In a significant move, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on September 17, 2025, his intention to designate Antifa as a “major terrorist organization.” This decision follows the recent assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, allegedly by an individual with left-wing affiliations. While Antifa is a decentralized movement without a formal hierarchy, Trump described it as a “sick, dangerous, radical left disaster” and called for investigations into its funding sources (The Guardian).
Following the U.S. announcement, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared that Hungary would designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, citing a 2023 incident in Budapest where Antifa activists allegedly assaulted attendees of a far-right event. Orbán criticized the European Union for not taking similar action and urged EU officials to align with the U.S. stance (AP News).
These designations have sparked debates about the balance between national security and civil liberties. Critics argue that labeling a loosely affiliated movement as a terrorist organization could infringe upon free speech and assembly rights. Supporters contend that such measures are necessary to address the violent actions of certain factions within the movement. As discussions continue, the implications of these designations on domestic and international policies remain to be seen.
Canada’s tariff wars reveal a glaring double standard: confrontation with Communist China draws muted shrugs, while disputes with the United States ignite fiery “elbow up” rhetoric and national outrage. When China slapped a 75.8% tariff on Canadian canola in August 2025—retaliation for Ottawa’s 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles and 25% on steel and aluminum announced earlier that spring—Manitoba farmers were left reeling. Nearly half of their canola exports go to China, and industry estimates project multi-billion-dollar losses. Yet Canada’s political class and major media outlets framed Beijing’s move as a mere “tit-for-tat” trade dispute, urging patience and diplomacy. Outside the mainstream, social media filled with posts lamenting the devastation in farm country.
Contrast this with the uproar over U.S. tariffs. In March 2025, President Donald Trump imposed 25% duties on Canadian goods (excluding energy), escalating them to 35% by August. Ottawa erupted. Prime Minister Mark Carney thundered about the need for a unified “North American market,” while pundits and media outlets blasted “unjustified” American aggression. Canadians were rallied with slogans of defiance and “elbow up” resolve. Yet under CUSMA, more than 85% of Canada–U.S. trade remains tariff-free, meaning the outrage over Washington’s measures dwarfed the reaction to China’s far heavier blow to canola.
The contrast betrays selective indignation. China, an authoritarian regime, cripples a vital Canadian industry yet escapes national fury. The United States, a democratic ally, delivers a lesser economic hit and is vilified. Such narrative hypocrisy undermines both unity and credibility, sacrificing farmers’ livelihoods for geopolitical posturing. If Canada roars at Washington but bows to Beijing, it sends a dangerous message: principle is negotiable, and farmers are expendable.
Sources:
Statistics Canada, 2023 Trade Data
CBC News, “China’s Tariffs on Canadian Canola,” Aug. 13, 2025
Fraser Institute, “Trump’s Trade War Update,” Aug. 12, 2025
Globe and Mail, “Over 85% of Canada–U.S. Trade Remains Tariff-Free under CUSMA,” Aug. 2025
Inflation is the steady climb in prices for goods and services, shrinking what your money can buy over time. It arises when too much money chases too few goods, a dynamic fueled by policy missteps and economic shocks. This essay examines inflation’s primary drivers, emphasizing government spending and money printing, with a focus on Canadian examples, including recent actions, grounded in hard evidence. The stakes are high: inflation corrodes savings, disrupts planning, and frays societal unity, demanding a clear-eyed look at its causes.
Government spending, especially when deficit-financed, is a key inflationary culprit. Large-scale fiscal interventions—like Canada’s $500 billion in COVID-19 relief programs in 2020–2021, including the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB)—flooded the economy with cash, spiking demand. This surge, coupled with supply constraints, drove Canada’s inflation to 8.1% in June 2022, a 40-year high. A 2022 Scotiabank analysis estimated these programs added 0.45 percentage points to core inflation by widening the output gap. Historically, Canada’s 1970s deficit spending, which fueled double-digit inflation, mirrors this pattern. Recent policies, such as 2025 provincial and federal inflation-relief transfers, risk further stoking demand, with Scotiabank projecting they could necessitate a 38% share of the Bank of Canada’s rate hikes to counteract their inflationary impulse.
Money printing, through central bank policies like quantitative easing, devalues currency by expanding the money supply. In Canada, the Bank of Canada’s purchase of $400 billion in government bonds during 2020–2021 lowered interest rates to 0.25%, encouraging spending but devaluing the Canadian dollar. This imported inflation, as a weaker dollar raised import costs, contributing over 50% to inflation in final domestic demand by late 2022. Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation in the 2000s, peaking at 79.6 billion percent monthly, offers an extreme parallel, driven by unchecked money creation. In 2024, the Bank of Canada’s continued quantitative tightening, alongside a 2025 policy rate hold at 4.5%, reflects efforts to curb these pressures, though global factors like U.S. inflation still amplify Canada’s import-driven price hikes.
Supply shocks and wage-price spirals further aggravate inflation. Canada’s 2022 supply chain disruptions, exacerbated by global port delays and China’s COVID-zero policy, spiked food and energy prices—food alone contributed 1.02 percentage points to inflation. The 1973 OPEC embargo, which quadrupled oil prices, offers a historical parallel, as does Canada’s 2022 experience with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which drove gasoline prices to $2 per liter. Wage-price spirals, fueled by 4.5% wage growth in advanced economies in 2021, also played a role, with Canada’s labor shortages post-reopening pushing service prices up 5% by mid-2022. Current U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods, as of January 2025, threaten to raise import costs further, with uncertain pass-through to consumers, potentially sustaining inflationary pressure.
Inflation’s corrosive grip—evident in Canada’s 2022 peak and lingering 2.6% rate in February 2025—demands accountability. Government spending and money printing, as seen in Canada’s pandemic policies and bond purchases, are potent drivers, amplified by supply shocks and wage dynamics. Historical and recent evidence, from 1970s deficits to 2025 tariff risks, underscores the need for disciplined fiscal and monetary policy. Citizens must demand restraint to protect purchasing power and preserve economic stability before inflation’s tide engulfs us all.
Scotiabank. (2022). Canadian Inflation: Mostly Temporary and Foreign, But Pandemic Programs Have a Major Impact on Policy Rates. https://www.scotiabank.com
Statistics Canada. (2024). High Inflation in 2022 in Canada: Demand–Pull or Supply–Push?. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca
The Globe and Mail. (2022). The Most Important Source of Canada’s Inflation: The Government Borrowed More Than $700-Billion. https://www.theglobeandmail.com
“The Biden administration’s policy has been to release migrants into the U.S. so long as they say they have “credible fear” of returning to their native countries. The migrants have all been instructed to use the phrase—and the agents feel hamstrung when they hear it. In December 2023, for example, over 75 percent of the nearly 250,000 migrants who illegally crossed the border were released into the U.S. with nothing more than a notice to appear at some future date in immigration court. Immigration courts are currently backlogged with more than 3 million pending cases.”
It is true of most occupations that deal with social interactions with humans: It isn’t the job that wears you down, it is the drain on your psyche and energy that gets you. These Border Patrol agents interviewed are stuck in a grey paralyzed swamp of indecision and futility.
This is where ‘patriots’ and others accuse me of hating the West and America.
Good.
Our inflated sense of being the ‘good guys’ and on the right side of history shields us from the monstrous atrocities that have been and are being committed in our name. The very truth of the matter is that there is no right side of history, only self interested actors on the state and individual level acting inhumanely toward those deemed to be the enemy. The truth is that being tortured for in the name of democracy or dictatorship is quite irrelevant to those being put to the irons – the only take away is that torture can not be justified, not ever.
The history of US intervention in Central and South America is a history of coups, brutal repression, and torture. One of the specialists sent to ‘teach the torture trade’ was Dan Mitrone, his legacy is written in the blood and lives of Left activists and innocents across Central and South America.
“The late US journalist and author A.J. Langguth credited US advisers led by Mitrione with introducing “scientific methods of torture” to Uruguay. These included psychological tortures like playing recordings of screaming women and children and telling prisoners it was their relatives being tortured, to more traditional torture techniques like electric shocks applied under the fingernails and to the genitals. According to Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban double agent who infiltrated the CIA and spent years in the agency’s Montevideo station, Mitrione said that the key to successful interrogation was to apply “the precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount to achieve the desired effect.”
“A premature death means failure by the technician,” Mitrione told Hevia. “You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.” Mitrione walked a very fine line between surgical and sadistic when he added: “When you get what you want, and I always, do, it may be good to prolong the session a little to apply another softening up, not to extract information now, but only as a political measure, to create a healthy fear.”
In order to build the perfect underground classroom in which to teach his Uruguayan students the tools and techniques of their torturous trade, Mitrione soundproofed the basement of his Montevideo home. He tested its integrity by blasting Hawaiian music or having an assistant fire a pistol from the room while he listened from different points outside the home. Hevia claimed it was there that Mitrione trained Uruguayan police to torture using “beggars from the outskirts of Montevideo,” a practice he honed to perfection while stationed in Brazil. “There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the different voltages on the different parts of the human body,” said Hevia.
The Cuban claimed that Mitrione personally tortured four beggars to death in his bespoke dungeon. This fits a historical pattern: At the notorious US Army School of the Americas (SOA), then located in Panama, US doctors supervised torture classes in which homeless people were kidnapped from the streets of Panama City and used as human guinea pigs. According to one former SOA instructor interviewed in the award-winning documentary film Inside the School of the Assassins, “they would bring people in from the streets to the base, and the experts would train us on how to obtain information through torture… They had a US physician… who would teach the students… [about] the nerve endings of the body. He would show them where to torture, where and where not, where you wouldn’t kill the individual.”
This is not the practice of any nation that claims to value human rights. Yet in death, a clinical, merciless torture teacher was celebrated:
“Back in the US, Dan Mitrione was hailed as a hero. White House spokesman Ron Ziegler lauded his “devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress” as “an example for free men everywhere,” calling him a man who “exemplified the highest principles of the police profession.” To his wife, he was the “perfect man.” His daughter called him “a great humanitarian.” Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis even staged a benefit concert for his grieving family — Mitrione had nine children — in his home town of Richmond, Indiana on August 29.”
Imagine if we could hear the incriminating shameful stories at the same volume as the triumphant patriotic tropes we are taught, we might able to begin the process of reclaiming our shared humanity.
Societies that do not adequately redistribute wealth face the Shit-life syndrome problem. Living on the margins is stressful at best. Living precariously is the reality for all to many Americans and Canadians and unfortunately it can lead to some very self destructive voting patterns.
“My state of Ohio is home to many shit-life syndrome sufferers. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton lost Ohio’s 18 electoral votes to Trump. She got clobbered by over 400,000 votes (more than 8%). She lost 80 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Trump won rural poorer counties, several by whopping margins. Trump got the shit-life syndrome vote.
Will Hutton in his 2018 Guardian piece, “The Bad News is We’re Dying Early in Britain – and It’s All Down to ‘Shit-Life Syndrome’” describes shit-life syndrome in both Britain and the United States: “Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security.”
The Brookings Institution, in November 2019, reported: “53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64—accounting for 44% of all workers—qualify as ‘low-wage.’ Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000.”
For most of these low-wage workers, Hutton notes: “Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.”
Shit-life syndrome is not another fictitious illness conjured up by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex to sell psychotropic drugs. It is a reality created by corporatist rulers and their lackey politicians—pretending to care about their minimum-wage-slave constituents, who are trying to survive on 99¢ boxed macaroni and cheese prepared in carcinogenic water, courtesy of DuPont or some other such low-life leviathan.”
For a democracy to work, the people’s representatives need actually represent the needs of the people.
The fact that the US is still entangled in Afghanistan has all but left the news media in the United States. I certainly hope that powers involved here can keep their agenda focus and actually produce some results. The status quo quagmire needs to end.
“The Afghan state minister for peace affairs, Abdul Salam Rahimi, announced on Saturday that the Afghan government was preparing for direct talks with the Taliban. “The government will be represented by a 15-member delegation. We are working will all sides and hope that in the next two weeks the first meeting will take place in a European country,” Rahimi said.
Oslo has been mentioned as the venue for the crucial meeting. The Taliban have not yet budged from their longstanding demand that a deal must be forged with the US first. Possibly, a deal will be announced after the ninth round of US-Taliban talks in Doha in the coming week.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani inspects a guard of honor during the first day of the Loya Jirga in Kabul on April 29. Photo: Rahmat Gul / AFP
Indeed, we are witnessing an utterly fascinating spectacle of diplomatic pirouette being played out between and among five main protagonists – Trump, who is demanding an expeditious US withdrawal from Afghanistan, assuming Imran Khan will deliver on his promises; Khan, in turn, going through the motions of persuading the Taliban to be reasonable while expecting generous US reciprocal moves to accommodate Pakistani interests; Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, seeing the writing on the wall that US withdrawal is unstoppable, while still hoping to secure a second term in office; Khalilzad pushing the reluctant Afghan government to fall in line with a Taliban deal, while also negotiating with the Taliban for an orderly US withdrawal, albeit with a weak hand; and the Taliban on a roll, sensing victory.
There are caveats galore. But the compass has been set.“
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