The Guardian On The Trade War

Since Mark Carney is a member in good standing of the transatlantic globalist elite, the UK Guardian ran a puff piece on him over the weekend:

Mark Carney stood before a walnut-veneered lectern, his face drawn tight, as he announced that talks with Canada’s biggest trading partner had collapsed. “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” he said. “And I promised: that will never, ever happen. We are keeping that promise.”

For years, the former central bank governor had worked hard to calm markets. Now, he was asking Canadians to accept uncertainty and confrontation.

Near the end of the press conference last Saturday, a reporter made reference to the sombre, combative tone of the speech: “Why does it feel like today Mark Carney is going to war?”

The prime minister paused.

“We were attacked. You’re at war when you get attacked,” he said. “We got attacked.”

I suppose you could characterize this as an "attack", but it was neither a surprise nor sudden. The "attack" is nothing but tariff uncertainty; Canadian companies, or companies based elsewhere but assembling merchandise in Canada for US export, have been reacting for over a decade to the prospect of increased US tariffs, which raise the price of Canadian-made goods in the US. The Canadian commentators in the video embedded above make the point:

$1 TRILLION+ left between 2014-2025. Now the auto-sector sequel: Honda $#15B suspended, GM CAMI $2B shut down, Umicore, $2.7B paused, Northvolt collapsed, Brampton production shifted south, Oakville EV plan scrapped, Oshawa shifts out. There's not much of an auto industry left in Canada after this.

Just in the past few days, Crown Royal, which still makes its whiskey in Canada, nevertheless moved its export bottling to the US side of the border due to the same tariff uncertainty. Canada's problem is that the prior tariff environment allowed companies to locate manufacturing in Canada for export to the US. The mere possibility that this could change has caused companies to reevaluate manufacturing in Canada. There's little Carney can do to change the economics of the situation; "elbows up" will simply stiffen US resolve -- and the question simply isn't whether the US actually imposes higher tariffs, it's just the possibility that it might.

Nevertheless, the Guardian says Carney's in charge:

One of Carney’s prescriptions – forging deep relations with like-minded “middle powers” and restructuring to lessen reliance on former allies – has already taken shape in Canada, at a speed and degree to which the pollster David Coletto described as a “wartime-footing government without a war”.

“It’s a government organised around an external threat that’s willing to suspend its own party’s orthodoxies, centralise power to move fast, and measure itself in outcomes rather than values,” he wrote.

“The public has hardly blinked,” Coletto said in an interview. “Mark Carney’s approval rating has just sustained itself through this entire period.”

. . . Polling shows that Carney remains the leader Canadians trust most to steer the country through economic uncertainty. But the prime minister has also embraced a role that would once have seemed almost incongruous: asking a country vastly smaller and less powerful than its neighbour to stand its ground.

He said in his recent address: “Canadians don’t submit to the weather – we thrive in it. We don’t wait to see which way the wind is blowing. Or surrender ourselves to the waves to be storm-tossed by events.

“We set our own course. We make our own weather. In Canada, we are masters in our own home, from coast to coast to coast.”

Trump's response has been to troll Carney, starting with renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America -- which Google Maps has confirmed:

Google Maps has officially begun displaying Lake Ontario as “Lake America” to users in the United States.

The move comes days after President Donald Trump ordered the historic lake renamed amid his escalating trade war with Canada.

The change began rolling out over the weekend, making Google the first major online maps provider to implement Trump’s latest geographic rebranding.

Trump continued the trolling over the weekend:

"When I announced that I was running in the 2024 Presidential Election, right at the beginning, Ford was getting ready to close their Big Factory, in Detroit. Then, because I was leading in the Polls, they figured they would leave it open a little longer to see what happened. Now it’s running 24/7, and it’s one of the most profitable Car Plants in the World!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.

"There are many other examples, for both Ford, General Motors, and others. I’ve revived, and indeed saved, the Automobile Business in our America. That’s because of what I’ve done with TARIFFS. One of the Worst Abusers is Canada," he said.

Trump said the U.S. doesn't need Canadian products.

"I don’t want Canadian cars, I don’t want Canadian parts, I don’t want Canadian anything. They’ve been ripping us off for decades, and it’s going to stop. This should have happened long ago with other Presidents, just as stopping Iran should have happened long ago," he wrote.

"They want to be treated like a State, but they aren’t one. I deal with the Leadership of many Countries, but I find Canada to be the worst. They are entitled no longer!" he added.

And now we're back to the question of Canada becoming a state, which Trump is implicitly tying to the tariff question. If Canada becomes a state, there are no tariffs in either direction. If tariff uncertainty remains in any form, companies will just continue to move out of Canada. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse puts this in the context of whether we terminate the USMCA:

I think we have finally figured out President Trump’s long-term strategy here. Essentially, we have been flummoxed over why President Trump has not yet triggered the 6-month USMCA (CUSMA) termination notice yet. However, he appears to be intentionally drawing this out.

. . . with an all-in perspective on termination, the moves President Trump is making now are all just to prolong economic pain and block investment while retaining the termination notice as the hidden ace.

Trump doesn't have to do anything; the economic pain is all on Canada's side, and it's already been having an effect. The Guardian is simply ignoring the reality on the ground.

Migration Lowers Wages

Via the Nrw York Post:

An ultra-exclusive Hamptons yacht club catering to the wealthy and well-connected was forced to suspend its members-only restaurant service for multiple days after several of its kitchen staff were booted from the country over visa issues, The Post has learned.

The swanky oceanfront Devon Yacht Club in Amagansett — which reportedly charges around $100,000 in initiation fees — canceled its Wednesday night dinner service after its foreign cooks had to leave the US because of problems renewing their H-2B temporary work visas, according to a letter sent to members the same day.

Food service was also canceled Thursday and was not expected to be back up and running until Friday’s lunch service, the club informed its deep-pocketed members — a group that once included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s parents.

“The H2B visa approval for our cooks is still not resolved,” the letter obtained by The Post stated, referring to special visas that allow US employers to fill seasonal or temporary positions with foreign nationals.

Eight staffers from the club were reportedly booted from the country, according to local outlet, The East Hampton Press.

However, the precise circumstances aren't clear:

In a statement to The Post, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said, “Neither [Customs and Border Protection] nor [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] were involved in this incident.”

Similarly, the East Hampton Town Police Department confirmed it had “no records or indication of outside agency activity.”

H1B and H2B visas are a form of indenture, something everybody denies. The H1B visa is for "highly skilled professionals in specialized white-collar roles" (cough), while the H2B visa is for temporary, non-agricultural seasonal labor. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are H2B visas a form of indenture?"

Legally, H-2B visas are not a form of indenture, but human rights organizations and labor experts frequently compare them to modern indentured servitude due to how the program is structured.

. . . Critics, including the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), argue that several core mechanics of the guestworker program mimic historical features of debt bondage and indenture:

The employer owns and controls the visa. If a worker quits or is fired, they instantly lose their legal immigration status and must leave the country. The visa is non-transferable; a worker cannot freely quit to take a better job at a different company without a highly complex, pre-approved petition process from a new sponsor.

Many workers take out high-interest loans in their home countries to pay third-party recruiters for job placement, visas, and travel. Even though charging these fees is technically prohibited under U.S. regulations, the practice remains widespread. This leaves workers trapped by massive debt before they even begin working.

Because complaining about wage theft, poor housing, or unsafe working conditions can lead to termination—and subsequent deportation—workers rarely report abuse.

This raises the question of exactly who got the kitchen workers deported -- apparently there was no CBP or ICE action involved, snd there were no complaints to the local police. So was the yacht club itself somehow involved? The Devon Yacht Club has a hinky recent history here:

Devon Yacht Club is a private facility tucked away on Napeague Bay, and been in the spotlight for the past year or so due to a controversial plan to redevelop the facility and the subsequent expulsion of a handful of members who spoke out against the plan.

. . . This saga adds to what has been a bumpy summer for Devon Yacht Club, starting with a string of lawsuits that stemmed from the expulsion of the members for what they say is opposition to the divisive redevelopment plan, which called for the demolition and relocation of club structures about 30 to 40 feet inland. Court papers say the cost was to clock in at $35 million.

So did the yacht club replace the deported kitchen staff with other H2B workers, or did they hire local workers? Did they have to pay the local workers more? So far, we don't have answers.

In my tech career, I often worked alongside H1B workers, which are at least theoretically required to have bachelors' degrees for "highly skilled" work, but in reality bachelors' degrees are optional for many tech jobs, and it's generally recognized that college graduates are underemployed as things stand: /p>

Overall, 52 percent of college graduates were underemployed one year after degree completion. That is, they were working in jobs that don’t typically require a bachelor’s degree to obtain. For those initially-underemployed workers with ten years of data, 45 percent of them were still underemployed after a decade, even given the post-pandemic labor market conditions that favored workers.

The whole idea that we have to import foreign workers to compensate for labor shortages is a scam. We import foreign workers to keep wages down. But the big unspoken truth about all such imported workers is their English language skills are pretty poor, they're difficult to work with as a result, but anyone who complains about this gets into hot water.

Ceutans Fight Back

With Ceuta abandoned by the coward socialist dirty Sánchez, the men of the city are taking things into their own hands and going after the invaders. pic.twitter.com/c8JwoRucqL

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) August 28, 2026

Via the BBC:

A month after tens of thousands of migrants entered the city of Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in North Africa, there have been outbreaks of violence as tensions mount between locals and foreign arrivals.

The Spanish government has been accused by opposition parties of struggling to manage the crisis effectively.

Ceuta's residents have complained of feeling unsafe on the streets, as well as expressing concerns about the burden being placed on public services.

. . . Earlier this week, the government centralised management of the situation, overriding the local authority, after criticism that it had been slow to respond.

Defence Minister Margarita Robles also apologised to those in Ceuta who "may have felt, or who even still feel, abandoned or not sufficiently cared", as the government unveiled plans to overhaul the country's immigration laws.

Much of the recent ill-feeling in the city appears to be driven by government plans to move migrants into existing public buildings, such as sports centres, in order to be able to process their legal status in an orderly way and return those not eligible for asylum to Morocco.

Many local people, and [Mayor Juan Jesús] Vivas, oppose this initiative, due to concerns that it will move the migrants closer to residential areas.

What I'm noticing here is an approach similar to that of the UK, whereby once migrants enter the country, they're assumed to have applied for "asylum", paperwork or no, and they're placed in facilities where they remain indefinitely while being "processed". In the case of Ceuta, of roughly 80,000 who simply crossed the border illegally July 30-31, about 70,000 were summarily shipped back, while about 10,000 who chose to stay seem somehow to have acquired a legal right to be "processed" indefinitely, with some segment of those deemed OK to remain more or less permanently.

If the UK is an example of how effective immigration policies have been in limiting illegal border crossings, only about 4% of those who arrive illegally, for instance in small boats, are ever returned to their countries of origin. The question for Ceuta is why the 10,000 who crossed illegally but stayed can't be shipped back just as simply.

The video embedded above suggests that Ceutans have become frustrated with this circumstance. The problem is that no matter the good intentions of the ciizens trying to chase them out, this can only be done by trained military or police units that can encircle them in an organized way and force them back across the border. The most small groups of vigilantes or demonstrators like those below can hope to accomplish is to embarrass the government into taking action, something the government is never going to do.

I'm starting to question whether the UK-style parliamentary system used by 21 EU countries as well as Canada can cope with the Western migrant crisis. It looks like only a strong executive can mobilize government response, which is something the US has demonstrated.

How Goes The Trade War?

I can't help it, I've been chuckling for days about Trump renaming Lake Ontario:

“If you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,” Trump said.

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said New York would be defying Trump’s wishes on renaming the lake that hugs its northern border.

“New York won’t be calling it that,” Hochul declared on X.

Carney also rejected the rebrand, saying that “the name is more than 400 years old” and “comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.’”

“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” he tweeted. “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”

The prime minister broke off trade talks with the US on Friday and claimed that “America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” but that so long as he was in charge it would “never, ever happen.”

Trump is, of course, trolling Carney, and Carney's reaction is predictably Canadian-huffy. The problem I see for Canada is severalfold. First, even Carney in the quote above is tacitly acknowledging that any substantial change in the US-Canada tariff balance would seriously harm Canada, but that balance is inevitably going to expire.

Second, Canadian anti-US sentiment is primarily in the eastern part of the country, and it's based on the tradition that loyalists were forced to flee to Canada after the US revolution. But this has never been as strong in the western provinces, and in addition, Canada is deliberately diluting the traditional population by importing immigrants, primarily from India:

Canada has a long history of immigration. Millions of people from all over the world have chosen, and continue to choose, Canada as their new home. In 2021, more than 8.3 million people, or almost one-quarter (23.0%) of the population, were, or had ever been, a landed immigrant or permanent resident in Canada. This was the largest proportion since Confederation, topping the previous 1921 record of 22.3%, and the highest among the G7.

Given that the population of Canada continues to age and fertility is below the population replacement level, today immigration is the main driver of population growth. If these trends continue, based on Statistics Canada's recent population projections, immigrants could represent from 29.1% to 34.0% of the population of Canada by 2041.

Old-fashioned anti-American rhetoric won't work with this group. Beyond that, anti-woke comic Ben Bankas, Canadian born but now a US resident, routinely asks his Canadian audiences how many are trying to emiograte to the US; typically, just about the whole room raises its hands. This is another group that anti-US rhetoric won't sway.

I got to know quite a number of the old-fashioned style Canadians in my younger years, including a family that nearly became my in-laws. The condition that they weren't Americans was a major part of their identity. Our beer isn't like American beer. The Americans like Las Vegas. The Americans have to have air conditioning. The Americans are violent The Americans didn't want to pay the bill for the service the UK did in fighting the French in the French and Indian War/War of the Spanish Succession, so they held the Boston Tea Party.

This was even harder for my almost-in-laws to justify: they'd moved from Canada to the US to get a higher standard of living, which was a matter you couldn't bring up with them. The parents and their older children had been born in Canada, and although they'd been down here for some years, they continued to congratulate themselves for being Canadian. The problem was their youngest daughter, who was born in the US. That poor girl affected the most Canadian vocabulary and speech of any in the family and was loudest in her denunciation of Americans. Somehow this drove the family dynamic and formed her personality.

I just don't see how you can sustain a national identity by saying you aren't like Americans, especially if your official policy is to expand the population via immigration -- many of those immigrants chose Canada as Plan B, when the US was Plan A, and they'll continue to try to get to the US.

There's something delusional about Mark Carney and something deeply unhealthy about Canada.

Canada's Moral Equivalent Of War

On Tuesday, I linked to a paper at Ottawa's Carleton University site that seems to provide a good outline of Canadian policy since Justin Trudeau's reported 2024 remarks to Trump that a 25% auto tariff would mean "the end of Canada". The paper's basic point is that the US and Canada are effectifvely at war, because the US is already implementing strategies that will mean a takeover of Canada:

The threat of the U.S. relying on military coercion to control a NATO ally has become front-page news in Canada and elsewhere, suggesting that Canadians are deeply concerned about this issue. However improbable a war with America might be, the reality is that the U.S. already has in place a number of strategies that can and will be leveraged to its advantage to achieve its strategic objectives.

These levers of influence fall within the grey zone of conflict and render the need to formally occupy Canada redundant. The grey zone refers to coercive statecraft that operates between war and peace, using ambiguity, incrementalism, and unconventional tactics to achieve strategic objectives without triggering full-scale military responses.

But the point that's left unsaid is that Canada isn't capable of a military response:

Canadian military chiefs have wargamed a US invasion and concluded that they would be overpowered in only two days.

. . . The invasion modelling was first reported in The Globe and Mail, which cited two unnamed senior government officials. They said they believed it unlikely that Trump would order an invasion of Canada.

. . . Carney, in his speech at Davos, said the US-led world order was enduring a “rupture”. His country had benefited from the old “rules-based international order”, he said, but must adapt to the new reality.

“Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion,” he said.

Canada, which he labelled a “middle power”, must move with the times, he said. “Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

The speech was not well received by Trump. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, they should be grateful also,” the US president said in a speech on Wednesday. “I watched their prime minister yesterday, he wasn’t so grateful. But they should be grateful.

“Canada lives because of the United States, remember that, Mark, next time you make your statements.”

Elsewhere, that report suggests that Canada could rely on other "middle powers" like the UK and France if a military response were called for. At least as it applies to the UK, good luck. But Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have inserted wartime rhetoric into the discussion:

"We cannot accept what they've offered, and we will not give what they've asked," Carney said on Saturday in Ottawa, adding that the United States 'asked too much and offered too little.'

The prime minister revealed that the U.S. had issues with Canada's subsidies for French culture; the prevalence of French-language media online and even the requirement to have bilingual labels on products sold in Canada.

"It was unacceptable right from the start, but the Americans kept trying and trying and we said no," Carney said. "Ultimately it's simple. That was never on the table for Canada and it would not have been acceptable to Canadians."

. . . Ontario Premier Doug Ford welcomed Carney's decision to abandon negotiations and insisted Canada would win a trade war with the U.S. because Canada is united and prepared for a fight.

"I'm glad he didn't sign that deal because it was a bad deal," Ford said in Toronto on Saturday. "It was a bad deal for Ontario. It was a bad deal for the auto sector, the steel sector and the manufacturing sector."

The premier said Canada needs to inflict pain on the U.S. to remind the Trump administration that Canada is its best customer and should be treated as such.

The U.S. team also wanted to introduce measures into the pact that would significantly undermine Canada's sovereignty, the prime minister said.

Conservative Treehouse reports on a CBC interview of US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer:

Most Americans have no idea that Canadian media is controlled by the Canadian government; it’s what they call “cultural protection” where the rules and regulations of permissible speech are controlled by govt regulators and media are subsidized by govt. The overall objective is to control information and censor viewpoints that might be averse to the interests of the Canadian govt. That’s why most Canadians have no concept of granular details on policy matters; they just don’t get the information.

In this interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), U.S Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is discussing the trade conflict and breakdown with Canada’s version of Baghdad Bob, Rosemary Barton. I’m a little surprised the CBC would even entertain the discussion. However, as noted in the past few days there is increasing skepticism amid Canadians about who and what actually blew up the trade talks. Canadians are starting to show signs of suspicion; enter Ms. Barton on behalf of the Canadian government to try and control things.

USTR Jamieson Greer answers the questions in a most unfortunate manner; meaning, he told the truth. Greer outlined exactly why he suspects the trade talks broke down, and it has nothing to do with economics or trade, it’s all politics on the Canadian side. As Greer noted, there was no change to the trade agreement between President Trump and Prime Minister Carney’s lengthy phone call on Tuesday, and the Canadian decision to walk away on Friday.

Canadian skepticism about Carney's anti-American rhetoric precedes the latest trade breakdown:

With the United States and Canada presently dancing around trade negotiations that will have consequential outcomes for both countries, any public statements issued by the countries’ leaders should themselves be considered a negotiating tactic.

Hence, it was a bit surprising to see Mark Carney release an extended video address in which he declared Canada’s historical ties with the United States to be a source of national weakness in need of correction. As if to drive the point home, he pulled out an action figure—excuse me, “figurine”—of Sir Isaac Brock, the British army general charged with defending Upper Canada from the United States during the War of 1812[.]

. . . This agonistic position toward Canada’s neighbour and most important trading partner has prompted accusations of either hypocrisy or expediency—hypocrisy because Carney (and frankly many Laurentian elites) retains strong personal ties with the United States; expediency because many suspect the PM is cynically relying upon this oppositional rhetoric to distract from growing economic problems at home, largely unrelated to American tariffs.

But this is not the first strong statement Canada’s leader has issued when it comes to the United States. He both diagnosed and endorsed a changing world order in his acclaimed speech at Davos and repeatedly referred to the necessity of “fighting” on Canada’s behalf. It is worth considering that he is quite sincere. One cannot help wondering at the alacrity and persistence with which the PM has pursued this approach: How much is a response to ongoing events and how much was already predetermined?

But why has Canada begun to speak so openly about the need to "fight" the US to protect Canada's "sovereignty"? I asked Chrome AI mode, "How common was Canadian rhetoric on the need to fight the US between 1860 and 1960?" It answered,

Between 1860 and 1960, Canadian rhetoric regarding the need to fight the United States shifted drastically from a widespread, existential necessity to an outdated, strictly classified formality, before disappearing entirely into peaceful economic and military integration.

Carney's position is clearly that things have changed. But what's changed? On one hand, Canadian forces stormed Juno Beach on June 6, 1944, while UK forces stormed Gold and Sword Beaches. Neither the UK nor Canada could remotely repeat that effort now. At the same time, if in the past a US president cogitated invading Canada, he might have the British Empire and the Royal Navy to contend with. That's changed.

The root cause is the precipitous decline of British prestige. In the 2000s, the "Anglosphere" was a popular concept. No longer. Part of the problem is that official policy in both Canada and the UK has been to dilute native British and Canadian culture with heavy migration. In part due to this, the UK in particular has been reeling from repeated "national embarrassments", and King Charles will never have his mother's prestige. More important, though, Carney recognizes the Canadian armed forces can't protect Canada from economic reality. So he has to talk big and hope nobody notices the small stick.

Details Emerge On Canada Trade Negotiation Breakdown

Let's recall that a week ago,

President Donald Trump late Tuesday stateside paused imposing 50% tariffs on certain Canadian imports, shortly before the duties were set to kick in at midnight.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that this was “based on the fact that Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a DEAL!”

This announcement comes after Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney held trade talks on Tuesday.

In his post, Trump also suggested that the Keystone XL pipeline could be “awoken from the grave!” The pipeline refers to an extension of a pipeline system in Canada and the United States.

as of yesterday,

The [Canadian] government announced counter-tariffs on American goods worth about $27.6 billion on Tuesday, in retaliation for U.S. tariffs on Canada that came into effect on the weekend after trade talks broke down.

The Canadian measures, which are set to come into effect on Sept. 8, will affect a range of products including seafood, furniture and tools.

Ottawa also unveiled a $7.5 billion support package to help Canadian workers and businesses weather the trade war with the U.S.

In response, U.S. President Donald Trump again hit out at Canada, saying he wants to change the name of Lake Ontario to "Lake America" and accusing Mark Carney of lying when the prime minister said the rejected U.S. trade proposal would have threatened Canada's French-language regulations.

Later Tuesday, the White House released a statement titled "President Trump Is Finally Ending Canada’s Free Ride" that listed what it described as "Canadian abuse" of its trade relationship with the U.S.

The details of the breakdown in talks are slowly starting to emerge:

This gives the game away.

To Carney, building a pipeline to export Alberta oil is a burden, something he needs to be convinced to do by America. They have to give him something to do it.

Alberta's interests don't matter. Alberta is simply a bargaining chip. https://t.co/vfPK6WVmof

— Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 (@ezralevant) August 25, 2026

Conservative Treehouse has many more details:

There are many people in Canada demanding to see the rough draft proposals of the U.S-Canada trade agreement so they can judge for themselves the issues that Carney claimed were irreconcilable. For those people this interview today by Canadian Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc will only embolden those requests.

. . . Essentially, it boils down to four issues. !1) Removal of tariffs on Canadian assembled Semi-Trucks. (2) U.S. streaming services writing code for “search engines” in the French language. (3) Canada demanding 5% of gross revenues from U.S. tech platforms, and the last one is silly because it already exists: (4) the U.S. having a right to reject a trade deal made by Canada with a non-market economy, ie. CHINA.

. . . Canada wanted tariffs on Big Rigs removed. The U.S. said no.

The reason is simple. Big Rigs assembled/built in Canada are falling apart in the USA. Why? Because they are full of cheap Chinese component goods and parts that wear out quickly. The U.S. wants two things on this issue. Either: (1) Make them in the USA, or (2) stop using cheap Chinese component parts. The parts that Canada are using are not even available in the USA because we tariff and reject them, so why should we accept them when Canada installs them? Either quit using Chinese parts (hence, the trade alignment against Chinese imports), or accept a tariff equal to the rate we would apply if the product was coming directly from China.

♦The Stupid French Language thing. The French language stuff was an ancillary aspect where the Canadian Cultural Police were demanding that all U.S. streaming platforms (YouTube, Netflix etc.) must have search engines using the French language so Canadian users can search for stuff to watch using the French language. A ridiculous issue that was not part of the trade discussion, but Mark Carney saw political value in blowing up the issue.

♦Intellectual Property. Canada was demanding 5% of U.S. tech platform gross revenue (not profit, gross), they call it a tax. Canada then uses the “tax revenue” to subsidize Canadian media and information platforms that promote the approved government message. In essence, Canada demands that information providers pay them 5% of their revenue so that Canada can subsidize information providers they approve of. This is what the Canadian government calls “cultural protection.” In reality it is state-run media using a financial system that would make Vladimir Putin blush.

♦U.S. Right to Limit Canadian Trade Deals. This point is exponentially ridiculous for Canada to be upset about because the current USMCA/CUSMA already has that clause. The U.S (or Mexico) can exit the USMCA if Canada enters into a trade agreement with a “non-market” economy, ie China. [USMCA Sec 32:10]

What puzzles me is how similar the Canadian negotiating strategy is to Iran's -- both pretend the sides are this close, Trump pauses retaliation, and suddenly Canada or Iran says no deal, for the same reasons they always say it. I simply don't see what they think they're accomplishing, either Canada or Iran. The White House position, in short, is this:

Canada has been ripping off the United States for decades — and President Donald J. Trump is done letting them get away with it. Last week, the U.S. offered Canada the most preferential market access of any country on Earth, with deep cuts on steel, aluminum, autos, lumber, and more. Instead of partnership, Canada chose unreasonable demands, walk-backs, and flat-out rejection. . . . President Trump said it best: “Canada is easily the most difficult and unreasonable. They feel entitled, but they are not a State, and will be entitled no longer!” Canadian leadership chose retaliation over partnership — and America is no longer willing to carry them.

When he met with Trump just before he resigned as prime minister, Justin Trudeau is reported to have said that putting Canada on an even tariff basis, along with requiring it to meet its NATO commitments, would be the end of Canada. It's hard to avoid thinking Carney agrees.

Warning, Canadian Psyops!

"WE DON'T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!"

President Trump announces tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks, automotive parts and steel will jump to 50% on January 1, 2027, accusing Canada of "ripping off" the United States for years.

Trump points to Canada's tariffs on American farmers… pic.twitter.com/a3DvYZNEnJ

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 24, 2026

Via Conservative Treehouse:

[Former Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia] Freeland calls in from Kiev to remind the Bloomberg audience that Canada’s best next steps will be to conduct targeted narrative operations against the American people in order to retain the Canadian parasite position. Rather than accept reciprocal terms for fair trade, Freeland notes the best strategy is to deliver targeted propaganda directly to American voters against President Trump. This was the approach Freeland, and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took in 2018.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "What moves would Canada make in directing propaganda toward American voters in the trade war?" It answered,

Canada and its provincial governments are executing localized media buys directly in American media markets, particularly along the border and in key electoral districts.

The Move: The Ontario provincial government launched a television ad campaign in U.S. border markets invoking the legacy of Ronald Reagan to criticize modern protectionism. By using a conservative icon, the ad specifically targets right-leaning and moderate American voters, warning that tariffs on Canadian goods will ultimately hurt American consumers and destroy local automotive and agricultural jobs.

The Impact: These ads have directly provoked the White House, with President Trump publicly condemning them as "foreign-funded propaganda" at campaign rallies.

However, the cases AI cites are all from 2025. Whatever effect they may have had a year ago, they haven't deterred Trump from renewing his campaign. On the other hand, a paper from Carleton University in Ottawa outlines Canadian weaknesses vis-a-vis US strategy: Grey Zones Undermine Canadian Autonomy.

However improbable a war with America might be, the reality is that the U.S. already has in place a number of strategies that can and will be leveraged to its advantage to achieve its strategic objectives.

These levers of influence fall within the grey zone of conflict and render the need to formally occupy Canada redundant. The grey zone refers to coercive statecraft that operates between war and peace, using ambiguity, incrementalism, and unconventional tactics to achieve strategic objectives without triggering full-scale military responses.

One thing that annoys Canadians is when US residents refer to the US as "America", which they feel reflects the view that the US is the only important country in North America -- but here, some Canadians are reflexively doing it themselves. I love it when Canadians get annoyed.

We have already witnessed how the U.S. leverages shared institutions, such as NORAD and CUSMA, to its advantage. With 76% of its exports going to the U.S., Canada’s heavy reliance on the U.S. market is a source of leverage. The threats of trade disruption pressure Ottawa to adopt U.S.-aligned positions on third countries, a dynamic evident during NAFTA/CUSMA renegotiations.

. . . Ambiguity undermines public trust when citizens perceive their government as unable to protect national interests from a supposed “ally”.

. . . Grey MAGA Funding & Disinformation: A plausible scenario involves U.S.-based “grey MAGA money” fuelling independence movements (e.g., in Alberta) or anti-government protests. If Washington provides tacit approval or refuses to acknowledge these as foreign interference, it creates a “grey zone” where the Canadian government looks ineffective in managing its own borders and internal cohesion.

The “Border Crisis” Rhetoric: Continued negative rhetoric from Washington about the security of the Canada-U.S. border is predicted to lead to a “thickening” of the 49th parallel in 2026. This gradual increase in inspections and delays at crossings like the Windsor-Detroit Ambassador Bridge makes the Canadian government appear incompetent at managing the country’s most vital economic artery. Forced Policy Shifts: Under the pressure of incremental border slowdowns, the Canadian government may be forced to adopt U.S.-style immigration or security policies, making it look like a “vassal state” in the eyes of the public.

Those weasely MAGA types, deliberately making the Canadian government seem incompetent! And Trump just won't stop annoying Canadians!

President Donald Trump escalated his war of words with Canada on Tuesday morning, floating a U.S. push to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" and accusing Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney of lying about the Trump administration's position on French-language protections.

"The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to [sic] doing much business with Ontario any longer," Trump wrote Tuesday morning on Truth Social.

Trump followed with another broadside aimed directly at Carney, rejecting claims the U.S. had sought concessions affecting the French language during the countries' recently collapsed trade negotiations.

"I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French!" Trump wrote. "In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing."

"This lie was made up by a weak and ineffective Prime Minister in an attempt to gain political support, which he has totally lost, from the people of Quebec," Trump added. "I love French Canadians!"

Yup, those Canadians are gonna run rings around us bumpkins down here south of the border. We're gonna have to brace for their psyops, you can be sure.

Ceuta Update

The migrant invasion of Ceuta was briefly in the news on July 31 and a few days afterward, but the Spanish government declared that they all went home again, and everything was back to normal. Subsequent reports indicate this was never the case.

It's been 15 days since tens of thousands of migrants from Morocco began flooding across the border into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta. Because the shocking images of the influx of mostly men of military age faded from international headlines after a few days, the casual news observer outside of Spain might think the situation in Ceuta is under control. In fact, the most recent videos coming out of the Spanish city are in some ways even more alarming than those documenting the initial invasion.

. . . While no official data has been released, a spokesperson for the police union JUPOL claims there is now a rape every day in Ceuta. Euronews reports that three Moroccan nationals were arrested this week for sexual assault offenses. El País describes the disturbing reason why another man was returned to Morocco (translation with the aid of AI): "A fourth detainee accused of entering a private residence and getting into the bed in which a woman was sleeping, wearing only his underwear, was also returned to Morocco after being charged with unlawful entry into a dwelling.”

A week ago,

Failing Spanish Prime Minister, the Socialist Pedro Sánchez declared the invasion crisis of Ceuta over, and flew off to vacation in the Canary Islands.

But the reality in the North African enclave is much different.

Thousands upon thousands of invaders are still there – a group almost entirely made of military-aged males, as befits an invasion.

The beaches of the territory have become an unmistakable tragedy, a slum made up with shacks made with straw and cardboard.

The sand is strewn with garbage and human waste, turning the once-touristic spot into a third-world hellhole.

More recently,

Attempts by authorities to clear Ceuta’s Trampolín beach and create a foothold for a return of the area to normality failed this week, as the remaining illegal migrants immediately re-established a tent city.

Less than 24 hours after the Spanish exclave city government attempted to clear the thousands of migrants from the encampment established on Trampolín, the local Ceuta Actualidad reported that the coastline was already covered in “kilos” of garbage.

“Not even a day. Not even a day has passed before Trampolín beach and its surroundings have become a dump again,” the local outlet reported.

The beach has been home to thousands of illegals who flooded across the border from Morocco last month in an apparently coordinated effort that saw around 80,000 migrants storm the border of Spain’s North African territory.

While Madrid and Brussels were quick to claim that all such illegals would be returned home, several thousand illegals remained within the city.

Just this past weekend,

The far-from-resolved invasion of Ceuta has plunged the city into a dramatic emergency marked by growing insecurity, surging crime, and warnings of a possible “sanitary catastrophe” by local healthcare professionals.

. . . El Español reports that local hoteliers have lost half of their usual restaurant clientele over the past weeks since the invasion. The outlet spoke with Gema Molina, a woman who has lived her whole life in Ceuta and who has been the owner of a local downtown restaurant over the past 15 years. She affirmed to the outlet that locals are now hesitant to go to a restaurant or club out of fear — a sentiment also shared by its owners who feel “abandoned” and not represented by the Spanish government.

. . . Molina further denounced that restaurants have suffered attacks by migrants who “enter in packs” to ask for food and drinks — becoming hostile should the restaurant refuse to comply with their demands. In other instances, she told El Español, it is the clients who are harassed by the migrants into compliance instead.

“The problem with all this is that if you don’t give them anything, there’s a confrontation. But I’ve also found bags of their feces outside my restaurant, as well as countless puddles of urine,” she denounced.

“And I’m the one who has to clean it up. Imagine walking up to a business that has human feces outside. No one is going to want to go in,” she continued.

It appears that the sanitation and crime problems are too big for the local government to handle -- the solution would mainly involve the mass removal of the remaining migrants, which estimates number about 10,000 of the possibly 80,000 at the start. But the national government is apparently unwilling to admit there's a problem at all, which is something we're seeing in the UK as well, and so far, legacy media is complicit.

The UK Rape Pamphlet Misses The Point

Via Breitbart News:

The British government has issued a guide to alleged asylum seekers to teach them the customs of the United Kingdom, such as not raping women or engaging in sexual acts with children.

In an apparent tacit admission of the backwards cultures being allowed into Britain, the Home Office — the government department tasked with controlling immigration — has published a nine-page booklet for new arrival migrants who apply for asylum, as is the case for most illegal boat migrants as soon as they set foot on English shores.

In a section on rape, migrants are told that both parties must consent to sex “without threat or pressure” and that it is not acceptable to have sex with someone who is “asleep, drunk, or unable to respond”.

“If you have sex with someone without their consent, this is called rape. Rape is a serious crime in the UK. You could go to prison, lose your support and accommodation, and it will affect your asylum claim,” the booklet explains.

The first question I have is whether the booklet will be published in Arabic, Urdu, or whatever languages the migrants actually speak, but it turns out this is a sensitive issue:

Home Office officials are preparing to translate guidance telling asylum seekers not to rape or beat women into multiple languages. The shocking literature – which was signed off by Home Office ministers - will be translated to “ensure there are no barriers to comprehension”.

But the Government is refusing to say which dialects the guidance, first revealed by the Express, will be adapted into. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch warned the official document effectively confirms some arrivals pose a danger to women and girls, saying: “Anyone needing this leaflet does not belong in Britain”.

Analysis of Government records show asylum seekers from Pakistan, Eritrea, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, India, Somalia, Nigeria and Vietnam make up the top 10 nationalities seeking sanctuary in the UK.

. . . Shadow Home Office Minister Katie Lam said: “Despite telling the public that illegal migrants pose no risk to the public, it's beyond telling that the Home Office feels the need to release a leaflet telling illegal migrants that rape is wrong, that sex with children is wrong, and that men and women are equal.

So the best we can gather is that the booklet has in fact been published in English -- it's online here -- but it has yet to be fully translated into any language the migrants actually understand. In other words, the booklet isn't intended for migrants, it's intended for UK natives to give the impression that the government has good intentions -- except it would be embarrassing to list the exact languages into which they intend someday to translate it.

But the problem goes beyond recent migrants/asylum seekers, to whom the booklet is putatively addressed, although not in their languages. "Grooming gangs", which is a polite term for rape gangs, have been a problem in the UK for generations:

Several government reviews have reported failures by British institutions in preventing, identifying and prosecuting the widespread cases of group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation that mostly occurred between the 1990s and 2010s. Allegations of governmental and institutional failures to respond to the problem or to downplay or cover up the issue have been described as a grooming gangs scandal.

Media coverage and political discourse around these crimes has especially focused on the ethnic and religious background of perpetrators in high-profile cases, most of whom were Muslim men of Pakistani descent, and whether this prevented proper investigation. Data in Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire shows that, in the 2020s, men of an Asian ethnic background are disproportionately represented among perpetrators in those areas, but there is insufficient data to draw conclusions about ethnicity of perpetrators across the UK.

Note on one hand the extreme delicacy with which the subject is addressed at all, combined with the reluctant acknowledgement that the problem has been minimized for decades. I strongly suspect that rape gangs originated with the systematic importation of Pakistanis to the UK from the 1950s onward:

Migration from regions that now form Pakistan began in small numbers during the 1950s and 1960s, facilitated by Pakistan’s membership of the Commonwealth. Many migrants were recruited to address labour shortages in industries such as textiles, steel, engineering, manufacturing, while others, including doctors, contributed to the development of the National Health Service.

It used to be taught in Economics 101 that "labor shortage" is another way of saying "rising wages". It's hard for me to avoid thinking that the first wave of Asian migration came at the same time as the postwar Labour government's nationlization of the transport, coal, and steel industries and socialized medicine, which the link above effectively acknowledges. The Pakistanis were introduced more or less specifically to keep UK working-class wages down, at a time when, in contrast, the US working class became much more prosperous.

I find it fascinating that the question of migration in the UK is treated with the level of delicacy, even prudery, that was once attributed to Victorians over sex. Of course, sex is involved here, too, but the official line is that the problem is new, and it can be solved by telling tne new migrants not to rape -- except the migrants who've been in the UK since the 1950s, the vast majority of whom were born there, have been doing the same th9ng all along, but it's not polite to say this.

An At Best Obtuse Piece By Harold Myerson

I've been noting the peculiar incongruity of Real Clear Politics's opinion choices, especially its frequent platforming of far-left figures like Harold Myerson and Robert Reich, while they seldom publish conservatives much to the right of Victor Davis Hanson and Roger Kimball, who at this stage are just mainstream Republicans and boring ones at that. The other day, RCP ran this Myerson piece, The Democrats’ On-Again, Off-Again Class Politics.

Myerson argues that the New Deal-Fair Deal politics of FDR and Truman were "class-based", but the later politics of Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy were not.

[W]hile working in John F. Kennedy’s White House, [Arthur] Schlesinger [Jr] comes away from a meeting with UAW President Walter Reuther and Sen. Hubert Humphrey, noting that both of them still spoke in “the New Deal’s distinctive rhetoric. Walter and Hubert could talk about ‘the people,’ about their ultimate wisdom, and the importance of doing things for them, in a way quite alien to the New Frontier”—the not particularly class-based perspective of the Kennedy administration. “I wish I could figure out,” Schlesinger laments, “the terms in which the idealism and imagination of the New Deal could be infused into the anti-sentimental, anti-rhetorical, understated mood of the New Frontier,” whose leaders he terms “technocrats.”

Read today, these passages illuminate the links between the shifting shapes of American liberalism—and, for that matter, American socialism—and the American economy. Writing at a time when New Deal reforms had produced an economy of opportunity “as secure and unalterable” as the landscape, when, as historian Nelson Lichtenstein recently noted in our pages, the real wages of working-class Americans doubled in a single generation, the postwar Democratic establishment had abandoned the class politics of its predecessors, whose victories had appeared to create a permanent middle-class majority.

Reuther and Humphrey, by contrast, were at that point semi-social democrats who were concerned about those who either didn’t make it into that middle-class majority or whose membership therein was precarious.

He then says that the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America is a return to "class-based" New Deal liberalism.

There are virtually no young people today who view their economic prospects as “secure and unalterable,” a view we now know was peculiar to the boomer generation. Is it any wonder that DSA, despite the fierce moral commitments of its founders, stayed a small organization of several thousand until the crash of 2008 and its prolonged and incomplete recovery made clear to young people, then and since, that the economy—deregulated and all but devoid of unions—was anything but secure? Is it any wonder that this year’s Democratic primaries, including this week’s in Florida, are defined by the precinct-walking and phone-banking of the young, class-based left, while the Democrats opposed to them can mobilize money but few if any volunteers?

But if the new DSA liberalism is "class-based", which class are we talking about? According to Nate Silver,

As a result of contentious Democratic primaries in Michigan, Maine, and New York, I’ve been reading a lot of conversation about the role that class plays in voting patterns in the United States. In these primaries, candidates like Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed who are associated with democratic socialism often claim to have the mandate of the working class. But in practice, their strengths tend to be with college-educated voters.

. . . I’m reminded here of Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis. It basically argues that America is producing “too many” college graduates relative to the number of high-prestige, well-paying jobs available to them. People who wind up in this situation often carry heavy student loan burdens or other sorts of debt. Even if their material situation is objectively “just fine,” it’s rarely great. They’re gloomy about their own financial prospects, and feel aggrieved about the state of the country. Their class status is ambiguous: privileged in some senses, but they’re part of the “have-nots” in other meaningful ways.

. . . [W]hat is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year.

This is very much also the sweet spot for the DSA. In the group’s most recent member survey in 2021, 80 percent of members aged 25 or older had bachelor’s degrees, but 45 percent had household incomes below $60,000 per year.

This isn't the working class. But I decided to do some research on Harold Myerson. Originally, I wondered if he was a "red diaper baby", but it turns out that strictly speaking, he isn't, if the term is used exclusively to mean a child of Communist Party USA members. Instead, according to Wikipedia,

Meyerson was born to a Jewish family in Los Angeles. He was educated in the Los Angeles public schools and at Columbia University. The son of long time leaders in California of the Socialist Party of America, he was active in the 1970s in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.

So this led me to look into the Socialist Party of America, whose most prominent member was Norman Thomas, definitely not a member of the working class:

Thomas was the oldest of six children, born November 20, 1884, in Marion, Ohio, to Emma Williams (née Mattoon) and Weddington Evans Thomas, a Presbyterian minister. . . . The summer after he graduated from high school his father accepted a pastorate at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, which allowed Norman to attend Bucknell University. He left Bucknell after one year to attend Princeton University, the beneficiary of the largesse of a wealthy uncle by marriage. Thomas graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1905.

He went on to become a socially active Presbyterian pastor, but the denomination found him a little too socially active, and by the 1920s, he'd become editor of The Nation and had begun running for president as leader of the Socialist Party of America. With an Ivy League degree from the era when the Ivies were class-based institutions, he was a bourgeois socialist along the lines of the UK Fabian Society. We may assume Harold Myerson was brought up in a family with similar views, and he went to an Ivy in the 1960s when these views were typical, if inchoate.

So neither Norman Thomas nor Harold Myerson had a working-class background, and neither do the vast majority of DSA members. And this is nothing new, it goes straight back to Norman Thomas. I think this is related to another trend I've been noting for a while, the alliance between the upper bourgeoisie and Marx's Lumpenproletariat, petty criminals, addicts, idlers, sexual deviants, and undocumented migrants. The DSA romanticizes the Lumpenproletriat, apparently out of guilt and perhaps envy that the underclass is somehow more authentic than the upper bourgeoisie, and they want to claim that they're the real working class, not, say, the prosperous union workers whom David Brooks derides as "patio man" in the pages of The Atlantic, The New york Times, and The Washington Examiner:

Certain profound questions flow through his mind. Is a 542-square-inch grilling surface really enough, considering that he might someday get the urge to roast an uncut buffalo steak? Though the matte steel overcoat resists scratching, doesn’t he want a polished steel surface on his grill so he can glance down and admire his reflection as he is performing the suburban manliness rituals, such as brushing tangy sauce on meat slabs with his right hand while clutching a beer can in an NFL foam insulator ring in his left?

Myerson is having a hard time getting his head around the idea that these are the people that Walter Reuther, Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman, and FDR represented.

Eric Swalwell Can't Win For Losing

Here's what puzzles me about Eric Swalwell. He's a major pretty boy, a very good-looking guy who should have no trouble with the ladies, but somehow, he's been repeatedly brought down by trouble with the ladies. The long-running saga of his affair with the Chinese spy Fang Fang began in 2014 while Swalwell had a seat on the House Intelligence Committee:

The FBI assessment, which later became a full-fledged investigation, centered on allegations that Swalwell awarded internships at his offices in exchange for campaign contributions. The FBI identified Fang “Christine” Fang, a Chinese national, as the alleged facilitator of this exchange and alleged she employed conduits to route illegal donations.

Swalwell also admitted that he had “physical relations with Fang” on multiple occasions, according to the FBI summary of his 2015 interview with agents. In a subsequent interview in 2016, Swalwell detailed one incident where Fang showed up at his door, after which Swalwell said they “hooked up,” according to the second interview summary released by the White House.

This guy could dance with just about any lady he wanted, but he's got to get it from a spy? But the Democrat establishment covered for him over another dozen years, until new allegations broke earlier this year:

A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.

“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”

She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.

Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.

That ended his California governor campaign, and it forced his resignation from Congress. Again, there should have been no obstacle to him having consensual sex with any number of women who didn't work for him, much less needing to rape anyone, but he had to go out and deliberately seek extra trouble. But that wasn't enough. Last week,

FBI agents confronted Eric Swalwell with a search warrant when he landed at San Francisco Airport Saturday and seized the former congressman's electronic devices, including his cell phone, as part of a federal criminal investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal.

Swalwell's MacBook Pro, charging cable, and wall charger were also seized during the search, which was conducted at 8.25pm, according to a warrant obtained by The San Francisco Standard.

The search warrant, filed on August 13, was filed under a federal statute (Section 242 of Title 18) which prohibits officials, including law enforcement, from abusing their authority to deprive someone of their constitutional rights - though it is unclear how the law applies to Swalwell's case.

This piece provides more insight:

The Swalwell search warrant was apparently issued under 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal civil-rights statute that applies when someone uses their governmental authority to deprive another person of rights provided to them either through the Constitution or by federal law.

That statute is often used against law-enforcement officers who are accused of abusing their authority. For example, the Standard points out, the officers involved in George Floyd's death were charged under that same statute, which is not strictly limited to police.

. . . The Standard also referred to the case of former Waterbury, Connecticut, Mayor Philip Giordano, who was convicted under the §242 statute back in 2003 for using the power of his office – and his connections to police – to intimidate two girls he had sexually abused into not ratting him out.

It's important to note here that authorities have not accused Swalwell of doing anything similar, nor does the reference to the statute on the warrant indicate that he committed a similar crime.

. . . Tony Brass, a former federal prosecutor who spoke to the Standard, said the statute could potentially come into play if investigators believe Swalwell used his position in Congress to intimidate witnesses or somehow interfere with another person's rights.

Between the involvement of the FBI's Public Corruption and Civil Rights Squad and the statute that's cited in the warrant, this may turn out to be about more than just the sexual misconduct allegations.

So the implication here seems to be that not only did he get a thrill from being a good-looking guy who nevertheless raped and sexually harassed women, we might surmise that he also got a thrill out of intimidating the same women to keep them from blowing the whistle on him. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Why do good-looking, sexually attractive men need to resort to rape and sexual harassment?" It answered,

Sexual violence and harassment are motivated by power, control, and entitlement, not by a lack of sexual access or physical attraction. Research in psychology and criminology consistently demonstrates that perpetrating sexual assault is a behavioral choice driven by a desire to dominate, demean, or exert authority over another person. /p>

For many perpetrators, the primary gratification comes from the act of forcing compliance and overpowering a victim, rather than the sexual act itself. /p>

Highly attractive or socially successful individuals may possess a distorted sense of privilege, believing they are inherently owed attention, compliance, or sexual gratification.

The problem is that Swalwell is starting to look like a serial loser, along with his bros Kevin Morris and Hunter Biden. They should really start a 12-step program for losers.

Don't Tell This Guy About Cell Phone Tracking!

A Florida man found a legal loophole to block a Flock surveillance camera using a 12-foot-tall protest sign.

77-year-old Carl Gunn legally blocks a Flock license plate camera in St. Petersburg, Florida, by sitting on a public sidewalk and holding a 12-foot pool skimmer pole with… pic.twitter.com/x3iMcU37RZ

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) August 19, 2026

If this guy ever finds out about cell phone tracking, he'll need to cover his umbrella with tinfoil. I'm amazed at the level of paranoia about automated license plate readers, especially Flock cameras, since all they do is trace the location of automobiles. Your cell phone can trace where you are, in a car or not, and GPS is only one way it does this. Nevertheless,

A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice in one week after Milwaukee Police Department staff failed to remove a vehicle alert from the Flock license plate camera system. TWICE it happened.

Years ago, in the NCIC(National Crime Information Center) files there was a BIG problem that cost the city of Los Angeles millions because- again, short version- they found out that the Police Department, after finding out the description they'd used in the original stolen car/wanted person entry, was not valid, they re-entered the stuff WITH THE SAME INFORMATION. Which led to the poor bastard being pulled out of his car at gunpoint several times. When he filed a case, the judge read that, said "You have no excuse after the first mistake" and awarded the guy a big settlement.Now we have effing Flock cameras being used as if they're part of the LE network, and getting people pulled out of their cars at gunpoint. And, similar to the NCIC problem, if people don't make damn sure information is cleared out when it should be, sooner or later some poor bastard pays the price.

Yes, mistakes get made, and as the case above shows, they were made before Flock cameras, but why is everyone in such a snit? This may come a little closer:

Back in 2013 and 2014 we shared the story of a man returning to Florida was stopped by police in Maryland who asked him for his firearm. When the Floridian asked the Maryland police how they knew he owned a firearm, things got sketchy. {Go Deep} The event kicked off a constitutional discussion.

A few years later in 2015 the Wall Street Journal reported on a national federal database that was using Automatic License Plate Readers (APLRs) to capture and store the travel of millions of Americans {SOURCE}.

Now we fast-forward a decade and that federal database is now being exploited by local police around the nation to keep track of ordinary persons of interest to their community who travel outside their jurisdiction. This is where the Flock Cameras come into the discussion.

The same government interests who dismiss our concerns about privacy are the same govt interests who point out how horrible China and Iran are for monitoring their citizens on CCTV systems.

And now, vigilantes are taking matters into their own hands:

🚨#BREAKING: An Arizona man says he has, "absolutely zero regrets" after he was arrested for using his work truck to bend a Flock camera pole backwards until it faced the sky.

"I kept backing up, saw it bend back, I saw it looking at the sky... and said,

‘That’s good enough." pic.twitter.com/Edtc3LdnVi

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) August 13, 2026

Did somone say vigilante?

he first time that “NoMark” tried to knock out a Flock camera feed, he waited an hour for the perfect moment – pacing in and out of bushes that towered over him, a few feet behind a pole holding up the device.

. . . These black cameras, which are hooked up to a rectangular solar panel and typically mounted on a pole, snap photos of passing vehicles and run the pictures against large databases. They have sparked nationwide backlash from pro-privacy critics, who point to public records suggesting that these devices can help law enforcement keep tabs on specific license plates and the people driving these cars. That they can sweep in so many people’s location from an innocent act in a public space – regardless of whether the target is a suspect in a crime, and without a warrant – has led to fears of mass surveillance.

And oh, my, the libertarians! Call the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit! They're in a lather because some Iowa sheriff deputies have been advised not to mention Flock cameras to drivers, but the only sane comment in the thread is:

Did you have an expectation of privacy in public spaces before this? If so, why?

So why aren't the same people smashing their cell phones, or at least warning everyone that their cell phones can track them even when they aren't in their cars?

Many assume that turning off location services on their cell phone will prevent their location from being tracked. However, this is only partially accurate, as there are several other ways that your cell phone can still track your location, even when location services are turned off.

Location tracking is a feature that is essential to the functionality of our cell phones. This feature allows us to use various apps and services, such as maps, ride-sharing apps, and weather services, which require location information to provide accurate and personalized results. The location data is recorded by the phone using GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular data.

Cell phones use a combination of GPS data, Wi-Fi data, and cell tower data to track location.

When you turn off location services on your phone, you are disabling the ability of apps on your phone to access your precise location data. This means that apps that rely on GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular data to provide location-specific services will not be able to access your location. However, the cellular system must know where you are, so while your apps may no longer be able to access your cellular data, it is still being recorded.

. . . CDRs are a type of telecommunications data that provides detailed information about calls made and received on a mobile phone. These records contain a wealth of information, including the time and date of the call, the duration of the call, the number dialed, and the location of the cell tower that was used to transmit the call. CDRs are primarily used for billing and customer service purposes, but they can also be used to track the location of a mobile phone. Over time, this creates a historical record of the phone's location, which can be used to track its movements and determine where it has been at different times.

CDRs are mainly used by law enforcement and private companies, like Envista Forensics, when conducting investigations to determine the historic location of a person's phone or if someone was potentially distracted while driving by texting or talking on the phone.

Another reason the cellular system continuously tracks you is that cell phone providers are required by law to track your phone's location for emergency services. This means that even if you've turned off location services on your device, your phone is still communicating with nearby cell towers, allowing your provider to pinpoint your location in the event of an emergency. While this information is not available to third-party apps or advertisers, it is still collected and stored by the service providers. This means that even if we are not being actively tracked in real-time, our historic location is still being recorded in CDRs.

So why isn't there a much greater public panic over cell phones?

Whatever's Become Of Hunter's Sugar Bro, Kevin Morris?

We last checked in on Kevin Morris more than two years ago, when I posted,

But I can't resist posting on one footnote. Kevin Morris, Hunter's "sugar bro", attended at least the first day of Hunter's trial on Monday to support him, although as I posted here, after spending at least $6.5 million to pay Hunter's lawyers and fund his lifestyle, he's said to be out of money. I've been increasingly skeptical of the conventional Morris narrative -- he's a "Hollywood lawyer" who stopped practicing law 15 years ago, and he's a "novelist" who was never able to sell a blockbuster despite his wife being one of the most powerful agents in the industry. In other words, he's basically been just a dilettante living off his wife for more than a decade.

And his wife is probably key to the most recent development in the story. In my post two weeks ago, I concluded, "It looks like Mrs Kevin has staged an intervention, and she's cut Kevin off."

Since then, likely due to the efforts of Mrs Kevin's publicists, he's been mostly out of the news. In January, 2025, his home survived the Palisades fire, but his stash of Hunter's paintings went up in smoke:

A trove of nearly 200 artworks by Hunter Biden has been destroyed — one of the casualties of the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles, The Post has learned.

The controversial art had been in storage near the Pacific Palisades home of Hunter’s Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris and is valued at “millions of dollars,” a source close to the Biden family said.

Morris, who loaned the first son nearly $5 million to help pay a tax bill and has been financing a documentary on him, lives in a sprawling five-bedroom, six-bathroom home which is among the few houses still intact in the posh neighborhood, The Post can confirm.

However, despite losing his investment in Hunter's paintings -- which after 2025 were worth about the same whether intact or in ashes -- Morris appears still to be working on an ongoing Hunter Biden documentary project:

Days after reaching a plea deal with federal prosecutors on his unpaid taxes and a felony gun charge in 2023, Hunter Biden appeared panicked and short-tempered, according to leaked footage from a new documentary about the former first son seen by The Post.

“What are you talking about ‘I’m protected’?” wide-eyed Biden animatedly says into a cellphone in the footage, from the documentary-in-progress being made by Hollywood writer and lawyer Kevin Morris, who loaned Biden more than $6.5 million for personal expenses and back taxes.

Morris, a novelist and producer known for brokering deals for “South Park” and “The Book of Mormon,” had been trailing Biden with a film crew between 2021 and 2024, during his father Joe Biden’s White House term. He also documented the scandal-scarred ex-lobbyist’s foray into the art world.

In addition to recording the self-taught artist’s gallery openings in Los Angeles and New York, Morris was seen directing a film crew taping Hunter Biden outside courthouses where Biden appeared on tax evasion and the gun charge.

. . . It’s not clear when the documentary film will be released. Morris did not return a request for comment Monday. Hunter Biden’s attorney declined to comment Monday.

Wait a moment. Mrs Kevin is one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood, but "it’s not clear when the documentary film will be released?" But Morris's support for Hunter also helped foster a relationship with another priotege, Eric Swalwell:

A campaign filing that was released on Tuesday revealed that Morris, who was dubbed Hunter's "sugar brother," for bankrolling his legal bills and lavish lifestyle, donated $29,900 to Rep. Eric Swalwell's, D-Calif., gubernatorial campaign on Feb. 2.

Swalwell, who reportedly helped orchestrate Hunter's surprise press conference outside the Capitol in December 2023 while he defied the House Oversight Committee's subpoenas to testify behind closed doors, was one of the loudest critics of the GOP investigations into Hunter during the Biden administration.

"There is absolutely zero evidence Hunter or his father acted corruptly," Swalwell said at the time. "So I’m not going to sit quietly and let MAGA Republicans do Trump’s bidding in Congress."

. . . During his time helping Hunter Biden, Morris faced multiple bar complaints, including from the Trump-aligned America First Legal, which accused Morris of violating California's Rules of Professional Conduct after he was publicly photographed smoking marijuana while Hunter Biden, a recovering addict, was around visiting.

. . . Swalwell's support at the 2023 press conference by reserving the "Senate Swamp," a popular area near the Capitol that is often used for press conferences, raised questions at the time about whether the California congressman played a role in the then-first son's decision to deny a congressional subpoena from Republicans seeking to question him about his alleged crimes and other financial dealings.

Morris, who previously maxed out donations totaling over $6,000 to Swalwell's House campaign in early 2023, and Swalwell stood beside each other during the viral press conference later that year.

"Degenerates of a feather flock together," a longtime GOP strategist told Fox News Digital. "Eric Swalwell is literally Hunter Biden's biggest cheerleader – from reserving the Senate Swamp to defending the Biden Crime Family's litany of illicit activities."

Morris and Swalwell also have ties to China that have raised questions among critics. In 2024, Morris confirmed to lawmakers that he still held a stake in a Chinese private equity firm that he took over from the president's son. Morris initially acquired the shares after purchasing Skaneateles LLC, a company that Hunter had previously owned, in the fall of 2021 as pressure mounted for Hunter to divest amid concerns about his stake in the China-based company.

The best that can be said of Morris is that he's a poor judge of character. Two months after the report of his $29,900 donation to Swalwell,

A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.

“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”

She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.

Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.

Swalwell ended his gubernatorial campaign two days later and resigned from Congress. Kevin Morris seems to have a reverse Midas touch.