TRIGGERnometry - Leader Of Canadian Freedom Convoy SPEAKS OUT - BJ Dichter

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

Benjamin Joseph (BJ) Dichter was a leader in the 2022 Canadian convoy protest. He is a truck driver, author, and podcaster from Toronto, Canada. Dichter was the candidate for Toronto Centre-Rosedale in the 2014 Toronto municipal election, and the 2015 Conservative candidate for Toronto-Danforth. He has been noted for criticisms of partisan divisiveness, and of political tolerance toward extremism. He is also the founder of the LGBTQ conservative group LGBTory. SPONSORED BY GiveSendGo - Go to https://www.GiveSendGo.com/ to check out a better alternative to crowdfunding. Support the people who support freedom! SPONSORED BY: EasyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We had everybody at that protest, and that's what scared the bejesers out of the political class. It was both of them, conservatives and liberals, lockstep, that put forward these lockdowns. We became the official opposition. Not only was it your personal, but also your business account. So they were effectively trying to make you go bust. The government was trying to make you go bust. We didn't do it, you know, for myself. We did for all of us, because we got to put an end to clown world.

You know how media works? I wanted to deny them the intellectual property of their own content so they could smear us and loop every day. I was trying to show the world, you don't need legacy media. That alternative media platforms like this have way more viability than legacy media. We learned about the Holocaust all the time. What did I learn in all those years in school? Dingo.

What I learned was, that was the government. Hey guys, Trigonometry needs your help. We took a big risk creating the show and for us to keep doing the incredible work that you all love, we need your support. That's the only

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Click the link on the podcast description or find the link on your podcast listening app to join us. Support us and help change the way we have conversations and make the world saner. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is one of the leaders of the Canadian Freedom Convoy protests that we saw last year,

which became a global news story. And he's written a book about his experiences called Honking for Freedom. What a great title. Benjamin Dictor, welcome to Trichonometry. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. This is the book. Look forward to talking to you about it.

Before we get into all of this, and it was such an interesting and massive story at the time. the way it was covered. That was interesting. But before we do all of that, tell us who are you? How are you where you are? What's been the journey that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? It's been a long journey. So my name, Benjamin Dichter, I am a trucker in Canada or have been for a few years. I really got into it during COVID to escape what Canada had become. But I've been a serial entrepreneur. I've been a diamond grader. I've been a corporate sales. director, ran my own business on a university campus for almost 10 years. And I saw wokeism entered the university space. It really started around 2012, 2013. And every year, things would get more and more extreme to the point that after four years, the students, you wouldn't recognize them.

They would leave with this cynicism, victimization narrative, hating the world. And it just got progressively worst and the faculty as well. So I ended up ultimately selling that business and getting into podcasting. Just like I couldn't be in that environment anymore. So this entire shift we've seen culturally is not new to me. And I guess that's what ultimately left to me being the spokesperson for one of the global uprisings against the shift in the narrative of our culture, which I think needs to stop. And so here we are. see a link between wokeness and what

you experienced in Canada during COVID? Oh yeah. What's that link? Because some people will say, well, Justin Trudeau is just an authoritarian or everybody was scared or it was about safety or whatever. But why do you say there's a link? So I'll qualify this by

I've also run for the Conservative Party in Ken in the past. So I know the behind the scenes mechanism, how everything works. Justin Trudeau is a symptom. He's not the cause. And Justin Trudeau really, everybody on Parliament Hill knows, he doesn't make any decisions. He has no idea what's going on. The PMO runs the country. So you have these quiet, you know, these secretive bureaucrats behind the scenes that are running the entire wheel of the country. And they just wheel him out. Can I just pause you there? What does PMO mean? Oh, sorry, Prime Minister's Office. Okay, got you. So the Prime Minister's Office is running the country. And so they don't have to be.

have any scrutiny in the media. He's just the puppet that they run out to be, they roll out to be the punching bag. He doesn't read the news. This is from a former liberal cabinet member who's told me this. He doesn't read the news. He doesn't know what's going on. He, the deal was he's going to be the relationships manager. And he let that slip one time when he first got elected. So they run the country. They tell him, Justin, go out and talk about these three, four issues. And that's why he seems so incongruent from what's actually going on to what he's actually saying. He has no clue. And I think I would argue seeing an element of that in the United States as well. So come back with me to wokeness and the connection between that and what you guys were protesting about.

Okay, so the wokeness is the underlying philosophy of people like Justin Trudeau and the people within PMO. So they're all very postmodern in their worldview, all subjectivists, all the negative aspects of postmodernism, what you see within that team. And people who were protesting, and I think this is what scared the government so much, is those are your middle class people and your working class people and your small business owners. I was shocked during this protest the range of people from various demographics, political and socioeconomic that I, was dealing with. Everything from working class truckers to billionaire hedge fund managers, to teachers, to people who worked in government, to police officers who privately would communicate with me. We had everybody at that protest, and that's what scared the bejesers out of the political class. Sorry, Francis, I don't mean to interrogate. I'm just very curious about the thing that

you said, which is how does wokeness connect to restrictions, mandates, etc. Do you feel that that's what I'm getting at? Do you feel that there's a link there? Oh, yeah, 100%. So tell me about that, because I'm curious what exactly you mean. What is the connection? The connection is the authoritarian nature of wokeness. What does wokeness do? It restricts your speech.

It restricts what you can say, and it restricts what you can think. Well, that's what we're seeing within our governments as well, and that's why we protested. I mean, it's a great point. I guess my question is, so when I was growing up, I used to look at Canada, and it seemed to me like America, but not mental. The un-American-Americans. Yeah, exactly. You know, and it was just, and I knew people who went to live in Canada, and it always

kind of seemed like this sort of lefty paradise, a lefty paradise that worked. And then over COVID, I just saw them descend into insanity. How has this happened? Because obviously it didn't just happen with COVID. There were things brewing for a while. Well, once again, Justin. Trudeau is a symptom. So I think it's been in rapid decline for generations. In an example, my dad was a teacher. So my dad is very egalitarian and, you know, somewhere in the

center, maybe fiscally conservative because he came from a business background. And I remember one time, if I remember is 1989. He came home from work and he would always talk to us about work and what's going on. And he was very frustrated. And he was frustrated. And he was frustrated the fact that they had a new policy at the Board of Education. You can only be hired to a senior position as a teacher or in the ministry or the board if you're a woman. Now again, my dad is very egalitarian. Doesn't have a problem with women enrolls. So I said to them, well, what's the problem with that? He said, the problem is they just have to be women. They don't have to be qualified. So I walked into my school this year and found out our secretaries from last year,

are now the principles. And when I asked them, what are we going to do for the budget? They didn't understand that that is their responsibility, and they know nothing about how to read a balance sheet. And this was in the late 80s that you started to see this. So this has been my entire life you've seen a little bit over time. In terms of postmodern theory, look, I'm no philosophy professor, but we all have our ideas.

If you take it, my historical view is you've seen postmodernism encroach into the arts starting in the 60s. It then got into education, at least in the Canada, in the 80s and 90s, and now it's dominated politics. And that's part of the chaos, what's causing the chaos right now. Because it's interesting that you say that it went into education, because I could not believe for the life of me that they re-elected Trudeau after everything he did.

I genuinely thought to myself, who is voting for this man? Well, is this when I explain why the conservatives suck? Take the floor. That's the moment everyone switches off. And this is why everybody gets angry at me and there's activists online that are targeting me and trying to smear me because I'm not going to engage in team play. There's no philosophy that's always correct. And the problem with conservative politics, there's two things. Firstly, they're weak. They're never going to challenge anything. They always seed ground to the other side. And the problem with that is if you're going to promise conservative politics, but all you get is rhetoric, their base, the next election around, decides, you know what, I'm just not voting for them again because they didn't do what I wanted. So that allows the left-wing parties to go even further to the left, right? So that's why we have this progressive fall off a cliff from the political left. But the other problem is the uniparty issue, which I was just on lotus eaters the other day. And we were discussing this very fact that's happening in the UK

as well. It's scary. You can almost copy and paste the UK political structure onto Canada. In the case of Canada, we have our Conservative Party, Pierre Polyev, who's the new leader, and the deputy leader of the Conservative Party is a woke supremacist who used to target me and other people. We were very pro-gay, pro-you know, people. We have a lot of friends in the gay community. and she was also a lobbyist for a lobby firm that was co-founded by Justin Truro's chief of staff. And who was her last client? Her last client was Walmart, where she lobbied for Walmart during COVID to be able to stay open and other businesses, small businesses should be shut down and to reinforce the COVID lockdowns. And what's really frustrating for all of us involved in the trucker protests, it was both of them, conservatives and liberals, lockstep,

that put forward these lockdowns. You know, we have a federal system. So we have federal and provincial parliaments, which you guys don't have. What frustrates me is people want to talk about Justin Trudeau, how bad he is, and he is. He's got to go. There's no question. But guess what? The passports in my province came from the Ontario.

conservative party. Remember Rob Ford? His brother, Doug Ford, is the premier. And he's the one who imposed the passports and just before the trucker protest reinstituted mask mandates and was contemplating do we have, should we have passports for grocery stores and pharmacies. Those were conservatives doing that. So I'm not going to engage in team play of, oh, team blue is good and team bad. is red. No, they all suck. I mean... Hard to argue with that. It's not... Yeah, you've got...

You can't argue with that because that is unfortunately the truth. They might say, and push back on me on this, go, look, hang on a second, like, BJ. Most people wanted lockdowns. Most people were demanding it. Sometimes I felt that in this country that we were a part of a select minority of people who didn't want lockdowns. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, first thing, when I discussed the whole uniparty scenario, that also applies to the lobby business that is running these political parties. You have this thing, what's a you gov, where every poll is 73%. And I saw it in my old business. My old business was on a university campus where we were often producing and replicating theseses for professors that were preparing these things for the provincial. government or the municipal government. And, you know, not that you look

through stuff, but you're going through it with the professors or the students and trying to format, and they would talk about their stuff. They'd be in the store for two, three hours. And they tell us what they're doing. They'd show us their reports and they'd show us their surveys. All of them were leading

questions. The data is wrong. This is why I love Scott Adams so much. We've gotten to know each other a little bit, because the data is always wrong. If you don't know the presuppositions, then he can't trust the data. So when people say 73% or UGov, 73%

of people wanted lockdowns, really? Because in my life in the most, in my frame, in the most lefty part of Toronto, I couldn't say 73% wanted. I know a lot of people didn't know what to do and couldn't make a decision

and they want leadership in government to make the decision because they have a better overall view of what's going on. I think that's a better representation. And I think you can add to that as well that those decisions and opinion polls weren't done in a neutral environment. If the government keeps shoving fear porn down your throat, people are going to get scared. And we actually saw during the pandemic that if you ask the average person in the street what the death rate from COVID is, they were generally overestimated by a factor

of 100 at least. They'd say it's 50% many of people. So if you think COVID has a 50% death rate, yeah, locking people in the home starts to look a bit more reasonable at that point. I'm not saying it is reasonable. No, no, for sure. But we didn't do this during SARS. Remember, Toronto was particularly hit during the SARS outbreak. And what was the death rate of SARS was 34%. We didn't do any of these measures during SARS.

Yeah, you wash your hands. We didn't even have masks. It was just, you know, use hand cleaner, hand sanitizer. Careful you talk to, you know, just don't. They didn't even do the social distancing. None of that. And you know what? We got out of that.

And that was a 34% death rate. I'm guessing it's probably something to do with the contagiousness of it, right? Maybe because it was so deadly, it didn't spread as much. But anyway. And the other thing is, sorry, I mean to cut you off, very, look, we were all scared. I'm vaccinated as well. I waited as long as I could. I had no choice.

Cuck. He's good. I knew he could say that. It's just a joke. I'm just joking. It's not a joke. It's a fact. And, you know, this is what people say to you, to vaccinate people online.

You're a cuck for getting... And what happened to, it's a joke for getting... And what happened to, it? It's your decision, you do what you want. Well, exactly. And that was the whole tenor of the Freedom Convoy is freedom. You get to choose. Exactly.

My body, my choice, right? Right. And Scott's going to yell at me for saying that. But anyways, I remember in the first couple of weeks, everybody's starting to try to explore what's going on. This doesn't sound right. It's so different than SARS. The behavior is not what we've seen. And we also have certain people in government that we know may have some ulterior motives.

Political entreatism is a problem in kids. Canada, particularly from people and organizations, NGOs from outside of Canada. And I remember I had a, you know, despite the fact that I'm a little bit of a rabble-rouser, I have people who are supportive and try to get me information, who are elected officials in many parties, not just the conservative party, who feel the same way as us. And one of them told me in a private conversation a couple weeks in, they said, I don't understand why we're doing any of this. Just between you and I, none of this makes sense.

We've spoken, this is the Conservatives, we've spoken to Doug, the leader. He won't listen to any of us. The senior health officials are completely incompetent. They're trying to cover for themselves. He said, don't believe any of what you're saying. This is all nonsense. And he said to me, you know how our parties work. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know how the parties work.

So once I heard that, then I realized, okay, let's be a little bit more. Let's step back a little bit. And maybe it's not quite as bad as we think. And that was, in my opinion, and that was the case. This became an opportunity for governments for changes in public policy. In my city particularly, like for example, local issues. They want to put bicycle lanes on every street in the city of Toronto.

Because, you know, when it's minus 20 degrees, everybody wants to ride a bicycle, right? And they did it. Same in London. You can't drive in the city anymore. Same in London. Bus lanes used to be only during certain hours, now they're permanent. And so you've got a traffic jam in one lane and an empty bus lane 24-7. Yeah, exactly.

Bicycle lanes everywhere. Listen, we've talked a lot about the background, which gives everybody a perspective on where you were coming from when you decided to get involved and actually do something. How did the protest start? Who formed it? What was the central theme of it? Just give us the background to how the actual Freedom Convoy began. Okay, so now that we know a lot more since the convoy, a lot has come out since the POEC Commission and Diverged Media, I encourage everybody to check out Diverg Media. Independent journalists have been digging into some of the evidence that was provided.

What I learned in writing my book was there was a team of 11, ended up being 11 truckers, started with Bridget Belton and a couple of others, communicating over TikTok and saying, we need to have a, a convoy because they're already starting to have problems at the border. She had one particular issue. She was basically harassed by CBSA, our border control. And she got online and started saying we have to have a convoy. Other people in the trucking industry were getting very frustrated as well. They saw their livelihoods. We're about to evaporate because they could no longer cross the border.

And they just found each other online and decided, okay, we're going to do a convoy. They initially wanted to do what's called slow rolls. You have a convoy truck's driving slowly, just causes disruptions to get attention from the government. And then some people with political ties got involved and I think ultimately co-opted it, but you can Diverge Media's documentary that's coming out soon. We'll explain a lot of that. But I was eventually contacted by people who I knew. One was Tamara Leach to ask to be the spokesperson and to do, well, to do media, spokesperson, press releases, all that sort of stuff. And I remember I said this many times that in the very first call, when she called me out of the blue,

I haven't spoken in like a month or maybe six weeks. She said, hey, listen, my friends and I or a bunch of us have started a convoy. And she said, I love these truckers and all, but I can't have any of them go in front of the media because we all know the media traps. And she knew I was media trained in the past. I produced a bunch of podcasts, not on record, Stephen Hicks' podcast, whatever. So she knew I was comfortable in this domain. and she said, would you be willing to be the spokesperson? And I said, yeah, sure.

I agree with the cause. I'm getting frustrated as well. And then I said to her, by the way, did you know I have a truck? And she said, no, get out. What do you mean? I said, well, during COVID, I got my license just before because my brother suggested it. And, well, we saw everything being locked down and we needed a taste of freedom. And so we both bought trucks and started going cross-border when I wasn't producing podcast.

working on other stuff, became an owner-operator, and went to the US to have a little taste of freedom to get to know my, by the way, biological brother who only met a few years prior. So that's what I did you drink COVID. That's very interesting. So you got the truck and then you became a spokesman for the truckers. The thing that I found horrifying, but almost depressingly predictable, was how quickly the rice, racist, racist, racist. That's racist. That's racist. It's not right. It is, mate. Racist. The prejudice against people who like rice, which...

Yeah, exactly. It's a specific demographic. But racist, white supremacist. And that was just smeared against all these people. And I've found that so depressing. I found it amazing. They did exactly what I thought they would do and what I wanted them to do. So in the early stages, the legacy media wasn't really talking. about us. They were trying to ignore it. So I thought, firstly, they were starting to post a bunch of stuff of us being Nazis. They have cartoons here and there, very slight. And I started putting statements online that the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, CBC, you're now banned from our press conferences. I made a point to ban them for a couple of reasons, because I've been in media scrums before.

I know how they operate. What they're going to do is they're going to come into a space like this. This is much larger than the space that we had for our press conferences. They come on with a massive camera and a crew of three people. They'll take up half the space. They'll call us names when there's a Q&A. And then guess what? They won't get any views. Where's the upside?

There's no upside in that. And then the other thing that some of the people there didn't understand what I was trying to do, I wanted to deny them the intellectual property. You know how media works. I wanted to deny them the intellectual property of their own content so they could smear us in loop every day like they did during January 6th. And Angelo from the post-millennial laughed.

He told me, we did a podcast together. He said, yeah, all the legacy media, CBC, CTV, whatever, they had to log on to the post-millennial's feed to get content of what's going on in Ottawa. And what I was trying to do is a couple of things. I was trying to show the world you don't need legacy media. That alternative media platforms like this have way more viability than legacy media. And I think it worked.

And the other thing is I was going for 100 million views the first week. I thought if I could capture amongst all of those platforms 100 million views, I will dwarf all of legacy media. And then they'll have no choice, especially since the vibe. in the framing that I was trying to build around it. So when Tamara called me, said, you know, let's think about a way to, you know, present this. She's going to be on the road with them crossing the country. And what I hearkened back to, this is when they call me left-wing pico,

when I was a teenager going to Grateful Dead concerts and Fish Concerts and Alman Brothers, that sort of vibe where you had all people from demographics come together around music and just focusing on peace and love and all that. And that's what I thought, you know, that's what we need. We need to have Woodstock right in front of Parliament Hill. And I think that's what we ended up having. And when did you know that this was going big, that this was starting to become,

and not only a national story, but an international one? The specific moment, I remember one of the things that had a dramatic impact. You saw, you know, line go up with analytics. I was putting a bunch of messaging out, and I called every contact that I had, because there's some very influential people who I know, who I never asked for any favors or just friends. And this was the one time I tried to reach out to everybody just to collect on a favor. Do me a favor. Can you talk about this, whatever? And one of the first people I reached out to was Gad's ad to do an interview with him and to talk about it and whatever. And I remember one day early on in January before we left or when the trucks were on the road. I don't remember the exact day.

One of the podcasts that I produce, I put a tweet out after talking to Chris Gera, who was on the ground. He was the first person working with the Ottawa police who were telling us where to park the trucks. Very important. And he said, our server crashed. We got up to 36,000 trucks registered. He said, we're now estimating like 50,000 trucks. Maybe we're trying to get all the data and they're struggling with it. And we may have up to half a million people coming this weekend.

So I put out on a tweet on one of my platforms, well, Justin Trudeau's going to have a difficult week. 50,000 trucks and a half a million people. and Jordan Peterson retweeted it, did us the favor. And then when that happened, boom, everybody started to jump on. But only within the alternative legacy media framing. And the other problem is, which I explained the strategy in the book, is I couldn't do a Freedom Convoy Twitter account

or a Freedom Convoy Facebook account because I was dealing with censorship. right? That was right in the heart of massive censorship. So what can we do? All right, I guess we can use hashtags and we'll use different hashtags and change them up periodically. So it'll be all that much more difficult to censor. And I think it worked. So I ended up managing a bunch of different Twitter accounts from platforms that I have. But myself and Tamara Leach's personal account both was me. And it was going great. It was, you know, there was, I was following it. and I was really, really invigorated by what you were doing. It just made me so happy that there was pushback, that it was done peacefully,

that it was done it in the right way. And it wasn't partisan. And it wasn't partisan. And it was great. And that made me so happy. Awesome. And then... This is Francis.

When he gets happy, when he always goes down at the end. You go off a cliff now. It never ends on a high with you, mate. It doesn't. Just then there. Okay, next question. It was so great, but then it got really bad. And then that made me happy. No, it doesn't happen. And then things started to happen. So tell us what happened at that point where you started to feel the chilly icy hand of authoritarianism on your shoulder.

Well, before that happened, look, explain how politics works. I think this is just common knowledge. there was a movement of over half a million people who joined a Facebook group. We were raising record money, and just to give you some framework, in Canada, it took the Liberals four years to raise $40 million to get Justin Trudeau elected. We raised $23 million in three weeks cumulatively. Wow. Holy shit. That's crazy, man.

Are we talking about the fact that Justin Trudeau got 40 minutes? No, no, no, there's two Jews talking about. about money, man. That's why we're excited. Just let us have a, let us enjoy our moment. So you, you, 23 million, see, I can't even say it. Yeah. That 23 million dollars in three weeks. In three weeks. So those, those weren't dollars. Those were votes. Yes. Because remember I discussed the Uniparty, we became the official opposition. So what is the political class going to do? And we saw that in the POAC testimony when the interim leader, the conservative, after the previous idiot resigned, and Justin Trudeau were emailing and talking to each other

how they need to end the protest, right? They needed to prevent us. I guess what their fear was, you see this group of a half a million people who are maybe largely but not exclusively conservative or freedom-minded, raising record amounts of money they can only dream of. They need to put an end to it. Benjamin, can I just stop you there? I want to come back to this because what we're talking about is super important. And France's question is really important. There's something you said there that bugs me so much in the way, which is, it's not you, it's the way we talk, is freedom has become a conservative issue. Do you not find that incredibly weird? It's frustrating. Because when you, I don't know if we're the same age, but I think we're

close. When I was growing up, freedom was definitely not a conservative issue. Listen. It was the conservatives that wanted to shut down your freedom. It was the conservatives who wanted to to ban my video games. I wanted to ban my music. They wanted to ban anything I liked because of, you know, religious Puritan reasons. Right. Whereas during the convoy, I'm talking to pastures who are talking to me about, yeah, we have to be, you know, freedom and, you know, they're very, okay, they don't agree with me

on certain LGBT issues, whatever. Okay, fine. But they're at least willing to listen and have the conversation and focus on more important issues, right? Like, they've evolved. You know, it's people like Justin Trudeau. and the rhetoric from the extreme left that have brought myself

and religious social conservatives together. And there's a lot of people that are, like somebody I've become close with during this period is Megan Murphy. Megan used to be what she would identify as a third-way feminist, socialist, whatever. She's been on trigonometry with big, big fans of us. She's wonderful.

Great person as well. So now, you know, five years ago, we wouldn't have been able to talk to each other. Now we've become friends and we're trying to find common ground to help everybody else. Yeah. So yeah, it's really frustrating. We'll be back to our interview with Benjamin in a second,

but first, we wanted to take a minute to tell you about Gives and Go. Give Sengo played an integral part in the trucker's story, helping them to stand up against an authoritarian government, oppressive banks, and a funding platform that abandoned them. If you don't know about Givesendgo, it's a crowdfunding platform that allows people to raise money online. Give Send Go can be used to raise money for medical purposes, business venture, personal needs, and all sorts of other causes that people have.

Give SendGo support freedom of speech. They don't cave to the mob, and that's why we're a proud partner with them. Go to givesendgo.com and support people who support freedom. But anyway, so come back to both the parties are talking about how to shut you guys down. So they both saw that we had this massive Facebook group. our own database because they only look at life through political goggles and they needed to shut it down. So I knew something was up and me and a few other people realized there's something up where we didn't know who, what, what specifically how it was operating, but we saw there was

something happening and it was essentially people that were aligned with the Conservative Party infrastructure or should, sorry, the uniparty infrastructure that were trying to to do their best to co-opt it. They wanted to make it just about, like, they're arguing with me. They came in one by one screaming at me and yelling at me. I'm like, I got three interviews to do. And I had a little bit of a media team under me. There were five of us working on it. Like, I don't want to hear the political nonsense. Go do your thing. And I remember before a GB News interview was exactly that conversation. They wanted to make everything about vaccines, for example. It has to be about the vaccines and the data and whatever. What do we discuss about data? You can't trust it, right?

I said, we need Canadians together. We need the world to come together, which means we need people who we disagree with on many issues to come together on the right for free speech, the right of free assembly and to protest and to talk to each other. But if you want to devolve this into your little anti-vaccine program, you know what's going to happen? that's going to kill all the positive sentiment we're getting from people who disagree. And I think it was the previous night that I had that conversation. I was in a Twitter space that I tried to do them when I could, but it was bonkers every day. And this particular person was a former school trustee from a party we call the NDP, which is very, very left wing.

And I don't know if there's anything we would agree on policy-wise. but we had a wonderful conversation about the importance of listening to each other and talking to people we disagree with and freedom. And she's, I'm vaccinated, but you should have the right, my body, my choice. You should have the right to make choices for yourself. And even they started to realize things are going a little bit far. But the uniparty political apparatus was doing their best they could every minute to tear it apart. from the inside. Aside from all the other garbage we were dealing with, which was we needed to get

fuel to the truckers or they're going to freeze. Some of them have their kids in there. Oh, they block the fuel truck now. Okay, I guess we'll have to get jerry cans. Oh, they're seizing jerry cans now. Great. Oh, some people are running out of food. Oh, we have a thousand trucks in a farmer's field. We need to put them somewhere. Like it was just to stop you there. When you use a word they, what do you mean by that? Who would they, BJ? The people that were trying to, the political class that were doing their best to try to capture the freedom convoy and turn it into a voting block. Okay. Does that make sense?

Oh, I see. Oh, I see. So just to clarify, I think you've picked it up in exactly the right place, Francis. It sounds like there were two things happening. Many. And there's like 50 things happening. But in terms of the broad movement, on the one hand, you had Justin Trudeau and his government trying to shut you guys down,

and we'll talk about debanking and, you know, police, et cetera, in a second. But also, I think what I'm hearing you say is there were people who wanted to capture this protest against mandates and all of this and to turn it into a strictly one-sided party political engine to drive. their vote where they wanted it to go. They wanted to capture this for the conservative cause, basically. That's fair. That's right. That's right. Okay.

And when they saw a guy who was acting as a spokesperson, who all of a sudden he's saying, we all suck, then I became the devil in the eyes of conservative partisan politics. And, you know, Tamer and I had that conversation when she first called me, because there was a 2019 convoy for oil and gas that was also co-opted that she got involved with. And I said, we're not doing this. No politicians. This is not for political parties Tamara. Like I'll do it as long as you agree to this that we are there to end mandates and to end the arrive can. Nothing more, nothing less. And we're staying. And she said she agreed. And said,

and we're staying there until we get something from the government. Right. She agreed. So yeah, it was. Okay. So all of this stuff is going on. Yeah. But quite quickly, I mean, I, I remember seeing, it wasn't maybe as bad as Australia, but I do remember scenes of violence, people being attacked. And I also, the thing that I think oddly, I mean, we're so used to violence now for some reason, the thing that really shocked the world was when people had their bank accounts taken away. And I saw this, not only through on the media, we have fans of the show. We do these monthly calls with our top supporters.

And one of them is in Canada. And she was saying, I sent money to the truckers. I'm and she's a pensioner living alone. She says, I'm terrified. I don't know what will happen to me if I don't have any money. Right? So this is where it quickly went to, isn't it? Yeah, it did.

So first, when they did the Emergency Measures Act, so I try to explain to my American supporters, that is Canada's equivalent of martial law. The political nerds will say, no, it's not a different. No, that's basically what it was. Right. They froze mine and the bank accounts of several other people. There's two or 300 people that had their accounts frozen.

It's not just your bank account. It's your bank account, your credit cards, your lines of credit, your corporate accounts, corporate lines of credit. Everything you have to transact was frozen. And when I logged on to my bank account, I saw this message that when you begin to transact, your transaction, or when you begin to use your account, your transactions will appear here. The one saving grace that I had was I'm a Bitcoiner, and I've been a Bitcoiner since many, many years. And during the protest, the Bitcoiners were raising, they ended up raising something like $1.2 million for us. Or 21 Bitcoin, I think is what it was.

And so they originally tried to contact the protest through Tamara. They got nothing but resistance, and they were not going to support the convoy. And then somebody saw me on one of the news programs or an interview somewhere or a podcast, whatever it was. And they looked me up on Twitter, sorry, X. Elon, it's X. And they saw hashtag Bitcoin. So they started sending me DMs. And you can see they were testing me. They're like, you're a Bitcoiner. I'm like, yeah, how long have you been in Bitcoin? What do you know? What wallet you use? Blow, all that sort of stuff. So they realized, okay, I'm the real deal. and they said, this was Caribou, by the way, big, Caribou is the one who distributed all the Bitcoin to the truckers

and was raided by the police, which is another issue. But they ended up raising $1.2 million. They came to me the next day and they said, we're raising Bitcoin. I said, great. I got your back. We'll get it to the truckers. I went to the board, of which some of them were, you know, conservative party loyalists.

and I said we got a bunch of Bitcoiners raising money for us. The response I got was, well, that's for criminal money. I don't like, okay, fine, forget it. And so I just kind of helped them and thank God because Bitcoin was the only money that got through to the truckers. It's the only money that was directly distributed. And I tell that story in the book. And what happened to all the money that you raised?

Because one of the platforms you raised it on, that was, I can't remember if they prevented or if the government forced them to not give you the money. What happened there? It's really interesting because according to the treasurer, it's neither. But that's his account. What happened? First, we had GoFundMe. And GoFundMe raised $10 something million, $10.1 million. And frustratingly, that money was transferred into Tamara's account.

And she didn't return their phone call for six days. I don't understand that. That doesn't make sense to me. because you can't transfer stuff for a nonprofit into a personal account. So, okay, fine. That will figure out over time. And there's some investigative journalist diverged media that's looking into that. But on February 5th, and there's a series of events that happened, and this is what I was dealing with behind the scenes.

So the mood and behavior was peace, love, unity, and freedom. And then I explain in the book where all of a sudden on February 5th, One of the lawyers came in and just decided to upload a video to Twitter to say, your freedoms are being eroded. Justin Truro is tyrannical. He's destroying the country. You're not going to have a future left. Come down here and come down here support the truckers and whatever.

And I lost my mind. That's not peace, love and unity and freedom. That's not the mood and behavior we were trying to build. But it's because a series of events already happened. February 3rd, the Conservative Party leader, who everybody wanted to get rid of, he resigned. The next day, Candace Bergen, the new interim leader of the conservatives, tried to bait us into joining her for a press conference. And she wanted to meet us at the ANW to do, I don't know, whatever it was. She wanted to do a photo op with the truckers.

Everybody else, I'm the one new. I was this thinker in the room. I said, no, absolutely not. She's going to bait us, and she's going to tell us we all have to go home, and then we'll have zero political capital, and it'll be over. And I was right. She came out of parliament that night instead in a late session of parliament, and she said, the conservative party's here for working people, truckers, blah, blah, blah, and it's time all the truckers go home. And there was some people in my room. I said, ha, you see, I told you what would have happened if we were there?

So clearly, I could see right at that point they were not in our favor. And then the next day, the lawyers show up, do the video. I go into, I storm into the Ark Hotel where they all have like a meeting room. This is before I broke my ankle, about an hour before. And I said, what are you doing? I used a few expletives and it was quite aggressive for the first time. Everybody was shocked that I could get so angry. And he responds with, oh, okay, I'm sorry.

Here, you have a $5 million lawsuit now, a class action lawsuit, which has now swelled to $450 million in damages that a few small businesses with ties to the Liberal Party are dragging us through the court system ongoing right now that we're dealing with. So clearly there was way more collusion going on behind the scenes than we realized. Both parties wanted us out of there as quickly as possible,

which we understand. But we just wanted to talk to somebody in the government. And they also were going behind our back, which I didn't know, to meet with the city of Ottawa to condense the protest. And they brought this to me and said, we're going to go meet with the city of Ottawa and work at a deal. I'm like, excuse me, they told us where the park. The city of Ottawa and the Ottawa police gave us our parking spots.

We haven't spoken with blackface yet, right? And I was actually trying to, we know who runs the party. So I know the people. I know the procedures. I know how they would have talked to us. And I tried to tell them, these are people in government. My dad had an entire career in government. Everybody's going to be pointing the finger at each other,

trying to defer blame to somebody else or another department. They'll do that for a week. And then at some point they'll figure out who to talk to. But if you go to meet with them now and start to acquiesce the demands nobody has made, you're a lawyer. You've never negotiated before? Like, what's wrong with you people? it's because they were trying to end the part of the protest.

It's, you know, listening to this story, it's, on the one hand, it's really inspiring. It's a classical, you know, the little guy stands up against tyrannical, oppressive regimes. On the other hand, it's really dispiriting because it's not just you against government, it's you against the entire political class. And the fact that your bank accounts were frozen, and you said, not only, you're not only, was it your personal but also your business account. So they were effectively trying to put, trying to make you go bust. The government was trying to make you go bust. And you know, it's interesting on that topic. What I did was I sent an email to the presidents of the two banks

that I work with saying, hey, my name is Benjamin. Why have my bank account frozen? Just out of curiosity, CC a bunch of lawyers. Yeah. And which is one of the podcasts I produced, not on record. And I finally got a response in March after the protest was done, after I tried to avoid arrest, which was a whole crazy week, which is another issue. And I got a response. And the response, this response letter, I held on to it. I held on to it because I knew there was going to be some sort of parliamentary investigation into the bank account freezing. Because the first lesson you learn in politics, everybody cares about their money, especially though. who say they don't. They teach everybody that in politics. And Krista Friedland, who is somehow,

somehow both the finance minister and the deputy prime minister at the same time. I've never heard of that before, but whatever. And on the board, the advisory board of the W.EF, the World Economic Forum. She was in this parliamentary session trying to evade questions. And she let it slip to suggest that the bank accounts and financial institutions took it on their own accord to freeze bank accounts. Like, really? Really? Because I have an email that says the opposite. So I have a very large substack. I reached out to a journalist, a very experienced journalist I know, Mark Petroni, and said, hey, Mark, check out this email that I haven't told anybody about. And Christopher and he's like, oh, that's great. Do you want to write an article about it? So he did. Zero

Hedge picked it up. And I guess effectively nuked that long. line of narrative that the government was trying to perpetuate that it was the financial institutions. And what people didn't understand, what I was trying to explain to people was, you know, this is maybe, not to like side with banks, but is this the inevitability of the excessive overregulation of banks that they always complain about, is this is where we're going to converge that the government can now, in a very fascistic manner, dictate who. Who gets a bank account and who doesn't, which is why hashtag Bitcoin. And what was really interesting about the case is the first time that I'd ever heard about debanking,

bank accounts being frozen. And now we're seeing it happen more and more. In Brazil, it happened two months later. Yeah. They had a trucker protest after the elections. What's the first thing they did? They froze all the bank accounts of the truckers. So do you think this is something that we're going to see happening?

We saw it with Nigel Farage in this country. That's right. Nigel as well had the same thing. One of our accounts suspended. We're still investigating what happened there as well. Listen, irrespective whether you agree or not politically, before the convoy, what happened to Abramovich here? They froze every, all his assets in the United Kingdom and essentially stole his soccer team. And I think that's why we had people from all demographics reaching out to us because they realize this is not a richer, poor issue. This is not a blue versus red issue.

this is the political class who've gotten a little bit drunk with power versus everybody else who just wants to get on with their lives. And the thing that I find really worrying is that for me is foreshadowing a world that we're going to be going into where cash is going to become obsolete.

There's my little conspiracy theory that they use COVID as a way to eliminate cash. Cash is going to become obsolete and this is going to be the way of controlling the populace? I, you know, yes, yes and no. Like, I'm of two minds about this, which is, by the way, a skill. I think we all have to start developing is going back to where we can simultaneously hold two world beliefs. People have forgotten that.

I comment a lot of this because I go in a lot of Bitcoin spaces. I'm going to be speaking in El Salvador in Florida on Bitcoin stages and stuff. I don't know that we're going to get the CBDC. That's what everybody's concerned with central bank digital currency, because that's what that would allow the political class to do. I think what people misread about how the political class behaves, because I've seen, I've interacted with a lot of these people, some of the wealthiest people in the world. And we get this impression that they are these authoritarian controlling hawks. And there's no question. some people on I would call it the authoritarian left have that sort of vision but not all wealthy billionaire influential industrial people they're not a group they all have different competing interests and many of the people that I've met within that demographic they're just scared fear is what's driving so much of this and I think when we understand that it's fear

not this over-inflated sense of control that some mid-level political bureaucrat thinks they have, but the really top people, they're worried about this collapsing as much as we are. Elon Musk is a good example of that, whether you agree with him or not, I happen to, but he's a good example. He's not an authoritarian looking for control.

It's fear of everything collapsing. So I think because of that and because of the weakness of, politicians, that politicians are always looking for one thing very, very vigorously, which is plausible deniability. And a CBDC pulls away the curtain of everybody, including politicians who will have a CBDC. And if it's centralized, I can promise you the world's hackers will start doing their best to hack centralized wallets of politicians to see where all their money comes from. And that's, once they get a window, all right, it's over. And where it goes,

because you're going to find some very interesting things on both ends of that spectrum. So it exposes them as much as the rest of us. So I'm actually quite positive on, and this is also why I advocate for Bitcoin. And many of the Bitcoiners will say, well, we're going to have exclusively Bitcoin. No, I think we're going to have a Fiat system that works with Bitcoin, this new asset, this protocol that never existed before. And I think things are going to work out. It's just going to be some bumpy roads for the next few years. Sorry to be too optimistic.

No, that's great. It's great. France is disappointed. Why aren't you telling me that I'm going to have no freedom? But you know what's really interesting talking to you? Because, you know, your family lineage to Venezuela, and we discussed this prior. You know, my experience in Latin America, I'm sure you're getting the same feeling that my friends who live in Canada now are telling me,

were living in Caracas in 2002. I'm sure you have those same sort of sentiments as well, don't you? There were times during COVID where I could feel almost like a PTSD response to what is happening. And also as well, the thing that I found even more worrying wasn't what the government were doing. It was looking around

and people who I thought were sane and rational and reasonable behaving in a manner that was quite clearly irrational. All right, man, it was just one day and I was very upset. You know, but you know it was really, really disappointing. You know, firstly, the political stuff in the convoy, I want to make this clear. All the political attempts to co-opt and destroy it from the inside, that's to be expected. Just didn't know where it was coming from and how it was working. None of that takes away from this beautiful moment where we all came together.

You know, the second interview I did when I was there, it was with a journalist, working for a French publication. She's from Quebec, but we did an hour-long publication. She translated into French for it to go out here. And I asked her, I always asked people after the interviews, and I'll do the same with you, what do you guys think? And I asked her, what do you think about what I just discussed in our conversation and what's going on? And she said to me, you know, my whole life, I've been a Quebec separatist. Until I saw the trucks driving across the country and that everybody's starting to unify and support each other despite our differences. She said, I bought my first Canadian flag ever. Wow. And I now consider myself Canadian.

That's the type of power that we achieved with all of this. So all the noise and the nonsense, I tell people in my live streams, that's just the noise. Turn it on and off and engage when you want to and focus on your life. And I think we all start to do that. We were, we resist the regular dopamine hits of the negativity of social media, at least regulate it. I think we're going to be a lot better off. No, I couldn't agree with you more. And it's increasingly how I feel about everything as well. We'll be back with Benjamin in a minute.

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Use our promo code which is triggered to get 50% off your first purchase. One of the things I wanted to ask you very much along those lines is what were the key objectives of the convoy and do you feel that the impact ultimately was positive. And what are some of the downstream effects? What have we seen? I know you've had all sorts of investigations into aspects of this going on in Canada. So, you know, are you happy with what was achieved? What are some of the takeaways, et cetera? Yeah, I'm happy with what was achieved. I'm not happy in the way it was achieved. So the first thing is we, look, we were there for two reasons, despite what the fake news wants to tell people. We were there to end mandates,

and we were there to end the Arrived Can app, which is the data tracking app that Canadians would have to have on their phone to re-enter the country, right? Okay, so that's what you're there for. And you could see in the first week, I mean, it's a good thing I had experience with politics and I'd been in, run campaigns and stuff.

I could see them message testing on the provincial level in the first week. You see that a lot. When a politician will say one thing and say the opposite the next day, they're just testing messaging to see how people are responding. and I think it was a five days into it, six days into it,

the Ontario Premier, Doug Ford, who I mentioned, who is the one, by the way, who sought the injunction of the $9 million that was in Givesendgo? That wasn't Justin Trudeau. That was the Conservatives. Again, it's not red versus blue. But you can see he was testing messages, suggested we should take, we end mask mandates,

and all that sort of stuff. Once I saw that, I knew, all right, we're going to win. We're going to get rid of the mandates. It's just going to take some time. The ones that held on the longest were the extremists, which were Justin Trudeau, Omar Algebra, and the PMO. And they took, if I remember correctly, was it six months, seven months, something like that, to finally lift mandates for travel within Canada. So, and, you know, we know how politics works.

They have to do it, but they have to have plausible deniability, which I was ready for. if Justin Trudeau had any sense of wisdom, he would have sat down with us because I had an out for him and a home run that everybody would look good. Because all I wanted to do was have what the United Kingdom had and what England had, right? You guys started opening up and dropping all your mandates. And I said that in our first press conference. We just want to go the direction of the United Kingdom. Why are we holding on to this sort of thing? But anyways, he definitely doesn't have the strength of his father who is not a fan of,

but there's no question his father would have been out there to talk to us and say, okay, what do you guys want, right? And sort of thing. So I'm happy with that we achieved that particular goal. There were convoys in 30 plus countries around the world that had the same frustration. And the Dutch farmers, Jordan Peterson was telling him, meeting a private conversation about this, that they were looking at what was happening in Canada. They were looking at kind of the weak points that the government or the authorities were able to exploit. And they adjusted their protest accordingly. And what happened? They ended up forming a political party. They got 20% of the vote in parliament. And now they can block all the

ridiculous nonsense that may or may not come from the World Economic Forum, right? Which is what the political class colluded to prevent us from doing. What was very frustrating was we had a public order emergency commission is what is called. That was the commission to investigate all the circumstances around the freedom convoy. And you could tell it was all, oh, he's rigged, but there was definitely some sort of set up behind the scene negotiating deals, same sort of thing as we saw, you know, those emails, where there were two narratives going into this. I didn't have standing. I was denied standing. And if I had standing, I would have cross-examined people on both sides, which is, I guess, why they didn't want me to have standing.

But there are two narratives going into the Public Order Emergency Commission. One was the liberal narrative that it was mad Max, panamonium in the streets, dead bodies flying around whatever, which obviously wasn't true. And then there was the conservative side narrative, which was, oh it was peaceful but it got out of hand both of those things were not true it was peaceful they got out of their leader they co-opted enough for the vote as they thought they would and they wanted to end it that's the truth of it and then there's one guy who came in there's a couple of us as well but you know i did a little more a legal approach um who i guess is a little bit mouthy and is not going along with either party who told the truth which was no both these people are lying but i or both these parties are lying

But I couldn't go up and do a vlog, right? It was Q&A. It was very rigid, very scripted, very, you know, and I had to do my best to insert the truth of what went on there. And I think over time, people will understand my testimony. A lot of people still don't understand it. So that was the frustrating part of what came from it. But I've been traveling, you know, in my truck when I'm driving. I'm in the States.

I'm all over the U.S., or at least the eastern part of the U.S. When people realize who I am, because that does happen from time to time, they feel, the Americans are funny. They feel like jealous. They can't believe Canada did it. You guys beat us to it sort of thing. But just overwhelming love and support here as well. That's why, you know, Carl and the guys had me at Lotus Eaters to sit in with them. Just all over the world, everybody has been so warm and loving and appreciative that we stuck our necks out, and we didn't do it for myself. We did for all of us because we got to put an end to clown world. And this was just one element of clown world that showed the world, A, how bad it can get.

And what I'm trying to show people is the mechanics of what goes on behind the scenes and why you should not trust anything that comes out of a mouthpiece of a political actor or people in line with a political class. We're going to wrap up in the second, but there's a couple of questions I want to ask you, one trickier than the other. I suppose the real test, this is the less tricky one. The real test of whether you guys made an impact is if we have another pandemic, are we going to go down the same route? And I wonder about that. I don't know what lessons politicians have learned because I look around and I think they will be more hesitant about taking some of the more authoritarian measures on the one. hand. On the other hand, they've also applied a methodology that did actually work, which was you scare the public and then the public will demand action and then you do the action, right?

So I suppose the question is, in terms of impact, do you feel that we are in a healthier position if another pandemic happens or another public health emergency occurs of some kind? Are they going to be less likely to go down this authoritarian route? I don't know. I think it's going to be different in every jurisdiction because what we did is we showed the political class. There is a line in the sand and you best not ever cross it ever again. Now, will everybody listen to it? I know a lot of them will. I know a lot of them in power are fearful of going through the same thing and being on the wrong side of it. But this is also why I think it's very important. I tell people who are conservative, if you have progressive neighborhoods or classically liberal, neighbor, they're easier. Classically liberal neighbors, talk to them. And don't talk about politics.

Talk about your car, your grass, your lawn. Start to redevelop relationships with people who you don't share a political framework. Because if not, what happens, we turn on each other. One of the negative things that's really disappointing through all of this, you know, I'm sure you had a lot of this indoctrination, not indoctrination, but education on the Holocaust. and what happened in Europe in the 1930s. You know, some people who work at constituency offices, work for members of parliament and whatever, and the number of people that were calling in to the government

to rat on their neighbors or their family members or whatever, that is not acceptable. We cannot be, if we are that way as a society, society will crumble. We need to start building for, friendships and relationships with people across the board. I told you one of my best friends is a Brit. What he doesn't like about London. This is everybody's very cold. People won't talk to you. But I was charmed to see on the tube a sign saying a little kindness goes a long way.

That's why I try to focus on positive framing and focusing on the good in people. Even people who we know are garbage. We all know them. Try to find a little bit of good. try to, because if not, we're going to start throwing each other under the bus. And that's what the political class needs to have another authoritarian lockdown like we had. So if you start shutting out everybody in your community, that divide and conquer is what they will exploit. That's what they tried to exploit during the trecker convoy. They tried to get us all fighting with each other. It worked with some cases, didn't work in others. But if we don't allow, if we resist that temptation, then I think we'll be better off and they won't be able to.

That's a really important message. And I think one of the things that people did learn and Francis and I know through our family backgrounds is no matter how liberal or, you know, program, whatever, the government's not your friend. That's right. They're not your friend. And they will use you against each other

if they want to fulfill their political ambitions in that way. The government does not, by definition, they can't have your best interests at heart because they have their own goals, their own objectives, they're looking after a country of different people. They cannot possibly have your interests at heart, by definition. And I think we saw that. The question that is more tricky that I want to ask you,

and I'm asking you because I wrestle with it, we have the situation, particularly here, I don't know how prominent they are in Canada, where we have Extinction Rebellion protesters who block ambulances from getting to hospitals, they stop people getting to work, they block roads and trains and so on and so forth. And I disagree with that because I think the cause that they're advocating for,

they completely misunderstand and the solutions they're offering are ridiculous, etc. But on the other hand, when truckers block a thing for a cause that I do agree with, I have less hesitation about that, right? So how do we square that? What is legitimate protests and when are you taking the piss, as we say, in this country? Yes. Well, I think, firstly, in the case of the trucker protest, we were trying to make demands to remove what we were told was a temporary policy, right? It was not some ambiguous, you know, concern,

some dark, scary thing in the future. You know, Scott, I'm sure, talked to you, I haven't watched the whole interview yet, but he talks about the Adams Law of Slow Moving Disasters. That's where climate change goes into. When I was a kid, it was acid rain was the big thing, and we solved that And before you were a kid, it was global cooling, by the way. We were terrible. That's right. Exactly. So I think there's what we're seeing with the Extinction Rebellion and stuff, that's part of the, that's a political tactic.

Right. And people argue the trucker convoy is a political tactic. I don't know. Talk to those guys. You see how political they are. They don't care about politics. They just want to get to work sort of thing. So, you know, I take your point, but I think a lot of things sometimes get lost in the nuance because

we always want to talk about things. in broad, simplistic manners. But I think they're quite distinct for that reason. The other thing is when we had our protest, despite what the fake news will tell you, and I have many pictures I can share with you, we had every street, because remember, we worked with the city of Ottawa.

So every street had a laneway that was open for emergency vehicles. We had two command centers, one was security, one was liaising with the city of Ottawa, in case there were emergencies, ambulance needed to get through, whatever. We had a coordinated team, mainly ex-police officers and some ex-military, that were ensuring emergency vehicles were not disrupted. So, you know, people see the picture of Wellington Street.

That was the main street where all the trucks were in every lane. But all the other surrounding streets in Ottawa, the trucks were occupying half the street, kind of like the bicycle lanes are doing now. And then the other half was free for emergency vehicles and for people if they needed to drive. And I actually leave Ottawa a couple of times and I have video of me driving back into Ottawa

and it was as quick as any other day. In Ottawa traffic it was no different. So we weren't, if Instinction Rebellion gone on a street and, well, I mean the cause is an issue. But it would be the same of them blocking one lane of roadway on a major street, not the entire thing. We live in the UK. That is the major street. Well, yeah, that's true. But you know what I mean? Yeah, of course. Of course we did.

And also, you know, I wanted just to double back to a point that you mentioned. And it's so frustrating for me because the first organization within, I think it was 13 minutes that smeared us as racist, bigot, Nazis, white supremacist, whatever, was a Jewish organization. in Canada tied to the Liberal Party called Sijja. They're the ones who released the press release on behalf of the Prime Minister to say that we're white supremacists. Now, I don't know, I didn't learn much white supremacy in the first 13 years of Hebrew school,

but you know what I did learn? We learned about the Holocaust all the time, and this is where I get so frustrated with these organizations, because from my perspective, what did I learn in all those years in school? Bingo. What I learned was that was the government in the 1930s that did that. Wasn't some random dude, you know, that is so lost amongst people. Not just the government. It's the point you made earlier.

And then the Soviet Union was the same. It was the government getting people brainwashed in a particular worldview and then getting ordinary people to tell on each other, to report each other to the secret police, to hand people in for wrongdoing, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the things that I found incredible during the whole thing was like, my position on all of this was, I'm against mandates and I'm against mandated vaccination, right? People are free to have the vaccination,

people are free to wear a mask, people are free to do whatever they want, right? But I think, if you look back, the idea that people shouldn't be forcibly injected with medical things that they don't wish to have came out in 1945 for very good fucking reason. Very good reason. And the fact that that became like a controversial thing to say, no, no, no,

people came together in Nuremberg for a very good reason and decided we're not going to let this happen again. And the fact that people were willing to just completely overlook that, this is the thing is they flip everything on its head, like you say. And you know, we always hear about the white truckers in Ottawa. whatever. You know, they're all, not all, but a very sizable minority, maybe even half of them, were from Eastern Europe. Oh, I bet. And, you know, the last person standing, the last trucker who was arrested, was Chaba Vizi. And Chaba is from Romania. And he was telling me, I took him to Boston to a Bitcoin Freedom event, Bitcoin Freedom Festival. And, you know, I talked on stage about the convoy, as we just discussed right now.

And I handed the mic over to him. And then he brought the audience into tears, telling him what his family went through under Soviet Union control, that the government was always listening to them. Their children couldn't hear their conversations. Because if their children said the wrong thing by accident in school, then you were taken away. you never, maybe never see your family ever again.

So the first chapter of my book, I talk about the talk that people would have with their kids. That's right. And we have, we've lost all concept in the Western world of how truly bad it is through this collective brainwashing in academia, trying to convince kids. I mean, I saw it on campus with my business that they're, oh, yeah, communism made so bad. Really? Okay, why don't you go? It's okay. Go to China. Just go. Go. Get out of here. We don't need you here. Leave. Like if it's so good sort of thing. And I know your experience, you know, my heart bleeds for, I love Latin America. I really do.

And I see what they've done to such a beautiful country. And I hope they come out of it. But we need to be vocal about this. And we're not going to change the world and better it and free people. If we just sit back and let it happen, some of us have to speak up, which is what the Freedom Convoy was about. You know the whole thing that I found so ironic about COVID is that Hitler was actually against mandated vaccination. He thought it was a bit too far.

He's like, no, I cannot do this. No, it's just too far. Yeah. So like, even for, anyway, but there we go. Thank you so much for coming on, BJ. It's been a wonderful, wonderful chat. The final question is always, what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Well, I'm talking about everything. So there's nothing. There's nothing. There's no topic I will shy away from personally. But broadly, as a society. What do you think needs more attention than it gets to? I guess that's the question.

You know, we all have our own frame. And, you know, I've stepped into this frame where I'm regularly in Twitter spaces, talking about freedom, talking about many of the issues we discussed right here. From my perspective, it's going to get spicy. the Islamist organizations engaged in political entreatism. And nobody will talk about it because they're afraid of the money

that's going to come at them in the form of lawfare. But what we're seeing, and the Freedom Convoy was pretty much immune to it. But on the political level, we see a very, very high degree of entreeism from what's called the Red Green Alliance. It's not a formal alliance, but they'll play off one another, which is CCP money and activists and Islamist organizations and their activists engaged in political entries and to co-opt our entire political system to restrict freedoms. And look what we're seeing.

Is that the source of it? Is that who's funding all the wokeism? I don't know. But maybe we should talk more about that and not be so afraid about what some religious lunatic might call us. I don't really care about what names people call me anymore. Well, there you go. The book is called Honking for Freedom.

Grab it wherever you grab it. And head on over to locals where we continue the conversation, including with many of your questions. Does BJ think the liberals can be defeated at the next elections? And should we trust the conservatives, given their failure to challenge the government on COVID, trans-nuttiness, etc.?