to hold them accountable are the one at fault. I'll continue to read,

00:13:39.160 look, here's Tristan Hopper, finding a fourth person who agrees with him, who defends Chrystia

00:13:44.740 Freeland. So to continue reading, disinformation is a real threat and Canadians need to be vigilant,

00:13:49.800 said Eeyore Mikulchinskyn, and I apologize for probably mispronouncing that name, the CEO of the

00:13:54.140 Ukrainian-Canadian Congress. He told the National Post when asked about the controversy regarding

00:13:58.780 Freeland's holding a black and red scarf. So there you have it. Four people quoted, Chrystia Freeland's

00:14:05.140 spokesperson, and three other people who are all willing to defend Chrystia Freeland say it is not

00:14:09.800 her fault, but it is the fault of people who are talking about this and sharing the image and making

00:14:14.480 the connections and reporting on it, trying to hold her accountable. They're the ones who are sharing

00:14:18.640 in misinformation and propaganda. You really can't make this stuff up. So you get this.

00:14:23.560 Chrystia Freeland is not to blame. It isn't her fault that she posted the photograph. It's not her

00:14:27.820 fault that she was in the photograph, that she was holding the flag, that she took the photograph,

00:14:31.580 and that she herself posted it. None of those are her fault. That's not her fault at all. The ones

00:14:36.180 who are at fault are groups like True North for covering it. We're the ones who are, quote,

00:14:40.700 unwittingly participating in an active Russian information operation, unquote, according to the 0.99

00:14:45.540 useful idiots over at the McDonald-Laurier Institute. What a joke. So she's not the one that's playing 1.00

00:14:51.200 into Russian propaganda. True North is for reporting it. See how that works. Must be so nice to be a

00:14:56.980 liberal in Canada. Journalists are notoriously lazy and stupid. And I don't suspect that Tristan 1.00

00:15:01.660 Hopper actually bothered to read the article that he linked to, my article that this was all based

00:15:06.100 on. If Tristan Hopper had bothered to read my piece, he would have known that I was well aware

00:15:10.280 of the Russian propaganda campaign surrounding this issue. That is why I was holding the minister

00:15:15.820 accountable for holding the flag, unlike the National Post, who's trying to hold me accountable for

00:15:20.800 writing about it. So I'm just going to go back for Tristan Hopper, for anyone who didn't bother

00:15:24.160 reading my piece. This was published on Monday night. This is what I said about it. I said this.

00:15:28.660 This all creates two major problems for Christy Freeland and the liberals. The first is a tremendous

00:15:32.940 double standard at play. Just weeks ago, Trudeau and his allies in legacy media relentlessly smeared

00:15:37.960 the trucker convoy as Nazis because of one still unidentified provocateur who crashed the protest before

00:15:44.480 quickly disappearing. Trudeau infamously called a conservative MP of Jewish heritage, Melissa

00:15:49.620 Lanceman accused her of standing with people who wave swastikas. They smeared an entire group by a

00:15:55.500 single despicable flag spotted near the protest. Now, in the case of Christy Freeland at the Ukrainian

00:16:00.200 rally in Toronto, she wasn't simply spotted at the same rally as a Nazi. She was literally holding

00:16:05.880 the flag. Okay, this is the part where I get into the Russian information again, reading from my piece,

00:16:10.820 which was published on Monday night. The second major problem this presents for Freeland and liberals

00:16:15.100 is that they are opening themselves to smears and propaganda from the Putin regime. When Putin

00:16:20.600 announced his invasion into Ukraine, the justification he provided in part was to denazify

00:16:25.440 the country. Putin's war efforts rely on propaganda presenting the Ukrainian government and its allies

00:16:30.640 in the West, and yes, that includes Christy Freeland in Canada, as supporting an extremist far-right

00:16:36.120 Nazi movement. When a prominent Western leader is photographed with a banner that represents the

00:16:42.060 neo-Nazi movement, she is naively playing into Putin's hands. Christy Freeland can scrub her own 0.99

00:16:47.400 social media to her heart's content, but her photo holding the red and black banner is making the

00:16:51.640 rounds on social media and is being used on other websites, including this NPR affiliate. This is a

00:16:56.820 significant misstep by Freeland. Let's see if anyone in the media notices or reports on it. Now, notice how

00:17:02.600 I pin the blame on Christy Freeland herself. That's sort of how journalism is supposed to work. You're

00:17:07.260 supposed to hold powerful people to account. But once again, we learn that the media in Canada has

00:17:12.280 different standards in dealing with liberals. So here you have Post Media, once considered the last

00:17:17.140 bastion of conservative thought left in the legacy media here in Canada. But here they are, selling

00:17:22.580 their souls, spinning for the liberals, smearing independent journalists, and misleading their

00:17:26.980 audience for what? Well, you can only assume it has something to do with that $600 million newspaper

00:17:32.020 bailout check written by one Justin Trudeau. They crafted an entire article based on Christy Freeland's

00:17:38.200 spin. Rather than holding the most powerful woman in Canadian politics accountable for the flag that 1.00

00:17:43.440 she held, knowing full well what it was and what it meant, the once trustworthy National Post is holding

00:17:49.260 me and us here at True North accountable for the crime of reporting on Christy Freeland. It is

00:17:54.340 unbelievable. They even go to the absurd extent of defending a Nazi slogan, blood and soil,

00:18:01.180 just to defend Christy Freeland. It is unbelievable. The National Post and its writer Tristan Hopper are

00:18:07.040 no better than the CBC. They're no better than the Toronto Star. They're willing to say anything to

00:18:11.420 stay in the liberals good books to defend their friends in the liberal party, even if it means

00:18:16.060 selling out any credibility they had left with their audience. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is the

00:18:21.040 Candace Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - March 03, 2022

National Post whitewashes a Nazi slogan to defend Chrystia Freeland

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