Links - 30th June 2026 (1 - General Wokeness [including Wikipedia Bias])

Left-leaning Wikipedia blocked founder from editing site — after he campaigned to make it more balanced - "Larry Sanger launched WikiProject Intellectual Diversity (WID), a group designed to help reinforce the online encyclopedia’s “original, firm commitment to intellectual diversity,” by emphasizing neutrality and transparency. However, Sanger — who coined the name “Wikipedia,” drafted the site’s foundational set of rules and guidelines, and launched the site alongside Jimmy Wales in 2001 — is now indefinitely blocked from editing, the most drastic action the site can take against an editor. “I am flabbergasted,” Sanger told The Post, saying the decision was made by a group of the site’s volunteer editors. He described the modern Wikipedia community as being like a “mob or a blob,” noting users do not feel obligated to a specific vision of the rules, but rather to each other. “They are constantly trying to gauge what other people think, and this is the way ultimately these people are able to influence each other,” Sanger said. “Even a lot of the hard and fast policies are regarded as just guidelines if everybody is on board.” Sanger became unpopular among the site’s most prolific editors for making public calls for those whose viewpoints have typically been underrepresented — Hindus prominently, but also, most pointedly, American conservatives — to be more involved. The exact reason for his blocking was not given. Wikipedia makes a lot of noise about how its content is created by volunteer users, citing a figure of 267,000 people contributing or editing over the last 30 days on its website. However, Sanger has long argued the real power rests with a small, largely anonymous class of Wikipedia administrators — who he has identified as being just 62 accounts, which he calls the “Power 62,” of which 85% hide behind their screennames and have never revealed their true identities. For Sanger, the swiftness of the block highlights a glaring lack of procedural fairness. “There is no due process,” he argued. “People are being blocked—in other words, disciplined—and yet there is no respect for certain expectations that any other serious disciplinary procedure would be held to.” He likened the platform’s arbitration to being judged by a “faceless mob,” with the absence of basic structural safeguards like a distinct prosecutor, jury, or opportunity to mount a formal defense. After making the fact he had been blocked public on X Monday, Sanger was permanently banned from Wikipedia and any avenue for appeal was closed by the site... The campaign to oust him was instigated by one of the most combative editors on the platform, who goes by the handle TarnishedPath. The same editor was a driving force behind one of the most controversial maneuvers in Wikipedia’s recent history: a 12-month “moratorium” that froze the lead of the site’s “Zionism” article, locking in a sentence that critics — and this reporter, in Tablet Magazine — have documented as effectively equating the movement for Jewish self-determination with ethnic cleansing. TarnishedPath has been extremely active in gender issues on Wikipedia, pushing strongly to have JK Rowling labeled “anti-trans” or “transexclusionary radical feminist” (TERF). The editor eventually placed a banner on Rowling’s entry alleging it expressed a non-neutral point of view. “She should be referred to as having ‘anti-trans’ or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’ views,” the editor wrote last June. The editor wrote in 2023 of people who sought to lend credence to the idea that the theory that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology: “They might have a political smear that they wish to push, but anyone who knows what terms properly mean, can’t say that the Lab Leak conspiracy is a scientific theory with any sort of integrity.” Just weeks ago, Wikipedia’s own administrators banned TarnishedPath from editing in the entire Israel-Palestine subject area on account of the editor’s problematic behavior. This didn’t stop the anonymous editor from playing a key role in the ban of Sanger — indicating the kind of palace intrigue that Sanger has critiqued as being detrimental to the open exchange of ideas on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has come under intense scrutiny for leftwing bias, including a successful effort to brand Donald Trump as a fascist and authoritarian. The site notably uses a list of reliable sources whose reporting can be cited as fact. While mainstream media outlets like CNN, New York Times, NBC, and BBC are almost universally rated as green for “Generally reliable,” conservative outlets, including Fox News, Newsmax, and Federalist are rated red for “Generally unreliable”— a rating lower than even Chinese state media outlet China Daily, which has a rating of yellow for sometimes reliable. To justify the ban against Sanger, editors categorized Sangers’ recent efforts — most notably his intellectual diversity project — as “canvassing.” Wikipedia policy describes canvassing as alerting other editors on the site about editorial activity “with the intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.” Sanger strongly pushed back against the canvassing charges, saying: “The people who found fault with that… pointed to the fact that I was recruiting for a project that, in their opinion, is aligned with the radical right wing, which is absolutely absurd,” Sanger explained. However, the first sentence of that same policy specifies that “it is perfectly acceptable to notify other editors of ongoing discussions, provided that it be done with the intent to improve the quality of the discussion by broadening participation to more fully achieve consensus.” Sanger has returned to being active on Wikipedia in recent months after a long hiatus. Last September, he published his “Nine Theses,” a set of essays demanding a top-to-bottom overhaul of a site he argues has been captured by a “Globalist, Academic, Secular, and Progressive”—or GASP— worldview. Ironically, the eighth of Sanger’s nine theses called for an end to the practice of indefinite blocking, which the co-founder called “draconian.” Sanger’s return to active engagement had already thrown the site into turmoil. In November, Sanger’s decision to weigh in on the Gaza genocide entry — one of the most contentious on the site — threw Wikipedia into what editors called “pandemonium” after Wikipedia’s other co-founder, Jimmy Wales, waded into the Talk page of the same entry with a heavy critique. Reacting to his former partner stepping in to defend him, Sanger expressed appreciation, but remained fatalistic about his standing on the site. “It’s so interesting that Jimmy has come out and defended me,” Sanger noted. “But I have a feeling he’s going to be very unsuccessful and that I am going to be permanently banned. I don’t think it’s ultimately going to make any difference.” Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, and Wales has largely erased any mention of him as co-founder. Wales stormed out of a podcast interview last November when asked about whether he was the sole founder of Wikipedia, telling the host: “It’s stupid. Don’t ask me stupid questions.”"
Left wingers hate different points of view so much

Larry Sanger on X - "Well, that’s that—I’ve been blocked by Wikipedia “indefinitely” for unstated reasons, by the “consensus” of a mob. There was no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury, no interpretation of law. All my judges were self-selected and hated me. 🤣"
Larry Sanger on X - "Well, now it’s really official. After being blocked this morning, then unblocked (after being defended by Jimmy Wales), I have now, as of this evening, been “blocked indefinitely” from editing Wikipedia. The charges are lies and misrepresentations. More soon."

Kaguya’s Top Gal on X - "He didn’t want it to be a leftist echo chamber so that made him a nazi and they banned him from his own site"

Meme - Soyjak with Proud Ally Award and Good Heckin' Person Award: "I <3 saying "the culture war is a distraction from the class war" but I would NEVER EVER EVER EVER stop pushing my culture war stances"
If you push back against the left wing agenda to radically remake society, you are a bad person starting a culture war and creating wedge issues and should focus on more important things like wages and housing.
If you push the left wing agenda to radically remake society, you are a decent human being and you are not being political

Ethnic differences in bone geometry between White, Black and South Asian men in the UK - "Black men had higher aBMD at the whole body, total hip and femoral neck compared to White and South Asian men independent of body size adjustments, with no differences between the latter two groups. White men had longer hip axis lengths than both Black and South Asian men. There were fewer differences in vBMD but White men had significantly lower cortical vBMD at the tibial diaphysis than Black and South Asian men (p < 0.001). At the tibia and radius diaphysis, Black men had larger bones with thicker cortices and greater bending strength than the other groups. There were fewer differences between White and South Asian men. At the metaphysis, South Asian men had smaller bones (p = 0.02) and lower trabecular vBMD at the tibia (p = 0.003). At the diaphysis, after size-correction, South Asian men had similar sized bones but thinner cortices than White men; measures of strength were not broadly reduced in the South Asian men. Combining pQCT and DXA measurements has given insight into differences in bone phenotype in men from different ethnic backgrounds. Understanding such differences is important in understanding the aetiology of male osteoporosis."
Proof that race is just skin deep, that race is socially constructed, and that there is no biological basis to race!

Toronto Star on X - "A Muslim wage gap? New study exposes major economic disparities in Greater Toronto and Hamilton"
सम्यक সম্যক on X - "“Credible” Blue Institutions in the West have converged to a point where they are publishing articles that would have been Onion articles or 4chan parody Guardian articles 10 years ago. Trump and his owners might have squandered the 2024 mandate but that does not mean that Blue Institutions have any credibility left…"
Rowan on X - "Isn’t it funny how the more immigration we have, the more “diverse” we are the more we hear radical left hyenas screeching constantly about alleged racism when they are typically most racist?"
Christina Kunneke on X - "So, do you organize employees along faith lines now? Have you looked into the wages for Buddhists, Shinto, Falun Gong, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Jews and atheists for comparison? If not, this is nonsense."
KSW33T on X - "Isn’t this the point of immigration?"
Wizard of Time & Speed on X - "Ah yes, imported low skill immigration somehow yeilds less wages than local and established skilled citizens. Interesting how that works. Truly amazing reporting here. Truly."
Captain Meowsers on X - "What about Christians? Buddhists? Mormons? Why do we only ever talk about Muslims? Muslims in all western countries are the most likely to be dependent on tax payers…."
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again!

This Week in Canada: Your Anti-Racism Is Not Anti-Racist Enough - "Joshua Gordon taught for years at Simon Fraser University’s School of Public Policy. He had limited-term contracts, received positive evaluations, and applied for a tenure-track job at the public university in British Columbia in 2021. The job posting required candidates to demonstrate a “commitment to EDI”—or equity, diversity, and inclusion—and the ability to “center diverse perspectives and experiences.” You might already have guessed what happened next. In his application, Gordon included a statement titled “Contributions to an inclusive community,” in which he wrote: “In discussions around gender, race, and class, I have sought to center voices from underrepresented groups. At the same time, in general I strive to make sure that everyone is treated equally, without regard to race or gender or sexual orientation.” Gordon didn’t get the job. One faculty member involved in the hiring process wrote that his statement “signals a potential lack of regard for diversity and what is required to make spaces feel inclusive.” A student added: “I think the only concern I have with Josh is that he is not at the level of anti-racism/anti-colonialism learning/knowledge that I would expect of a professor in this program.” And one member of the search committee said about his rejection: “Almost entirely, it was based on his qualified (as opposed to enthusiastic) support for Indigenous reconciliation as defined by First Nation advocates.” Gordon, who is white, also was remembered for challenging aspects of a letter in 2020 from students and alumni who accused Simon Fraser of “a pattern of systemic racism.” During faculty meetings, he argued that it should not automatically be assumed that institutions were systemically racist. One faculty member accused him of being defensive. Gordon later accused the same faculty member of being “the primary organizer against his candidacy.” He filed a complaint with the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT), claiming that the decision not to hire him was discrimination based on his political beliefs. If you still don’t believe just how ideological hiring inside Canadian universities has become, let me tell you how Gordon’s complaint turned out. He lost. The tribunal member who decided the case said that while Gordon might have been torpedoed because of his opposition to what he called “activist EDI,” those views do not qualify as protected “political beliefs” under British Columbia’s Human Rights Code. “Though such beliefs or worldviews may be ‘political’ in the everyday sense of the word, they are not political within the specific meaning” of the law. Reading last month’s ruling reminded me immediately of my reporting on former Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto in 2023. He became a symbol of growing ideological conflict about diversity training in Canadian institutions after objecting to aspects of mandatory anti-racism sessions run by a consultant. In one session, Bilkszto challenged claims about white supremacy and systemic oppression and objected to being categorized through racial frameworks. Rather than defending his right to disagree, many of Bilkszto’s colleagues appeared to treat dissent itself as evidence of moral failing. Bilkszto was portrayed not as someone raising questions, but as a racist whose views were dangerous or illegitimate. After two years of public humiliation, professional fallout, and legal battles, Bilkszto took his own life in 2023. Friends and colleagues told me at that time that his reputation meant everything to him, which is precisely why the public branding and institutional ostracism devastated him so deeply. The Gordon ruling reflects a strikingly similar dynamic. Faculty members organized against Gordon’s job candidacy because they viewed his approach to EDI, anti-racism, and identity politics as inadequate or suspect. One faculty member was described as “adamant” that hiring should be used to “advance EDI” and “shape the direction and future” of the school. Another internal communication described a faculty campaign objecting to Gordon’s inclusion on the shortlist. Across Canada, university hiring ads require applicants to submit diversity-related statements, demonstrate commitments to anti-racism and inclusion, or give priority to candidates from designated identity groups. The federal Canada Research Chairs program requires universities to meet equity targets for women, racial minorities, indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, and gender minorities. Toronto Metropolitan University openly instructs hiring committees to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion principles into the faculty recruitment process. The Gordon ruling also made me think about Barry Neufeld, a school board trustee in Chilliwack, British Columbia, who was ordered to pay CAD$750,000 for saying on Facebook that a man is not a woman. After the decision against him, Neufeld told me that he was simply criticizing gender identity ideology in schools. Yet the ruling concluded that questioning aspects of gender identity ideology could amount to denying someone’s very existence. It all seems upside-down, but in a country that treats disagreement not as dissent but as harm, that’s where we are."

Robert Reich on X - "If this country was truly “pro-life,” we would have Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, gun reform, universal child care, and a living wage. The right-wing agenda isn’t about “life.” It’s about control."
Cynical Publius on X - "How is keeping the government out of our daily lives a form of "control," Mr. Oompa Loompa? Explain."
Comment (elsewhere): "So you're proposing total Government control because you're opposed to perceived control? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤡"

Logan Bowers 🏗️ 🏘️ on X - "“Policing should be more targeted” lolololol. Let me tell you a story about targeted policing. So Seattle got speeding cameras a few years ago, an advisory group had to recommend where to place them. One thing they hated was that if the cameras were simply put in the most dangerous places—with the most dead children—it would be disproportionately in PoC neighborhoods. So the working group wanted to move some cameras into whiter neighborhoods. But think about the implications for a second: local residents are the ones most likely to be caught speeding and local residents are the ones most likely to die in collisions. Targeting actual need of speeding cameras was deemed racist. So the implication of the group’s recommendations was to literally kill poorer children of color, so that more white people would get speeding tickets."
Damn Elon Musk murdering 600k children!

Yossi BenYakar on X - "A church in Ottawa has been turned into a mosque, and the speaker in the video doesn’t hide a thing. He openly boasts about their rising influence, political reach, and long-term plan to reshape the country. They are telling you exactly what their movement intends to do. Why do so many Canadians refuse to see what’s right in front of them?"

GB News on X - "King Charles will now 'protect the multi-faith nation' as new role defined"
Paul Embery on X - "I do not know of any other country whose ruling elites are so willing to trash that country’s history and traditions, or seem so intent on diluting its unique national character and turning it into some sort of outpost of the UN. It’s relentless."

I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup - "On the other hand, that same group ab­solutely loathed Thatcher. Most of us (though not all) can agree, if the ques­tion is posed ex­plic­itly, that Osama was a worse per­son than Thatcher. But in terms of ac­tual gut feel­ing? Osama pro­vokes a snap judg­ment of “flawed human being”, Thatcher a snap judg­ment of “scum”."
wanye on X - "This is a point I’ve made before in a slightly different way. The average liberal hears that somebody screamed the N-word at a nice black guy in a suit and they feel it way down in their gut. What a fucking despicable thing to do. The type of person who would do that is pure scum, the worst of the Earth. It’s disgusting. The feeling is visceral. Makes them wanna puke. Who could possibly do such a thing? But then they hear a story about a black teenager who stomped on another man’s head until he died and… well they’re not going to condone it, obviously, but the passion, the intensity, the disgust — it’s just not there. And I just think, like, you know, stomping on another man’s head is worse than saying something racist. I think that should be obvious to everybody. And I think the fact that one of these things feels to liberals like an absolute kick in the gut and the other one doesn’t is deranging a lot of their politics."

Eric Zed | Facebook - "The absurdity is hard to comprehend. We're told to hate billionaires. But I suppose they just mean, "our" billionaires. Those same social moderators will then in the same breath, enthusiastically accept the billions poured into Western institutions from Islamic Gulf monarchies, as political aid. We're told to oppose foreign influence and that AIPAC are monsters with dark money. But foreign influence is welcomed when it arrives wrapped in the right politics and benefits the right narratives. We're told to defend women's rights, LGBT rights, secularism, democracy, and liberal values. Then organizations, networks, and governments fundamentally opposed to those values are shielded from scrutiny because questioning them has become politically inconvenient. Citizens going so far as to advocate for their validity and protagonism. The Muslim Brotherhood plays a great role in what we are seeing in the western world, allieship is directly and/or indirectly established with them and college campus'... Meanwhile they are being designated, restricted, investigated, or banned by governments across the world. UNRWA is a human rights advocacy group in direct relation to the UN, yet staff recently became the subject of October 7 investigations. Billions in foreign money from equally as or more corrupt billionaires flow into Western institutions. Yet somehow the people who claim to oppose power, influence, religious interference, and billionaire control become the most reliable defenders of those exact things when they arrive wearing the correct ideological costume. That isn't principle. That's tribalism. That's narrative addiction. That's ideological capture. The alliance isn't merely contradictory. It's one of the most extraordinary political paradoxes of the modern era."

Coddled Affluent Professional on X - "There’s no idea that’s seriously entertained on the right that is as stupid as ‘prison abolition.’"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Creationism?"
Just Loki on X - "Would you rather live in a town where the city council was 100% creationists or 100% prison abolitionists?"
Aryeh Kontorovich on X - "I've long maintained that the bad RW policies are at least *reversible* -- unlike the LW ones like mass immigration and transing children. but creationism isn't even a policy. it's just a harmless belief"
wanye on X - "This is the characteristic of mass immigration that I find so appalling. You can say whatever you want about bad economic policies, but everybody kind of understands that if you get it wrong, then you can start doing something else and re-introduce economic growth. But mass immigration is the permanent destruction of society as it exists today. It is completely irreversible. It’s hard to imagine a more arrogant, hubristic, reckless policy."

Renzo Downey on X - "Dispatch from the @TexasGOP Convention: “A Muslim Texan sought to find his place in the party at the state GOP convention. He left in tears.”"
Andy Hopper on X - "Hussein's dad founded the Houston chapter of the terrorist organization CAIR. He showed up to our convention to elicit the exact reaction that we are seeing echoed throughout the press--that Islam is somehow the victim. This is the tried-and-true formula to hijack the sympathies of Western cultures through the media."
Amy Mek on X - "🚨 SCOOP: Staged Tears at Texas GOP Convention DO NOT FALL FOR THIS ISLAMIC AND LEFT-WING OPERATION!
Mohamed Hussein’s staged tears at the Texas GOP Convention were pure theater. The Texas Tribune and its leftist media allies are running the same tired “Islamophobia” script to protect CAIR and Muslim Brotherhood operatives who tried to embed themselves inside the Republican Party. These are the exact networks Governor Abbott designated as terrorist organizations. (thank you) 🚨 These are the four operatives tied to CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood who registered as delegates/guests and tried to plant themselves inside the Texas GOP Convention:
🔺Tarek Hussein – CAIR-Houston founder
🔺Amjad Muhtaseb – MAS Houston (Muslim Brotherhood arm)
🔺Samar Halabi – Pushes hijab recruitment and dawah on Texas public school kids
🔺 Mohamed Hussein – Board member at the radical Clear Lake Islamic Center
When conservatives moved to remove them, the tears flowed on cue - just in time for the cameras (of cours Classic victim card. Classic distraction. These networks preach Sharia, glorify Hamas, run prison dawah, and target our children. Pastor Rick Scarborough said it straight: “If you embrace those values, there’s no place for you in America. That’s not assimilation - that’s takeover.” Texas, hold the line. Do not fall for jihadi and left-wing staged outrage. They will keep inventing crises to silence you. Stand strong - Americans across the country are with you. Demand investigations. Enforce the terrorist designations. Remove the infiltrators from our party. (more to follow on this) The red-green alliance wants us divided and weak. We will not comply. Texas First. America First."

M.A. Rothman on X - "𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐋𝐄𝐅𝐓'𝐒 𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐀𝐋 𝐂𝐑𝐔𝐒𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐒 𝐀𝐋𝐖𝐀𝐘𝐒 𝐄𝐍𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐀𝐌𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐘—𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐄𝐃 𝐀𝐒 𝐅𝐑𝐀𝐔𝐃𝐒
Victor Davis Hanson has been mapping the Left's most cherished social movements for years. The pattern is always the same: a crusade launches with religious fervor, bulldozes anyone who asks questions, and then quietly collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy — usually after doing enormous damage. #MeToo was supposed to be a reckoning. “𝘉𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘞𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯” became a moral commandment — until it became inconvenient. Christine Blasey Ford's uncorroborated 2018 allegations against Brett Kavanaugh were treated as settled truth. Then Tara Reade made a far more credible accusation against Joe Biden in 2020, and the same movement spent months working to destroy her. The new rule, left unspoken: believe women only when useful to the Left. Now Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner — a socialist backed by Elizabeth Warren — has been exposed with a social-media history of crude, pornographic put-downs of women and 𝐚 𝐓𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐤𝐨𝐩𝐟 𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐍𝐚𝐳𝐢 𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. Warren called him “𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥.” The movement that was going to hold powerful men accountable for disrespecting women is now campaigning for him. BLM followed the same arc. Ferguson's “𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘶𝘱, 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘴𝘩**𝘵” was a fabrication — the DOJ under Obama confirmed Michael Brown attacked the officer first. Jussie Smollett staged his own MAGA “𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘤𝘬” and hired two Nigerian-Americans to play the role. Kamala Harris called it an “𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯-𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘭𝘺𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨” and never apologized. The George Floyd aftermath: 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐭𝐬, 𝟑𝟓 𝐝∗𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐬, 𝟏,𝟓𝟎𝟎 𝐢𝐧𝐣𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐬, $𝟐 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐲 𝐝𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞 — plus a torched police precinct, a federal courthouse, and a church. America got defund-police layoffs, no-cash-bail laws, dropped SAT requirements, race-segregated graduations, and thousands of DEI bureaucrat positions. Race relations did not improve. BLM's founders never accounted for the $90 million in donations they collected. They vanished into multi-million-dollar homes. Britain offered a stark parallel. Eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak was fatally stabbed by a Sikh immigrant wielding an 8-inch “𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘢𝘭” sword exempt from Britain's knife laws. The attacker falsely claimed Nowak started it with slurs. Police handcuffed the dying Nowak as he said nine times he couldn't breathe, almost certainly ensuring his d∗ath. No national mourning. No protests. Nowak was on the wrong side of the Left's victim-victimizer ledger. Climate is the same story on a longer timeline. Agencies now quietly concede global warming was never the existential emergency they declared. Germany dismantled its energy infrastructure chasing net-zero — and wrecked its economy — 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐚 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐜𝐨𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡. The elites who demanded sacrifice made none themselves. The transgender push follows the pattern precisely. Gender dysphoria is ancient and rare, affecting under 0.01% of the population. The Left invented “𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘣𝘦” to weaponize dissent, pushed biological males into girls' locker rooms and women's sports, and triggered an epidemic of teens questioning their biological sex. Hanson identifies the engine behind all of it: crises manufactured in affluent Western universities, newsrooms, and bureaucracies, designed to frighten ordinary people into otherwise-insane agendas. The long-term playbook runs four moves: open borders to build a dependent constituency; fake working-class candidates; destruction of time-tested institutions like the Electoral College and the nine-justice Court; and pseudo-existential crises requiring massive taxes and ever-larger government managed by the elite class that invented the crisis. The antidote is already visible. Westerners are saying no to green haranguers, gender demagogues, the race-baiting industry, and open borders. As Hanson puts it, they are refusing to let the Left “𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺, 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘭𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘺.” 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧."

Links - 28th June 2026 (3 - Canadian Politics: Internet Surveillance)

Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare - "Last year, the Canadian government pushed Bill C-2, which would erode Canadian digital rights in the name of “border security.” The bill was so bad it didn’t even make it to committee because of the backlash from the privacy community. Now, the spring’s worst sequel, Bill C-22, aka The Lawful Access Act, is trying it again...   The dangers of these sorts of backdoors are not theoretical. In 2024, the Salt Typhoon hack took advantage of a system built by Internet Service Providers to give law enforcement access to user data. When you build these systems, hackers will come."

Vicki Johnson 🇨🇦❤️🇬🇷💙 on X - "Every Canadian with a smartphone or smart appliances should pay close attention to what Bill C-22 will entail.  The government, through this bill, is ordering telecom providers and smart device providers to have the capability to turn on your device's microphone remotely, eavesdropping on your conversations in the privacy of your own home 🏡, car, or wherever you are.  This isn't something we, as Canadians, should be subjected to, period.  The Liberal government, especially now under Carnage Carney, is quickly moving Canada 🇨🇦 into a dystopian future of all-encompassing surveillance.  They are using the novel 1984 as their procedural manual.  Canadians should be outraged over this bill and must ensure that it is not passed!!! #StopBillC22 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻"

bu/ac on X - "Fucking wild that the Government of Canada wants to be able to access your phone, cameras, all your data at anytime they want. Not only that the bill allows foreign policy to spy on any Canadian without a warrant. Meanwhile the Government made it so all emails and and texts of theirs are automatically erased after 15 days.   And people are like “fill out the Canadian census or you won’t get a paved road”.   So Fake And Gay."

Apple argues Liberals' lawful access bill could put users’ personal data at risk - "Last year, Apple removed its strongest data security tool from customers in the U.K., after the British government asked the company to create the ability to access the content via a back door."

U.S. Congressional Leaders Warn Canadian Lawful Access Plans Harm U.S. National Security and Economic Interests - "Their core concern is that the bill could compel U.S. technology companies to build backdoors into their encrypted systems, introducing systemic vulnerabilities for users in both countries."
Michael Geist on X - "Bill C-22 gives US tech companies a stark choice: compromise security of their entire user base, including US citizens, or consider exiting Canada. That's not a hypothetical. Congress is now saying it out loud, warning about the risks of lawful access."
Cyrus 🇻🇦🇨🇦🇺🇸 on X - "I wouldn’t be surprised if this was by design to force American tech to exit Canada so that we can welcome Chinese tech into the country as a replacement."

Mario4thenorth | Facebook - "Signal, the non-profit, encrypted-messaging app, just warned, it would rather leave Canada than comply with Bill C-22. Here’s what Bill C-22 actually does:
✅ Forces tech companies to build surveillance backdoors into their systems
✅ Mandates that every cell phone in Canada be trackable
✅ Allows the Minister of Public Safety to issue SECRET orders to turn your Amazon Alexa into a listening device
✅ Requires metadata retention for up to one year: who you called, when, and where you were
No comparable Western nation has adopted surveillance powers this broad. Meta called it conscripting private companies into “the government’s surveillance apparatus.” The US wrote directly to the minister warning it compromises American citizens’ privacy. A lawyer told committee: “As written, the minister could issue a secret order to turn your smart TV into a listening device.” Imagine: this is the same government that froze bank accounts without a court order. The same government that turned off committee cameras. The same government with 638 unresolved wrongdoing complaints. Now wants inside your phone."

Windscribe joins Signal in threatening Canada exit over controversial surveillance bill - "The fight for digital privacy in North America is heating up. Popular Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider Windscribe has threatened to relocate its headquarters out of Canada if the country's controversial new surveillance legislation, known as Bill C-22, is passed into law.  Introduced in March 2026, the proposed Lawful Access Act aims to give law enforcement broader tools to investigate severe crimes. However, privacy advocates and tech companies are sounding the alarm, warning that the bill’s requirements would severely weaken user security.  If enacted, Bill C-22 would mandate electronic service providers to build technical surveillance capabilities and retain certain user metadata for up to a year. For anyone using a VPN to protect their online identity, this legislation contradicts the strict no-logs policies that keep user data out of the hands of governments and hackers alike. Windscribe's ultimatum followed a similar warning from the encrypted messaging platform Signal. Earlier in the week, Signal's Vice President of Strategy and Global Affairs, Udbhav Tiwari, told reporters that the bill could force the introduction of technical vulnerabilities, making private messaging platforms a prime target for foreign adversaries.  Tiwari stated that the firm "would rather pull out of the country" than comply with a law that undermines its privacy commitments. Responding to the news on X, Windscribe made it clear that it shares Signal's zero-tolerance stance on mandatory logging.  "We won't be far behind if C-22 passes," Windscribe stated. "In its current state, VPNs would almost certainly require us to log identifying user data." While Signal operates entirely outside of Canada and could simply shut off its Canadian servers, Windscribe faces a much more complex logistical challenge. The company was founded in Toronto, meaning its core operations and headquarters fall directly under Canadian legal jurisdiction.  Expressing frustration with the proposed regulatory framework, Windscribe’s post on X did not mince words regarding the financial and ethical toll of the bill.  "Signal isn't headquartered in Canada so they can just shut off Canadian servers, but our HQ is," the VPN provider added. "We pay an ungodly amount of taxes to this corrupt government, and in return they want to destroy the entire essence of our service to basically spy on its own citizens."  The looming threat of Bill C-22 mirrors similar global legislative battles, such as the European Union's highly debated "chat control" proposals and the UK's Online Safety Act, both of which have drawn heavy criticism for threatening end-to-end encryption. For Windscribe users, the company's threat to relocate should offer a degree of reassurance. The provider recently had its strict no-logs policy empirically validated in a 2025 Greek court case, where authorities were unable to retrieve any user data because the company simply had none to give. Relocating its headquarters would allow Windscribe to maintain this technical infrastructure without running afoul of Canadian law."

David Peterson on X - "Regarding Canada's Bill C-22: @ProtonVPN is Swiss. Complying with foreign surveillance orders without Swiss legal process is a criminal offence. Not happening. We'll defend our Canadian users and never compromise them. We will fight C-22's application by every means available."

cbcwatcher on X - "CBC's amateur-hour take on Bill C-22 misses the biggest flaws: This "simple" police access bill would force telecoms, apps, and tech (Apple, Meta, Signal etc) to build backdoors, retain your metadata/location/comms for a YEAR, and install gov-directed tech thereby weakening encryption "with warrants"
Reality CBC ignored:
🚪Signal, NordVPN, Proton & others threaten to EXIT Canada entirely rather than break privacy (just like Meta blocked news under Bill C-18)
🍯Creates massive honeypots for hackers & foreign spies. U.S. Congress already warned of cross-border risks
⚠️Vague "safeguards" won't stop scope creep or abuse. Gag orders hide it from the public.
👮Police get easier access while criminals switch tools. Law-abiding Canadians lose strong encryption available everywhere else
🔄Repeats Online News Act disaster: tech pullbacks, degraded services, innovation hit
Minister claims "no encryption break" but the bill's technical mandates say otherwise. Rush to pass by summer = no real fixes  This isn't balanced journalism... it's advocacy that buries real privacy/security costs. Needs major amendments or it will backfire just like C-18!  Canadians deserve better than surveillance theater from CBC's Cat Tunney @mgeist  @gary_srp  @privacylawyer  @cattunneycbc"

Meme - TableSalt @Tablesalt13: "BREAKING The Canadian government has been community noted AGAIN."
Public Safety Canada @Safety_Canada: "All G7, Five Eye partners and most EU countries have lawful access frameworks that include technical obligations for electronic service providers."
"Bill C-22 an act to keep Canadians safe"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "The EU Court of Justice has ruled twice that general and indiscriminate mandatory data retention by service providers is unlawful, meaning most EU countries lack equivalent frameworks to Bill C-22's metadata retention requirements."

Juno News on X - "A Google exec warned Bill C-22 "goes beyond any regime that I'm familiar with" because it gives government broad secret powers without judicial oversight. Google says it was not consulted before the bill was tabled."

Chris Ryan on X - "🚨 APPLE JUST DROPPED A BOMBSHELL ON CANADA’S BILL C-22:   “This may be one of the LAST times we’re permitted to discuss the consequences of this legislation publicly.” 🤐  Why? The bill’s secrecy provisions GAG companies like Apple from telling YOU or the PUBLIC about SECRET government orders for your data. 💻   This isn’t “lawful access.”   It’s forced encryption backdoors + permanent gag orders.  Apple: We will NEVER build backdoors that put every Canadian at risk.   Canada is sliding into authoritarian surveillance.   Kill Bill C-22 before it kills our privacy. 🇨🇦  #KillC22 #Apple #SurveillanceState"

Facebook - "Bill C-9, C-22 And C-8 Are All Interconnected: Why Aren't They Talking About This?  Bill C-9 criminalizes hate speech — it defines what you're allowed to say. Bill C-22 forces telecoms to record everything you do online and save it for up to one year without a warrant. Bill C-8 allows the government to cut you off the internet entirely if they consider you a threat to the network. They would never know you're a threat without Bill C-22. They could never call you a threat without Bill C-9.  What will it take for Conservatives and Independent Media to start connecting the dots? #CanadaPolitics #IndependentMedia #ConservativeParty #canadafirst #chinada"

Time to speak out against Bill C-22 - "The CEO of Canada’s largest tech company, Tobi Lutke of Shopify, sees the Liberals’ legislation as a huge mistake, posting on X: “C-22 is looking like a huge mistake. It worries me a great deal. There is so much nonsense in there that it may well end up dealing a death blow to Canadian tech viability.”... Regarding security and sovereignty, Canadian investigative journalist Sam Cooper has suggested that C-22 will surveil Canadians and compile data that can be accessed by transnational crime cartels and, most likely, given the Canada-Sino strategic partnership, by the Chinese Communist Party. Cooper writes on this in The Bureau and, in part, he warns: “Beijing is patiently positioning itself — collecting encrypted messaging data from Western users while its universities and state-linked hackers advance quantum computing technologies powerful enough to break into private Western communications. Without entering complex legal territory, it is fair to say that enough credible experts have made the case that Ottawa would be opening the door and handing Beijing the keys to exploit exactly these kinds of structural weaknesses. In passing Bill C-22 as written, Canada would be legislating a gift to the adversary.”   The concerns of a host of U.S. high tech companies operating in Canada have been heard in Washington D.C. and a congressional committee sent a warning letter to Anandasangaree that the new requirements for retention of users’ metadata and “back door” access for government agencies is a threat to both U.S. national security and the integrity of cross-border data flows. (An important aside is that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee looking at Bill C-22 is the same committee that exposed the U.N.’s global financing alliance for net-zero policies (GFANZ) as a “climate cartel” and criticized Carney for his role).  Regarding Canadians’ privacy rights, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) has been vocal in its worry that the legislation is a serious threat. The organization’s president John Carpay baldly states, “Canadians deserve security without sacrificing privacy. When laws drive secure communications services out of the country, Canadians should be asking serious questions about privacy, security, and government overreach.” JCCF urges the government to make substantial changes to the legislation, including “removing the proposed production order, eliminating mandatory data retention requirements, requiring full judicial oversight, and adding a sunset clause.”...   MP Leslyn Lewis summarized the seriousness of Bill C-22 becoming law in her second reading debate in the House of Commons: the legislation “allows the government to build a system that makes it easier to access your telecom data, your phone, internet, and other digital activity, by requiring networks to be ready for that access. The problem is how that system is being built. It is being shaped by government ministers, behind closed doors, and without full parliamentary scrutiny. Ministers will set the rules for how your data is collected, retained, and accessed — through regulation, not through open debate in Parliament. Bill C-22 is not just about access to your data. It is about control over the system that makes that access possible.”   Dean Allison, local MP for Niagara West, brought into focus the larger picture for Canadians when he posited: “First it was Bill C-11 controlling what Canadians see online. Then Bill C-18 blocking and manipulating access to news. Now Bill C-22 takes the next step: surveillance and state control…. This is no longer about ‘safety’ or ‘protecting Canadians.’ It is about control. A government that froze bank accounts without court orders, shut off committee cameras, and faces hundreds of unresolved wrongdoing complaints now wants expanded access into your digital life. Canadians should be asking a very serious question: How much freedom are we prepared to surrender in the name of government ‘oversight’?”   Final word this week goes to Canadian broadcaster and political commentator Jasmin Laine, who summarizes the cumulative effect of the Carney Liberals’ online legislation: “When governments begin simultaneously influencing what citizens see, what narratives are amplified, what information is suppressed, and how securely people can communicate, you are no longer dealing with isolated policy decisions. You are looking at the infrastructure for behavioural and narrative control. That should terrify every Canadian—regardless of political affiliation.”"

Jacob Mantle on X - "🚨 BREAKING🚨  The Liberals are trying to ram C-22 through the House of Commons before summer. This would mean zero, absolutely zero amendments, zero further debate, to the largest expansion of government surveillance in history. This is not democracy, this is tyranny.   @googlecanada  @Apple  @Meta  @tobi  @mgeist  @privacylawyer  @windscribecom  @NordVPN  @DuckDuckGo  @MWACCanada  @bccla  @JoshDehaas  @ProtonVPN  @expressvpn  @CDNConstFound  @ggreenwald  @PrivacyPrivee"

Ottawa is trying to censor AI chatbots with new online harms law : r/canada - "From Windscribe:
• C-8: Without a court order, govt can cut you off from the internet
• C-9: Criminalizes speech online
• C-22: Keep a year of metadata of everything you do online
• C-34: Requires ID checks to use social media"
"When he said they would move at speeds we never thought possible, I thought he was talking about the economy."

tobi lutke on X - "These bills, along with C-22 and C-9 constitute a total erosion in Canada’s basic liberties. They interlock into making Canada essentially unviable for those with choices on where to build."

Michael Geist on X - "The kids’ social media ban gets the headlines, but my post argues Bill C-34’s most consequential element may be the Commission, a super-regulator overseeing the system with its own rules of evidence, potentially secret hearings, and wide-ranging powers."
Michael Geist on X = "You have to read Bill C-34 on The Commission to believe it. It sets the rules on age verification, social media bans, and content removals while serving as combined regulator, investigator and advocate. At the start, Chair alone can be the full Commission."
Build Canada on X - "You've likely seen the headlines from bills C-34, C-36, and C-22 in the media.  Each may sound reasonable on their own: protect kids online, modernize privacy, help police catch criminals.  But buried within is an emerging Digital Regulatory Superpower unlike anything Canadians have ever seen.  These bills hand one unelected commission power over what Canadians can say, what stays private, and who the state can watch.  As of today, the Federal Government is rushing to enact massive Internet Surveillance Reform into law without proper debate."

This Week in Canada: Your Anti-Racism Is Not Anti-Racist Enough - "Should governments give themselves the power to construct the infrastructure for large-scale digital surveillance? Once they have that power, they will wield it. Canada has not earned much trust. Back in 2022, the same Liberal Party that just brought us Bill C-22 treated the trucker convoy as almost an insurrection. Mark Carney, then just a resident of Ottawa who happened to be former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England—not yet the prime minister—wrote in The Globe and Mail that protesters had engaged in sedition and “are not patriots.” He urged the government to start “enforcing the law and following the money.” “Those who are still helping to extend this occupation must be identified and punished to the full force of the law. . . . by now anyone sending money to the convoy should be in no doubt: You are funding sedition,” Carney wrote. “Drawing the line means choking off the money that financed this occupation.” Once governments start viewing domestic dissent as problematic, surveillance powers look awfully tempting... Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and one of Canada’s leading experts on internet law, recently warned Parliament that retaining such information at this scale would create “a comprehensive surveillance map of virtually every Canadian.” Similar data-retention regimes have been struck down by the European Union’s top court. There is something darkly ironic about all this. Governments and tech companies spent years and fortunes encouraging citizens to digitize every aspect of their lives. Work online, bank online, store memories online, communicate online, they all told us. Many of those same companies built business models around harvesting enormous amounts of personal data and cooperated with state surveillance efforts. Now, after pushing society past the point of no return on digital dependence, governments are demanding more and more access to that data, even if it was supposed to be protected from outsiders.

The Last Canadian Politician I’d Trust to Police the Internet

I remember when left wingers mocked conservatives for justifying policies based on harm to children. And this is ignoring Trans mania being justified the same way too.

The Last Canadian Politician I’d Trust to Police the Internet

"Justin Trudeau’s nine-year tenure as Canadian prime minister, which ended when his own Liberal caucus tossed him overboard in late 2024, can be divided thematically into two distinct periods.

During the mid-to-late 2010s, he presented himself as a sunny Canadian patriot. Then, following the COVID pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and the unmarked-graves social panic of 2021 (which Trudeau’s own government did much to spread), he sounded the exact opposite theme: Canada, he began telling Canadians, was in fact a deeply racist genocide state. He ordered his Liberal colleagues to implement a massive “Action Plan on Combatting Hate,” and introduced legislation that would give his government new powers to stamp out hate speech.

In 2021, Trudeau’s government floated Bill C-36, which would have brought back a defunct legal provision that had allowed Canadians to bring human-rights complaints against one another for alleged hate speech. To give readers an idea of how this kind of arrangement works: Under British Columbia’s provincial human-rights system, which has long permitted this kind of dubious complaint, a former school trustee was just fined $750,000 for saying that he believes in the primacy of biological sex instead of the ideological construct known as gender identity. 

Thanks in part to pushback from civil libertarians, Bill C-36 never went anywhere. But the controversy surrounding the legislation gave Canadians a window into the unsettling ambitions of Canada’s would-be censors. In 2022, members of a 12-member “Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety” appointed by the Liberals urged the government to expand the category of censorship-worthy “harmful content” to include “algorithms that contribute to unrealistic body image” and “misleading political communications”; with some adding that “a definition of harmful content must include an understanding of how…a racialized person with lived experience on the psychological toll of racism and its systemic impact would likely have a different perspective on what constitutes harmful content compared to a cis-white male.”

In an ironic twist, many of the experts voiced “concern” over the fact that “misinformation and disinformation” weren’t yet officially deemed to be “harmful content.” As it turns out, one of the better known members of the advisory panel was an activist named Bernie Farber, who’d himself just been outed publicly (and somewhat hilariously) for spreading fake news about the early-2022 convoy protest in Ottawa...

The Liberals took another kick at the can in 2024, with revised legal provisions bundled together into Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act. If anything, this iteration—which also, thankfully, never made it into law—was worse than the original. Not only would it have empowered Canada’s federal human-rights commission to get back into the speech-regulation business. As University of Ottawa scholar Michael Geist noted in a scathing response to the draft bill, it also would have created a new internet oversight body that could conduct secret hearings, and which was completely unbound by “any legal or technical rules of evidence.”

Bill C-63 also would have amended the Criminal Code so that any convicted individual could be sent to jail for life if it was determined that he or she had committed any crime in a manner “motivated by hatred based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.”

In fact, the Act didn’t require that the underlying transgression was criminal in nature—only that it was “an offence under this Act or any other Act of Parliament” (my emphasis). And the government didn’t even have to wait for any law to be broken before it acted: Under Bill C-63, Canadians could be pre-emptively hit with a peace bond if authorities believed they might utter hate speech in the future.

Under the new (and more sensible) leadership of Mark Carney, the government retreated to the more modest restrictions contained in Bill C-9—the Combatting Hate Act, which is expected to soon become law.

As the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) notes, C-9 does contain some troubling provisions—such as eliminating the requirement that the Attorney General sign on to criminal hate-speech prosecutions. But other provisions are quite defensible, such as the creation of a new category of criminal offense that targets hatemongers who gather outside houses of worship and other civic institutions “with the intent to provoke a state of fear in a person in order to impede their access.” 

As anyone who observed the campus “encampments” that popped up following the 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks, or who’s observed the mobs that periodically harass Jews outside Canadian synagogues on the pretext of promoting Palestinian rights, this kind of thuggish behaviour (often euphemistically described as “direct action” or “civil disobedience”) isn’t really speech at all. It’s simply harassment dressed up as activism. And it’s notable that many of the “civil society groups” that joined the CCLA in criticizing the Combatting Hate Act are strident leftists and anti-Israel types who fret that it will be used to silence “Muslim, Palestinian, Black, Indigenous, 2SLGBTQIA+ and other equity-deserving communities.”

The more stripped-down nature of C-9 reflects the difference in worldviews between Trudeau and Carney. During the second half of his tenure, Trudeau often seemed consumed by the idea that Canada’s main problem was conservative bigotry. And his tenure coincided with a collective progressive hysteria centered on the belief that there was a burbling underground of right-wing hate groups poised to literally destroy Canadian democracy. Trudeau’s legislative overreach reflected these partisan phobias. And one reason his speech-regulation bills failed is that Canadians (rightly) distrusted him as an arbiter of what they should be allowed to say.

Last month, Carney (wisely) announced that his government would abandon efforts to resurrect the aforementioned Human Rights Act provisions that allow Canadians to prosecute one another over alleged online hate speech. He also shot down a thoroughly misguided Senate proposal that would have shoehorned an ill-defined ideological crime called “Residential School denialism” into Bill C-9...

His move to quash the anti-denialism provision nonetheless unleashed a wave of denunciations from Indigenous groups, which called the move “regressive, disappointing, and a setback for reconciliation.”  

But C-9 is only half the story. The other half of the Liberals’ Carney-era speech-regulation strategy takes the form of the new Safe Social Media Act, Bill C-34. And this one is more problematic, even if it’s principal stated goal—protecting Canadian children from the (very real) dangers associated with toxic online environments—is entirely legitimate.

The centrepiece of the legislation, which mirrors similar efforts in Australia, is a ban on the enlistment of Canadians under the age of 16 on TikTok and other social media services...

Carney’s government has used the pretext of child protection as a means to advance a larger content-regulation agenda. This includes a blueprint for a “Digital Safety Commission,” which will force social-media companies to ensure Canadians aren’t exposed to “harmful content.”... 

the Safe Social Media Act also is aimed at proscribing material that “incites violence” and “foments hatred”—the latter description being one that, as noted above, some Canadian human rights officials would apply to the observation that men can’t become women by putting on a dress.

Moreover, as Geist notes, the text of the Bill “leaves nearly everything that will determine how the law actually works, including which services are covered, when the ban applies and to whom, what counts as adequate age verification, and what design features platforms must build” to later decisions by Cabinet and the (as yet non-existent) Digital Safety Commission.

Several Canadian pundits whom I very much respect, including Jamie Sarkonak of the National Post and Josh Dehaas of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, see C-34 as a thinly veiled plot to eventually put control of the entire internet under the thumb of Canada’s federal government... the Prime Minister would roll out C-34 under the auspices of a cabinet colleague who is strongly associated with the dogmatic style of social-justice puritanism that Trudeau embraced during his political twilight.

I speak here of Trudeau’s childhood friend Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture. He’s been making the media rounds, promoting the Safe Social Media Act while presenting himself as the great defender of Canada’s youth—whom he says are “dying” due to uncontrolled internet use.

“Kids just aren’t on the bargaining table—hard stop,” he told a reporter when asked about potential U.S. objections to Canada’s move to block access to American social-media giants. The eyeball-rolling suggestion here is that opposing Bill C-34 doesn’t just make you anti-child, it makes you pro-Trump, and therefore a bad Canadian.

Back in 2021, Miller had a prominent role in promoting the Trudeau-approved lie that 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children had been found in an old orchard in British Columbia. Even after that falsehood was debunked, Miller continued to call for the criminal prosecution of residential-school “denialists” who deviated from the myth that he and Trudeau helped create...

On the fifth anniversary of the unmarked-graves farce this past May, while others were admitting they’d been duped by the fake news of 2021, Miller was silent. Like Trudeau, he’s never taken accountability for his role signal-boosting what is arguably the single most persistently toxic piece of misinformation the Canadian internet has witnessed in the social-media era—a deception that led to the torching of dozens of Canadian churches. It’s something Miller might want to think about the next time he pontificates about the link between online misinformation and violence.

More than anyone else in Carney’s orbit, this Liberal holdover from the Trudeau era personifies the instinctive sense of distrust that a lot of us feel when we think about allowing our government to decide what we can say, read, and watch online. Carney may have good intentions. But he picked a flawed messenger to communicate them."

The surveillance powers the Canadian left condemns abroad and builds at home

Anarcho-tyranny strikes again. Left wingers love government overreach when it pushes the left wing agenda.

The surveillance powers the Canadian left condemns abroad and builds at home

"On April 27, 2026, the United States Supreme Court heard argument in Chatrie v. United States, and a decision is pending. The case began with a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, and a single warrant served on Google. Police did not have a suspect. They had a location and a time, so they asked a magistrate to order Google to identify every device that passed through a roughly 17.5-acre zone around the Call Federal Credit Union during a two-hour window.

To answer that warrant, Google had to search the Location History of more than 500 million users. The technique is called a geofence warrant, and it inverts the ordinary logic of a search. A conventional warrant names a person and authorizes a look at that person's effects. A geofence warrant names a place and a time and works backward through everyone who was there.

The federal courts have not been able to agree on whether this is constitutional...

The same questions surround Flock Safety, the company that has built the largest automated licence-plate reader network in the United States. Its cameras logged more than 12 million searches by over 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. A Texas sheriff's office ran a woman's plate across 83,000 cameras after she ended a pregnancy, with the search note "had an abortion, search for female." U.S. Customs and Border Protection was given access to Illinois data in violation of that state's privacy law.

What is notable about the American argument is the broad reaction across the spectrum. The libertarian Cato Institute filed a brief urging the Court to find that Fourth Amendment property rights "do not dissolve merely because one's records are stored by a third party." The ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Georgetown's Center on Privacy & Technology filed on the same side. Reason covered the case sympathetically. On the merits, the right-libertarian and the civil-liberties left agree that a search which sweeps in everyone near a crime is a problem. But yet, depending on country and context, there's a difference about who is willing to say it out loud.

In March 2026 the federal government introduced Bill C-22, its lawful-access bill. It is the successor to the data-disclosure provisions of the 2025 Strong Borders Act, Bill C-2, which were withdrawn after the privacy community objected and never reached committee. C-22 carries the core of that regime forward...

The bill also expands data-sharing with foreign governments, the United States among them. A law marketed as a defence of Canadian borders would route Canadian subscriber and metadata into the same American security apparatus that Canadian commentators describe as a threat.

Let's focus on the metadata retention provision. Metadata is not the content of a message, but a year of it draws a precise map of associations and movements: who contacted whom, from where, and when. The Supreme Court of Canada has already considered how revealing that kind of record can be. In R. v. Spencer, decided in 2014, the Court held that Canadians retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in the subscriber information that links an identity to online activity, and that obtaining it without authorization is a search under section 8 of the Charter. The Court treated the ability to stay anonymous online as part of personal privacy, and found that no existing law — not Canada's privacy legislation, not the Criminal Code — gave police the power to demand the data on their own. Lowering the statutory threshold to "reasonable grounds to suspect" is a legislative response to Spencer rather than compliance with it.

The objections to C-22 have come almost entirely from outside the partisan arena... These are privacy specialists and civil libertarians. These are not the voices of Canada's political opinion class.

Canadian progressive commentary treats American surveillance as a standing emergency... mmigration enforcement and abortion access do not neatly divide Canadians along the same lines they divide Americans, but they animate the Canadian progressives who follow American politics as a spectator sport.

As Toronto prepared to host World Cup matches in June 2026, Mayor Olivia Chow declared American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents "not welcome" in the city and carried a council motion, 21 to 4, opposing any ICE presence during the tournament — a stand against a foreign agency that has no authority to operate in Toronto regardless. The gesture cost nothing and changed nothing — a virtue signal to her base during an election year. Meanwhile no comparable defiance has met the surveillance powers the Carney government is actually legislating at home.

In fact, where C-22 is covered, it is covered as a technical dispute about retention periods and encryption standards and warnings from technology companies. The treatment is dry, procedural, and confined largely to the academics named above. In Canada, the American apparatus is described as a step toward a police state, while the Canadian one is described as an esoteric privacy file.

The explanation is not complicated. The government building the Canadian apparatus is one that left-of-centre commentators broadly trust. A surveillance power feels administrative when the right people hold it and ominous when the wrong people do. The moral outrage stays focused on Trump because the partisan cognitive dissonance to address what's happening at home is too great.

Canada does not need to speculate about how a government uses a power to compel private firms to hand over personal data without a warrant. The Liberal government did so in February 2022, when it invoked the Emergencies Act against the convoy protests in Ottawa...

The Federal Court found that unconstitutional...

The pattern is the same in both countries. The judiciary holds that compelled access to data held by a third party is a search that requires authorization, and the executive keeps building tools that operate without it.

In the United States, the Fourth Amendment gave rise to Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 ruling that the government needs a warrant to obtain historical cell-site location records, and now to the geofence question in Chatrie before the Supreme Court. In Canada, section 8 of the Charter did the same work in Spencer on subscriber information and in Mosley and the Court of Appeal on the convoy account freezes. Courts in both countries reached the same conclusion. Trump and Carney have responded the same way, by legislating or operating around the rulings rather than within them.

C-22 fits that pattern exactly. The Supreme Court of Canada said in 2014 that subscriber information carries a reasonable expectation of privacy. The bill answers by letting police demand it on the weakest standard in Canadian criminal law: reasonable grounds to suspect.

The government justifies new surveillance powers in the name of public safety. The record makes that justification difficult to take at face value, because the same government has been reluctant to use the ordinary powers it already holds.

Parliament had to pass Bill C-48 in 2023 to re-tighten the bail rules it had loosened in 2019, after police forces across the country reported repeat violent offenders reoffending on release. The Edmonton Police Service tracked one cohort of released arrestees and counted, over three years, more than 3,600 further violent-crime incidents and 26 homicides. Statistics Canada's violent Crime Severity Index rose 15% across 2021 through 2023 before a slight dip.

Auto theft reached a record $1.5 billion in insurance claims in 2023, up 254% nationally since 2018 and 524% in Ontario, severe enough that Ottawa convened a national summit on the problem. British Columbia, with federal cooperation, walked back its drug-decriminalization pilot in 2024 and then ended take-home so-called safe supply in 2025, conceding that prescribed opioids were being diverted into the illicit market.

A state that will not hold violent repeat offenders, slow a record wave of auto theft, or keep the free opioids it hands out from being trafficked back onto the street, but that does want to execute digital dragnets of Canadian metadata and build a mechanism to reach inside encrypted services, is not following a public-safety logic.

The more plausible motive is harmonization. Bill C-2 was a border bill, drafted under American pressure on the shared frontier, and C-22 expands the sharing of Canadian data with the United States. The reach for these powers is more aligned with the demands of the bilateral relationship than it is with addressing crime in Canada.

Mark Carney was elected on "elbows up," a promise to resist American overreach. On surveillance the elbows are down: C-22 feeds Canadian data into the apparatus he campaigned against, and the wager is that his supporters will swallow it obsequiously.

Surveillance infrastructure is permanent in a way that governments are not. A metadata retention mandate, a lowered threshold for subscriber data, and a standing capability to compel decryption do not expire when a government changes. They are inherited by whoever wins the next election, and the one after that.

The leftist commentators comfortable with C-22 because they approve of the government building it are extending a trust they cannot expect their successors to honour. The same powers, in the hands of a future Conservative government, would not be received as anodyne administrative housekeeping. The left would call these powers the "fascist" police-state machinery that the Trump version is being called."

Facebook Group Admin and Mod Drama

Someone asked me why one of my Facebook groups has me as the sole admin, and no mods. I said there're disadvantages to adding other admins and moderators:

People want to be mods/admins and keep pestering to be granted that status
People rally group members to pressure admins to grant such status
Mods and admins can go power hungry and ban/mute people for no reason
There can be disputes over interpretation of rules or new rules (as you can see I have minimal rules, want to keep it a chill group, and mostly it is)
There can be disputes between mods and admins
There can be disputes between mods/admins and members
There can be rallying members to complain about this or that admin or mod
There may be the creation of splinter groups/discords and poaching members/telling members to leave the group
Some mods/admins will add new mods and admins
Some mods/admins will remove other mods and admins

See also this comment from a power-hungry admin (currently featured as the banner for "You run a Facebook group not a country, but okay."):

Cal Lombardi: "Imfao you're a funny one. Not sure if I should ban you or just keep you here for the amusement. There's a certain hierarchy here, as my admin badge should have keyed you in on, and you went and mocked me. Do you know how much power I have? I'm not just the admin of a group with over SOK members, I've got a network of admins that are loyal to me alone and their power spans all of Leftbook. I'm the veritable champion online, and if you don't do what I say... why don't you message some group members and find out? The only reason you're not banned yet is that I wanted to give you some time to read this first... to know how deep the shit you're in is. Don't mock my community. Don't mock Harry Potter fans or those winning with Autisim. You want another chance? Say you understand and you apologize, and say you realize you've been a stupid *** a beautiful place."

A lot of Facebook group admins and moderators are batshit insane and power drunk.

Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed Sane (Women and Wokeness)

vittorio on X: "Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed Sane"

"Bill Ackman quote tweeted a graph showing the partisan gap between young men and women almost doubled in 25 years... 

 

Women moved radically left. Men stayed roughly where they were.

 

'Why?'

 

Good question. Most answers I've seen are either tribal ("women are emotional") or surface-level ("social media bad"). Neither traces the actual mechanism.

 

Let me try...

 

We've been told for a decade that men are "radicalizing to the right" and that this is dangerous. The actual data shows the opposite. Men barely moved. Women moved 20+ points leftward.

 

The story we are told is exactly inverted from reality. And when female leftward movement does get discussed, it's framed as progress: "women becoming more educated, more independent, more enlightened"

 

They'll tell you the graph shows enlightenment and progress. Wrong.

 

The graph shows is capture.

Before getting into mechanism, something important: this pattern isn't only American. It's global.

 

The Financial Times documented it last year The gender ideology gap is widening across dozens of countries simultaneously. UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Poland, Brazil, Tunisia. Young women moving left on social issues, young men either stable or drifting right.

This matters because it rules out explanations specific to American politics. It's not Title IX policy. It's not

#MeToo. It's not the specific culture war of US campuses. Something bigger is happening, something that rolled out globally at roughly the same time.

 

South Korea is the extreme case. Young Korean men are now overwhelmingly conservative. Young Korean women are overwhelmingly progressive. The gap there is even wider than the US. Contributing factors include mandatory military service for men (18 months of your life the state takes, while women are exempt) and brutal economic competition. But the timing of divergence still tracks with smartphone adoption... 

Start with the biological hardware.

 

Women evolved in environments where social exclusion carried enormous survival costs. You can't hunt pregnant. You can't fight nursing. Survival required the tribe's acceptance: their protection, their food sharing, their tolerance of your temporary vulnerability. Millions of years of this and you get hardware that treats social rejection as serious threat.

 

Men faced different pressures. Hunting parties gone for days. Exploration. Combat. You had to tolerate being alone, disliked, outside the group for extended periods. Men who could handle temporary exclusion without falling apart had more options. More risk-taking, more independence, more ability to leave bad situations.

 

(Male status still mattered enormously for reproduction, low-status men had it rough. But men could recover from temporary exclusion in ways that were harder for pregnant or nursing women.)

 

This shows up in personality research. David Schmitt's work across 55 cultures found the same pattern everywhere: women average higher agreeableness, higher neuroticism (sensitivity to negative stimuli, including social rejection cues). Men average higher tolerance for disagreement and social conflict. The differences aren't huge but they're consistent across every culture studied.

 

Not better or worse. Different selection pressures, different adaptations.

 

But it means the same environment affects them differently. Consensus pressure hits harder for one group than the other.

Now look at what we built.

 

Social media is a consensus engine. You can see what everyone believes in real time. Disagreement is visible, measurable, and punishable at scale. The tribe used to be 150 people. Now it's everyone you've ever met plus a world of strangers watching.

 

And look at the timeline. Facebook launched in 2004 butwas college-only until 2006. The iPhone launched June 2007. Instagram in 2010. Suddenly social media was in your pocket and in your face, all day, every day.

Look at the graph again. Women were roughly stable through the early 2000s. The acceleration starts around 2007-2008. The curve steepens through the 2010s as smartphones became universal and platforms became more sophisticated. Women are by nature more liberal, but the radicalization coincides with the rise in smartphones adoption.

 

The machine turned on and the capture began.

 

The mental health collapse among teenage girls tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption, with stronger effects for girls than boys. The same vulnerability that made social exclusion more costly in ancestral environments made the new consensus engines more capturing.

 

This machine wasn't designed to capture women specifically. It was designed to capture attention. But it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively. Women are more susceptible on average. So it captured them more.

 

Add a feedback loop: women complain more than men. Scroll any platform and it looks like women are suffering more. Institutions respond to this because visible distress creates liability, PR risk and regulatory pressure. In addition, women are weaker and inevitably seen as the victim in most scenarios. The institutional response is to make environments "safer". Which means removing conflict. Which means censoring disagreement. Which means the consensus strengthens.

 

The counterarguments get removed or deplatformed and the loop closes.

Universities flipped to 60% female while simultaneously becoming progressive monoculture. The institution young women trust most, during the years their worldview forms, feeds them a single ideology with no serious opposition.

 

FIRE's campus speech surveys show the pattern clearly: students self-censor, report fear of expressing views, cluster toward acceptable opinions. This isn't unique to women, but women are more embedded in higher education than men now, and the fields they dominate (humanities, social sciences, education, HR) are the most ideologically uniform.

 

Four years surrounded by peers who all believe the same thing. Professors who all believe the same thing. Reading lists pointing one direction. Disagreement is not even rare, it's socially punished. You learn to pattern-match the acceptable opinions and perform them.

 

Then they graduate into female-dominated fields: HR, media, education, healthcare, non-profits, where the monoculture continues. From 18 to 35, many women never encounter sustained disagreement from people they respect. The feedback loop never breaks.

 

Men took different paths. Trades. Engineering. Finance. Military. Fields where results matter more than consensus. Fields where disagreement is tolerated or even rewarded. The monoculture didn't capture them because they weren't in the institutions being captured. (mostly because they were kicked out of them, but that's a different piece)

 

Marriage collapsed. This probably matters more than people think.

 

Single women vote more left than married women. This is consistent across decades of exit polls. Part of this is likely economic: single women interact with government more as provider of services, married women interact with government more as taker of taxes. The incentives point different directions.

 

The marriage gap in voting is one of the most consistent predictors. And marriage rates have collapsed precisely during the period of divergence.

 

Men saw marriage collapse differently. Family courts. Child support. Alimony. The rational response was skepticism of expanding state power.

 

Same phenomenon, different positions in it, different political responses.

Algorithms optimize for engagement. Engagement means emotional response. Time on platform. Clicks. Shares. Comments.

 

Women respond more strongly to emotional content on average, they are more empathetic, they can be more easily manipulated with sad stories. That higher neuroticism again, higher sensitivity to negative stimuli. The machine learned this. It fed them content calibrated to their response patterns. Fear. Outrage. Moral panic. Stories about danger and injustice and threat and wars and "victims".

 

Men got different feeds because they responded to different triggers. The algorithm doesn't really have a gender agenda. It has an engagement agenda. But engagement looks different by demographic, so the feeds diverged.

 

Women ended up in information environments optimized for emotional activation. Men found alternatives: podcasts, forums, cars, wars, manosphere etc.

 

Feminism told women their instincts and biology were oppression and wrong. Wanting children was brainwashing. Wanting a provider husband was internalized misogyny. Their natural desires were false consciousness installed by patriarchy.   

 

Many believed it. Built lives around it. Career first. Independence. Freedom from traditional constraints.

 

Now they're 35, unmarried, measuring declining fertility against career achievements. And here's the trap: the sunk cost of admitting the ideology failed is enormous. You'd have to admit you wasted your fertile years on a lie. That the women who ignored the ideology and married young were right. That your mother was right.

 

I think this is why you see so little defection. Not because the ideology is true, but because the psychological cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying. Easier to double down. Easier to believe the problem is that society hasn't changed enough yet.

I should be honest about something: men weren't immune to capture. They were captured differently.

Women got ideological conformity. Men got withdrawal. Porn. Video games. Gambling apps. Outrage content. The male capture wasn't "believe this or face social death." It was "here's an endless supply of dopamine so you never have to build anything real."

 

Different machines, different failure modes. Women got compliance. Men got passivity.

 

The male line on that graph staying flat through 2020 isn't necessarily health. It might just be a different kind of sickness, men checking out instead of being pulled in. Or it may be that everyone and everything moved more left and women moved lefter.

Here's the update: the male line isn't flat anymore.

 

Post-2024 data shows young men shifting right. Recent surveys all show the same thing. Young men are now actively moving more conservative.

 

My read: women got captured first because they were more susceptible to consensus pressure. The capture was fast (2007-2020). Men resisted longer because they were less susceptible and less embedded in captured institutions. But as the gap became visible and culturally salient, as "men are the problem" became explicit mainstream messaging, as men started being excluded from society because of lies, as masculinity, or the very thing that makes men men became toxic, men had to start counter-aligning.

 

The passivity is converting into opposition. The withdrawal is becoming active rejection.

 

This doesn't mean men are now "correct" or "free". It might just mean they're being captured by a different machine, one optimized for male grievance instead of female consensus. Andrew Tate didn't emerge from nowhere. Neither did the manosphere. Those are capture systems too, just targeting different psychological vulnerabilities...

Some people will say this is just education: women go to college more, college makes you liberal, simple as that. There's something to this. But it doesn't explain why the gap widened so sharply post-2007, or why it's happening in countries with very different education systems.

 

Some will say it's economic: young men are struggling, resentment makes you conservative. Also partially true. But male economic struggles predate the recent rightward shift, and the female leftward move happened during a period of rising female economic success.

 

Some will point to cultural figures: Tate for men, Taylor Swift for women. But these are symptoms, not causes. They filled niches the machines created. They didn't create the machines.

 

The multi-causal model fits better: biological substrate (differential sensitivity to consensus) + technological trigger (smartphones, algorithmic feeds) + institutional amplification (captured universities, female-dominated fields) + economic incentives (marriage collapse, state dependency) + ideological lock-in (sunk costs, social punishment for defection).

 

No single cause. A system of interlocking causes that happened to affect one gender faster and harder than the other.

If this model is right, some predictions follow.

 

The gap should be smaller in countries with later smartphone adoption or lower social media penetration. (This seems true: the divergence is less extreme in parts of Eastern Europe and much of Africa, though South Korea is a major exception due to other factors.)

 

The gap should narrow among women who have children, since parenthood breaks the institutional feedback loop and introduces competing priorities. (Exit polls consistently show this: mothers vote more conservative than childless women.)

 

The gap should continue widening until the machines are disrupted or the generations age out of them.

 

Here's the part I don't know how to solve: these systems are self-reinforcing. The institutions aren't going to reform themselves. The algorithms aren't going to stop optimizing. The ideology isn't going to admit failure. The male counter-capture isn't going to produce healthy outcomes either.

 

Some women will escape. The ones who have children often do since reality is a powerful solvent for ideology. The ones who build lives outside institutional capture sometimes do.

 

Some men will stop withdrawing or stop rage-scrolling. The ones who find something worth building. The ones who get tired of the simulation.

 

But the systems will keep running on everyone else...

 

The answer isn't "women are emotional" and it isn't "social media bad." The answer is that we built global-scale consensus engines and deployed them on a species with sexually dimorphic psychology. The machines captured the half more susceptible to consensus pressure. Then they started capturing the other half through different mechanisms.

 

We're watching the results in real time. Two failure modes. One graph. Both lines moving away from each other and away from anything healthy.

 

I don't know how this ends. I don't think anyone does. I don't think it will.

 

Both machines are still running."