Anyone Who Thinks Canada Should be the 51st State Can Fuck Right Off
Canada exists because of treaties with Indigenous people, who are being rounded up and denied American citizenship. And that's just the start of why Canadians and the world should oppose this.
There’s been a lot of talk about Trump annexing Greenland, or Canada. Possibly invading Mexico, or retaking the Panama Canal.
I’ve heard people debating it online, and talking about it like it’s moving to another town for a job. It’s not.
So anyone talking about Canada as the 51st state can fuck right off.
O Tempora, O Mores!
It’s clear that there is an effort on right now to remake the world, with sabre rattling, preparations for war while active disruptive disinformation campaigns being run by China, Russia and India in Canada to say nothing of far-right propaganda from the US and its pseudo-intellectual broligarchs.
It’s worth pointing out what a sham this is anyway, because one of Trump’s advisors said Canada shouldn’t be a state, because if they are, they would have two Senators - who would likely be Democratic. Canada would also have as many electoral votes as California.
For that reason, Trump’s advisor said that Canada should not be a state, but a Territory. That means that Canadians wouldn’t have a vote.
We need to recognize that with the astonishing concentrations of wealth and income in countries around the world has come astonishing levels of corruption. The rich and powerful are able to get away with terrible crimes. They are able to buy police and politicans and media outlets, and threaten and terrorize. And because they are rich and powerful, they have authority, and are seen as authority.
We do not have to tolerate this.
When people in power commit crimes and deny it even when there is clear evidence of their guilt, they corrupt their followers. When people are so divided by hate and fear that they will say anything to prevent the other side from having any advantage at all, it means otherwise fine people are being corrupted into defending the indefensible.
Corruption is not just a state of being. It is a process of being corrupted.
The world is currently flooded with corruption, and we are sliding towards the abyss because people don’t know how to de-escalate. I don’t just mean that as a question of bravado or not wanting to back down. Because we are failing to diagnose the problem, which makes the solution impossible.
Yes, the U.S. has an oligarchy. Most countries do at this point. Not all oligarchs are intent dismantling the government so that it can’t prosecute them, as they are in the U.S. In many countries, they don’t have to.
For the optimists cheering for a multipolar world, Russia is an oligarchy, and so is China, and neither have the rule of law, and there is no way of changing the leadership. That is absolute power, the kind that corrupts absolutely. (China has more billionaires in its congress than the U.S. has millionaires in its congress. As Bloomberg news reported in 2012, the Chinese economic miracle is “the result of a conscious decision by the former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and some of his closest associates — the so-called Eight Immortals — to safeguard the primacy of the Communist Party by putting their families in charge of opening up China’s economy... Three children alone — including Deng’s son-in-law He Ping and Chen Yuan, the son of Mao Zedong’s economic czar Chen Yun — led or still run state-owned companies that had combined assets of about $1.6 trillion in 2011, or the equivalent of more than a fifth of China’s annual economic output.”
Canada: It’s Not Just a Little Real Estate Problem
In the spirit of being true to our obligations and our ideals, I will start with a point of law that I have not seen enough in this debate, which is that it is absolutely clear that Canada is built on treaties of Indigenous people with the Crown, and the Crown is not just the head of state.
The Crown represents the publics - all Canadians who are not Indigenous, and it has an obligation to Indigenous people as well.
All Canadians are part of this legal relationship. What’s more, there are treaties that define this relationship that precede the existence of Canada as well as the United States, namely the Royal Proclamation of 1763.
It has been a long and painful struggle for Indigenous people in Canada of slowly gaining their rights, with incredible levels of discrimination to this day. We have a long way to go and I sure as hell don’t want our country to go back.
What is happening right now to Indigenous Americans is a crime. The President is trying to declare that they aren’t American Citizens.
That is the least American thing I’ve ever heard. Since when does the President get powers like that? This is the kind of abuse of power that the US was created to eliminate.
The province I live in, Manitoba was founded on liberal democracy by Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders that guaranteed the rights of all, not just a few.
So that should be a reminder for every single Canadian. Every single one. We owe a deep deep debt to Indigenous people for many reasons, including that they have fought by our sides in North America and in battles and wars around the world. Fighting the kind of discrimination that the US is showing to its citizens right now.
“We find this truth to be self-evident: that all men are created equal”
This opening line at the beginning of the U.S. Declaration of Independence is as profound a statement of ideals as you will find.
That’s why, for anyone who wants to whine about Woke and DEI, fuck you too.
It’s no coincidence that all the people covered by DEI are the people that the KKK wanted to kill and that Nazis rounded up, stole all their property, put in camps gassed and went up a chimney in smoke.
That’s anyone who didn’t fit some imaginary, inbred, Aryan ideal: Jews, blacks, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, gay, lesbian and trans people, and women as well.
I’ve spent my life hearing “never again,” while seeing it happen again and again, but I have never seen a moment of global moral corruption like we have today.
Unlike Americans, who sat with their thumbs up their asses until Pearl Harbour, and didn’t join the Second World War until well after Hitler and the Soviet Union agreed to carve up Europe and the Holocaust was already underway, Canadians actually went to war against the Nazis in 1939.
Canadians fought and died side by side with people from all over the world - against global fascism. Canadians of every background - Catholics, Jews, Blacks, Indigenous folks, side by side with Sikhs, Hindus, Chinese and Russians, to name a few, along with quite a few queer folk.
It wasn’t in defence of capitalism, or communism. It in defense of the ideals of liberal democracy - which the far right and the far left have always both hated.
The total indifference to human suffering and people cheering the deaths of others is nothing I have ever experienced in my lifetime. We shouldn’t be surprised: we’ve all been softened up especially since 9/11, as war crimes and torture were defended and normalized.
The degree to which everyone has been conditioned to simply repeat slogans that minimize corruption is jaw-dropping.
The Sham Premise of an Unsafe Border
Canada is facing tariffs based on a phony pretense that Canada’s border is a problem for crime in the United States - phony since Canada intercepts considerably more illicit drugs and prohibited weapons coming from the U.S. than the U.S. intercepts from Canada. Our crime rates are significantly lower.
Trump has said that while he would send the military to seize Greenland, he would use economic force to take Canada. The tariffs are an unprovoked declaration of economic warfare.
In response, Canadian officials have scrambed to announce more security at the border - which unfortunately gives the appearance of confirming that there was a problem, where there isn’t.
It’s a manufactured threat by Trump - but he is doing what he claimed he would do - make other countries pay to police America’s borders. Protecting the U.S. border is the job of the U.S. government.
The Toronto Star Reported that “Canada can dodge tariffs with swift border action, says Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary”
That nominee is Howard Lutkin, who is the head of Trump’s transition team, and the head of of Cantor Fitzgerald, a firm that works with Tether, a a major cryptocurrency network whose cryptocurrency, stablecoin is pegged to the U.S. Dollar.
In late November 2024, the US Department of Justice reported they were investigating Tether, because of concerns about illicit drugs flowing over the border, Tether has been used used to launder money for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
Unsealed court documents highlight how drug cartels from Mexico and Colombia are leveraging cryptocurrency, particularly Tether USDT/USD and Bitcoin BTC/USD, to launder tens of millions of dollars…
Cantor Fitzgerald, led by Howard Lutnick, has been a key custodian of Tether's reserves.
Lutnick is reportedly planning a multi-billion-dollar program involving Tether, offering dollar loans to clients who pledge Bitcoin as collateral.
In January 2024, the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODOC) warned that
Its popularity is illustrated by the “surging volume” of cyber fraud, money laundering and underground banking cases, the UN said, including schemes like “sextortion,” a form of blackmail threatening to post sexual content or information about a person, and “pig butchering,” a socially engineered romance designed to “fatten up” targets before extracting money.
The UN said financial authorities and law enforcement have reported a rapid uptick in the use of “sophisticated, high-speed money laundering” teams specializing in tether in recent years, with criminals advertising their services on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Telegram.
Online gambling platforms in particular have “emerged as among the most popular vehicles for cryptocurrency-based money launderers,”—especially those using tether—the report said, warning they are “fueling the intensification” of the region’s “rapidly growing illicit digital economy.”
This is a chart from the Financial Times. The green diamond-shaped logo with a T is tether.
There’s an old definition of chutzpah: a man kills his parents, and when found guilty at trial, asks for mercy because he’s an orphan.
You have a senior Trump administration official demanding that Canada crack down on drug crimes when it’s alleged that his companies are profiting from international criminal activities.
He’s threatening to punish other countries for not doing enough to stop crimes he and other members of the administration can profit from.
If the U.S. administration wants to clean up drug trafficking, they could do so by cracking down on the most popular methods of financial transaction that make it possible: cryptocurrency.
Here, the President himself is also involved, with the launch of his family’s “meme coins” just before being sworn in, which raised billions of dollars in investment.
Back in the old days when people gave a shit about rampant corruption and conflicts of interest, part of the reason that public officials are supposed to set their private businesses aside and declare the money they are getting is so you know what deals they are doing.
The other cryptocurrency of choice for money laundering, with the involvement of Chinese organized crime and the Chinese government, is TRON, whose owner recently bought a famous piece of fine art recently for $6.2-million - a fresh banana taped to a wall with duct tape. The buyer, was TRON CEO Justin Sun, who was charged last year by the SEC for violating marketing rules - paying celebrities to promote his crypto without disclosing they were paid. TRON purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, a new crypto venture backed by President-elect Donald Trump.
We Must Defend Individual Rights and the Rule of Law, and that Starts with Rejecting Being Ruled By Criminals
Hannah Arendt argued that authoritarian states happen when the mob and the elite meet - a criminal elite whose power and corruption is that the law does not apply to them, and they use brutality and criminal means to enrich themselves and to extert control.
There’s all sorts of talk about “philosophies” and “thinkers” and strategies. People keep repeating Timothy Snyder’s “don’t obey in advance. Everyone keeps using big words and going back into history, dragging out quotes and theories about using a ton of two-dollar words. “Authoritianism” “Kleptocracy” “Kakistocracy” - even “fascism”. The other is all the fake and pop psychology being used to explain it, which usually involves reducing everyone’s personalities and character to a string of symptoms and psychological “types” psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, ADHD, and more.
These are all evasions.
When people ask “how can we challenge this?” we need to name it for what it is. It is corruption, and it is corrupting.
Call it what it is. This is corruption. Call it criminal. Why are they acting like this? Because this is how gangsters and extortionists act, and people who are defending these crimes are corrupt as well, especially Republican politicians and media, and their own followers.
“Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”—writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy—including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.… Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”
No, we’re not flattered by the offer
Now, there have been a couple of folks - Fox Newsdouche Jesse Watters, who suggested that Canada should be honoured by the suggestion that the U.S. would want us as a state. That’s the sort of thing that a low level goon says to women when they’re making unwelcome advances.
There’s a reason we’re not flattered by the idea being the 51st state, which is that the US is really fucked up right now, and no one has been making that argument more strongly than MAGA. That’s why they voted to Make America Great Again, because it’s not great now.
And from the point of view of an outsider, I can say that there have been lots of mistakes by all political parties, but literally nothing that the current administration is doing has anything to do with what made America great.
On his first day, Trump pardoned the violent criminals who assaulted police on January 6, including one individual who is “now facing child sexual assault and child pornography charges”. He pardoned Russ Ulbricht, who ran an entire website, Silk Road, that sold illicit drugs like heroin, cocaine, LSD, meth, to anyone, and put out a hit on an associate.
The President himself is a convicted felon, and he and his family used the office to enrich themselves by taking money from foreign countries and from corporations. This is brazen corruption and a complete abuse of power.
The President, by threatening lawsuits against the media, is using intimidation to extract payments. This is not a settlement for wrongdoing. It is protection money to a Mafia State.
The Supreme Court, which is also corrupt, has ruled that the President can commit crimes.
ProPublica has reported that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have both received gifts and trips with billionaires who had cases before the court, and they failed to recuse themselves. It’s not just a legal or a national scandal, it’s a global one. It is a court that has been bought and paid for, and they have ruled that the United States of America no longer has the rule of law.
On the face of it, this is an utter betrayal of the constitution and everything the U.S. was created to stand for. The sheer corruption and hypocrisy of justices who claim to be constitutional originalists who are attempting to grant the President powers greater than a King.
The Republicans in Congress are using the politics of disgust to talk about protecting women and children from people who aren’t straight.
By politics of disgust, I mean referring continually to the private parts of teenagers and children, as well as implying sex acts, which is disgusting for the simple reason that hearing other people talk about sex in the wrong context at all is disgusting.
Pretending to care about women while turning a blind eye to the violent crime of sexual assault
While they talk about women’s safety, and Republican states are passing “bathroom laws”. (Never mind that the entire problem - the entire problem - can be addressed by just designing bathrooms with individual, closing stalls and sinks that everyone could use.)
U.S. statistics show that the number of such incidents of women being exposed to threats in washrooms is zero.
That means that women face an infinitely greater threat from Trump’s cabinet nominees who have been accused and sued for sexual assault.
Trump lost a civil court case where Jean E. Carroll sued him. He claimed she was “not his type” but mistook one photo of her of his wife.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has been accused of sexual assault and made a payment to settle it, as well a history of problem drinking.
RFK Jr has been accused of sexual assault, and was a heroin addict who sold drugs and who encouraged others to partake, including a brother who died of an overdose. Kennedy, whose cousin Caroline described him as a “predator” in calling for the U.S. Senate to reject him, managed to get a job with the New York D.A. thanks to his family connections, when he was arrested for possession of heroin. His anti-vaccination charity led to the deaths of 83 people in American Samoa.
Linda McMahon’s husband, Vince McMahon, (of World Wrestling Fame) has been arrested on sexual assault charges, and was accused of ignoring allegations of sexual harrassment and sexual predation where WWE employees were demanding sexual favors from minors. The allegations are disgusting.
Trump’s hush-money co-conspirator David J. Pecker, who ran American Media and the National Enquirer, covered up negative stories about Harvey Weinstein.
The reaction from MAGA mouthpiece Marjorie Taylor Greene was to argue that if Matt Gaetz was going to be criticized, that all the files and hush-money agreements between other Republican politicians should be released.
While Trump has threatened to investigate Liz Cheney for contacting a J6 witness, Speaker Mike Johnson tried to discourage a subpoena because so many Republicans were sending the witness sexual texts.
I know it can sound square and old-fashioned, but back in the day when I was growing up - the 1970s and 1980s - rapists and pimps were considered to be the scum of the earth, for good reason. They are.
Sexual assault is a crime - a violent crime. When Trump first announced his candidacy in 2015, he justified deportations by saying there were foreign rapists.
Pretending to care about children while doing nothing to prevent school shootings
To add to the hypocrisy of any Republican who claims to be defending children in schools from the woke or DEI agenda, while ignoring the actual and ongoing slaughter of children in U.S. schools.
In the last 25 years, the Supreme Court and states have passed gun laws that are in complete defiance of the intent of the constitution. The Second Amendment is not well drafted, but the idea of “well-regulated militias” was for the creation state-regulated “posses”. It was not about personal self-defence, it was so that state governments could empower armed militias, usually for controlling or killing black slaves or Native Americans.
Today, there are open carry laws in every U.S. state and more U.S. citizens have been killed with a gun in a shooting than in every foreign war since the U.S. was founded. Bulletproof backpacks, lockdown drills and thoughts and prayers are considered the only response to horrific and repeated slaughter of American children.
“From the 2000–01 to 2021–22 school years, there were 1,375 school shootings at public and private elementary and secondary schools, resulting in 515 deaths and 1,161 injuries.”
After one such shooting where 22 children were killed, Alex Jones spread a conspiracy theory that is did not happen, which resulted in the families whose children were murdered being relentlessly harassed and abused as liars and actors. It’s hard to imagine a crueller act than siccing your viewers on mourning parents, and Jones was eventually successfully sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. Elon Musk reinstated his account on twitter.
The lawlessness is the point
The last months have been an absolutely shocking display of people being corrupted - people reversing themselves, and praising a President they once excoriated - Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos killed anti-Trump editorials at the Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong killed one at the L.A. Times.
Fox News is a pure propaganda outlet that spreads misinformation - it’s the American Ministry of Truth.
Behind the scenes, Fox news hosts like Tucker Carlson knew they that what they were saying on air about the 2020 election was a lie. They were sued, and texts and other information confirmed what they really believed, and it wasn’t what they were saying on air. Fox lost a massive lawsuit, but it hasn’t stopped them.
It’s the kind of brainwashing you see on totalitarian “state television” - not independent public broadcasters - but broadcasters whose sole purpose is to toe and enforce the party line.
All these supposed titans of industry and the US free market are all paying fealty and tribute because they are afraid of retribution from the zealots who are in charge.
They are using their power to blackmail and extort U.S. businesses as well as countries around the world with threats for protection money, while massively enriching the President and his apparatchiks.
It all brings to mind an episode of the Twilight Zone that was parodied on the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. Bart has psychic powers where he exacts revenge against all and any slights. He demands to watch Krusty the Clown, but Homer has money riding on a football game he’s watching. Bart turns Homer into the football, with the sports announcer saying,
“And the ball has turned into a great big fat guy. And we know that whenever anything strange happens, it’s good that Bart did that.”
The episode is frightening, because it’s about a child with godlike powers, who can read everyone’s thoughts, and at the slightest sign of resistance or straying from his orders, he will wipe their minds or kill them and “put them in the cornfield.”
“A monster had arrived in the village. Just by using his mind, he took away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines, because they displeased him. And he moved an entire community back into the dark ages, just by using his mind… And you'll note that the people in Peaksville, Ohio have to smile. They have to think happy thoughts and say happy things because once displeased the monster can wish them into a cornfield or change them into a grotesque walking horror. This particular monster can read minds, you see. He knows every thought, he can feel every emotion. Oh, yes, I did forget something, didn't I? I forgot to introduce you to the monster. This is the monster. His name is Anthony Fremont. He's six years old with a cute, little boy face and blue guileless eyes. But when those eyes look at you, you better start thinking happy thoughts. Because the mind behind them is absolutely in charge. This is the Twilight Zone.”
It’s hard not to think of this episode, especially after the events of the last week.
Towards the end of the episode, after the boy has killed a family guest, he wishes for snow. Except it’s not winter. The adults warn that the crops will die, the farmers will have no harvest, and that people will die.
This has happened many times in the past under totalitarian - and under ideological zealots who have no concept whatsoever of the way the real world works, because they have been raised in a culture where disagreement is forbidden.
This is the corruption of politics, knowledge and economics all become one: these are systems that cannnot tolerate dissent because their system is based on an ideological house of cards.
A huge amount of U.S. right-wing economics is grounded in Southern Confederate Grievance, and therefore on the total denial of history.
They are all fundamentalists - and a fundamentalist, as one thinker once explained after 9/11, is someone who longs for a past that never existed. That perfectly sums up the entire idea of “MAGA” - they want to return to a past that never existed.
In the last 10 days, the U.S. deportation plans have resulted in huge numbers of farm laborers not showing up to work, with the risk that food will rot on the vine.
The President issued an order to stop all Federal grants, in a move that is likely unconstutional. In the U.S., Congress makes and passes budgets, and all these funds had already been voted on and approved.
The result was an instant cessation of all funding to millions of Americans for medicaid, SNAP, homeless shelters, meals on wheels, the list goes on. Surgeries were cancelled. Veterans mental health and housing programs were cancelled.
As it turns out - and as I have written - the biggest recipients of federal transfers in the U.S. are Republican states, not Democratic ones. There have been two plane crashes this week, which were not just predictable, but predictedm and current administration - instead of building or reforming, has launched an internal war against its own people. That includes delegated the dismantling of the Federal Government’s payment systems to Elon Musk, whose most recent accomplishments include throwing a Nazi salute and telling a Neo-Nazi party in Germany they shouldn’t be ashamed of their past.
I haven’t even touched on the fundamental aspect, which is the end of monetary sovereignty.
So, whether you’re a Canadian, or an American, these are all reasons that Canada should not be the 51st state.
And I say that as someone who loves lots of American culture, and I love and admire many Americans. You do not have to put up with this shit, and neither do we. The number of people who oppose and want to fight corruption is always far greater than those who live off it.
The US is an extraordinary country, with extraordinary people, and it can still accomplish great things. I believe it needs to live its highest values to recover - the angels of your better nature.
But those values are still not Canada’s, and never will be.
-30-
Well first of all, Americans have stop looking to ‘leaders” to save them. But it is heartening to note spontaneous acts of resistance are happening all,over the country.
Sorry, Siri, causing problems again. what is China and oligarchy? Or a dictatorship.