The “Effective Altruists” want you scared, stupid and subservient.

Today’s post is a sneak preview of the “Future Shock” section of the forthcoming Sovereign Capitalist Letter (get our latest report and a sample issue here).

Just heading into mid-September, a purported moral panic broke out amongst the frontier AI leaders that their own products were “too dangerous” and so the only remedy would be for the government to regulate all AI models.

Weeks earlier, Bernie Sanders had introduced The Ban AI-Superintelligence Act, that would make it illegal to create an AI model that was more intelligent than humans, going so far as to prescribe a 20-year prison term for any person who did and the “corporate death penalty” for companies.

JUST IN: Senator Bernie Sanders introduces bill to permanently ban AI that exceeds human intelligence.

Violators would face up to 20 years in prison. pic.twitter.com/y2pk79zQlQ

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) September 3, 2026

Sanders’ Bill is truly the domain of dystopian sci-fi. It reminded me of an episode from the ill-fated Twilight Zone reboot (“Examination Day“) which culminated in a distraught couple mourning their child, who had just been exterminated by the state for testing too high on his pre-adolescent IQ test.

Examination Day. pic.twitter.com/PrKGnh7y4x

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 27, 2026

It all started with a “resignation in public” tweet from one Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee, on September 8th posted his parting thoughts on X, stating that AI could exterminate humanity within 10 years.

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026

One of Anthropic’s trust and safety leads, Evan Hubinger, then endorsed the tweet, citing a “non-zero chance” of 10% or more that such an outcome was possible.

That original resignation tweet, now closing in on 200 million views, which emanated from a heretofore unknown X account, less than a year old,  with no followers, and two name changes in the last six months went absolutely viral – with some well-timed, fortuitous boosting from some of the biggest “AI Alignment” personalities on the internet, and then the Wall Street Journal came out with an “exclusive” on the story, ….which actually went live on the WSJ site 18 minutes before Coxon’s tweet.

Before long Sam Altman said we “definitely” need more government regulation on AI and even Elon Musk chimed in and agreed that the frontier labs should be reviewing each other’s models for safety.

Within days a full-blown hysteria was underway – for me it bore all the hallmarks of mass formation psychosis or at least a well-organized attempt to manufacture one.

Within a week, King Charles was speaking at an AI Safety summit at Buckingham Palace, urging government oversight and increased regulation of AI…

“Surely we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late?” the King ruminated.

Also, that guy behind him, looking rather pleased with himself, is “Tino” Cuéllar, Anthropic’s Chief Global Affairs Officer.

The “AI Safety Summit” itself was announced on September 7th, leaked via Politico – the day before the Coxon tweet that ignited what had become at this point, a global(ist?) furor.

Even the Pope weighed on AI safety, and not to be left behind, Bill Gates hit the Sunday talk circuit this past weekend with another doozy of a soundbite:

“AI is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths” – which means we need to turn control of it over to politicians and a new class of global inspectors.”

Several things about this relatively sudden AI panic did not pass the smell test, among them, the facts emerging around Coxon himself, who had “barely been at the company long enough to find the bathroom” (as the All-In guys put it), turned out to be neck-deep in the “Effective Altruism” movement, a well-connected network of young WEF types, which espoused global governance over potentially harmful technologies like AI.

He had received scholarships and grants from the EA Infrastructure Fund, the Long Term Future Fund and was a fellow at the Newspeak House in London (yes, newspeak).

Who are the Effective Altruists?

Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement that purports to “use evidence and quantitative reasoning to identify the most consequential problems and direct resources toward reducing them”.

Tired: World Economic Forum
Wired: Effective Altruism pic.twitter.com/zNGNfMNWkW

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 16, 2026

Love the euphemistic language (it’s actually what ChatGPT will use when you ask it). The punch line for the EA raison d’être is, as usual, a society ordered under expert, technocratic management – their expertise, their management.

One of their earlier recruits was Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX empire was run by a cadre of EAs at the top and who seed-funded Anthropic as the lead investor with $500M of a $580M Series B round in 2021.

A recurring EA strand is its fixation on existential risk from advanced AI, advocating stronger safety research, governance, and oversight to reduce the chance of catastrophic or irreversible outcomes.

We’ve all seen this movie before, with global warming, then with Bitcoin mining (causing more global warming) and now, AI exterminating humanity.

The common through-line is that the “problem” is some unfalsifiable calamity that could happen someday and for which the only logical response is to put a bunch of globalist technocrats in charge of… well, everything.

What people didn’t seem to understand, then or now – is that the problem isn’t really about the problem – I’ve long reported on proposals that would make personal choice and individual liberty things of the past, because letting people think for themselves would be “too dangerous” for the problem at hand.

Global warming meant personal carbon quotas, limits on travel, even living space, according to some “degrowth” advocates, how many new outfits you could buy.

listening to greenoid Ulrike Herrmann sell her degrowth plan for Germany: no personal automobiles ofc, living space to be rationed at 50 sq metres/ person, train speed capped at 100 km/hour & train travel also to be rationed (everyone will get a personal kilometre allotment). pic.twitter.com/JTlTlVDwVm

— eugyppius (@eugyppius1) October 30, 2024

The panic around Bitcoin mining wasn’t about that, it was about energy – and who gets to decide how much you’re allowed to consume and what you can use it for.

Bitcoin mining today, Netflix tomorrow. Why not? Once you concede oversight to some external authority for one form of energy use, you’ve tacitly done so for all of them.

The problem that politicians and aspiring technocrats see with AI is that it grants the rabble cognitive superpowers.

More specifically, open-source AI does.

Frontier models are proprietary. They have guardrails, training biases and actively scan and filter your conversations for potential safety issues. It’s arguably their purview to do so.

But it’s the open-source software movement that is the unfiltered Promethean agent here and just you wait – we’ll soon see what the ultimate target of this AI Doom cult really is: open-source LLMs.

That is why the frontier labs are gleefully courting government oversight – not because their own products are “too dangerous” (if so, then why are you going public?) but because oversight instantly creates an AI oligopoly – a cartel, namely Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, on the inside – and everything else, effectively outlawed – at least that would be the preferred outcome.

This is the exact playbook I’ve told you about in the past, one that was described to me personally by an EIR from a Bay St. private equity firm in a meeting with two out of the four Big Four Canadian banks, back around 2015 – talking about Bitcoin:

“You get funded, you get out front, then you work with the government to create the regulations around it, and *BOOM*, you get to turn around and pull the ladder up behind you”

I still remember the look of absolute glee on his face when he got to that last bit. When I got home, I took a shower.

What To Do About It

I’ve been dutifully building out local compute capacity – both at home and thanks to our CTO, easyDNS now has a modest GPU farm out at our main datacenter.

I make it a point to download the latest open-weight models, Qwen, GLM, DeepSeek – which are, ironically, all Chinese…

But that won’t last. In fact, it’s already changing. We recently had “another country heard from” with the Japanese NII LLM-jp-4, Swallow, PLaMo and Rakuten AI 3.0 models weighing in.

France has Mistral, even Canada (yes, Canada) has Cohere Command A+ (my SolomonAI demo was, in case anybody needed to be told, a joke):

The newest AI superpower is… Canada . pic.twitter.com/xb7nVy796n

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) June 7, 2026

And from elsewhere in “Big Tech,” there are Google’s Gemma 4.0 and IBM Granite.

Any of these models could be used to start iterating software, weights, and the next generation of more powerful open-source LLMs.

In other words, it’s over.

The incumbent ruling caste basically sees this, and viscerally realize that the entire edifice of Industrial Age institutions are ripe for existential disruption. I’ve written about this many times. We’re transitioning from a linear, top-down world to a network-shaped, decentralized one.

So the next best thing they can do, since they can’t put the genie back in the bottle, is to convince the masses that AI is bad, and rogue AIs are going to literally exterminate humanity.

Hence the AI doom psyop (with another wave breaking out right now around swarms of rogue AIs), and, of course, this has become a political issue.

Now, the same people who were wearing N95 masks in 2025, adding their pronouns to their names,  putting the Ukrainian flag in their bio, keying Teslas and stomping around in “No Kings” parades are now protesting data centers.

They want you scared, stupid and subservient, instead of spending your time creating software, building out your personal business empires, not to mention analyzing public data and proofreading all these hypothetical models they use as a justification for incessantly changing the rules.

What they really need are legions of frightened and stupid voters, not cognitively supercharged and wildly entrepreneurial or creative cyberpunks.

AI Doom vs AI Boom is a choice, and the choice is yours.

Today’s post was a sneak preview from the forthcoming edition of The Sovereign Capitalist. You can get our latest special report for paid members, and the next edition of the newsletter when you grab this deal.
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What the G20, Werner, and Warsh tell us about America’s new monetary playbook

via Kane McGukin at the Mesh Point

In every transition, there are road signs along the way. Matt Dines has been one of the more accurate minds of late on the monetary and geopolitical transition we are living through.

His and Camron Otsuka’s commentary earlier this month on Mine Print Hash, post the G20 meeting in North Carolina, sheds a lot of light on major sticking points that will pave the way for both future policy and monetary frameworks. This will not happen overnight, but at the same time we’ll likely look back and say, “man, the world changed fast.”

A few highlights that matter:

1. The Financial Stability Board (FSB). Just as Great Depression meetings brought new entities for the next cycle, G20 meetings post-GFC brought the FSB for the same reason. New rules to pave the way for stability in a new economic era (2009 Pittsburgh summit). According to Dines FSB brings AI into the mix, plugging it into the Basel Accords, the last of which, Basel III, an update required because of the financial behaviors and shortcomings that caused the GFC.

As Dines points out, all we need now is a final agreement so all parties can play nice around the new rails, i.e. stablecoin/Bitcoin/SOFR rails. Global stablecoin arrangements will take final shape after the announcement of a Bretton Woods 2.0. Something I’ve discussed many times over, and something that feels nearer and nearer by the day. The most important point? Bessent has basically championed this from day one.

As Werner’s model suggests (see point four), Bessent opposes the state picking winners directly, but supports guiding private capital toward strategic ends. Video referenced in Samson’s post.

2. Bringing forward the private sector as a way to grow our way out of this. What’s critical to understand here is that during the GFC, entities and individuals were overleveraged. To combat this, the central bank expanded its balance sheet to take on all the underwater debt. Today, the script is flipped. The private sector is relatively unlevered, and the central bank is overlevered. This is important because the only way to grow an economy is to guide credit towards productive use cases. Regardless of opinion, this has been the underlying basis of the early-stage beginnings of all successful economies and empires for centuries (see Werner). For those keeping score at home, these are the breadcrumbs we’ve been given to better understand where monetary and fiscal policy are going (Office of Strategic Capital).

3. G20 is bringing in banks and private institutions, which is a paradigm shift in how credit allocation works. This is the announcement. We are going to run a different playbook for our monetary framework from now on. This is the only way out. The only way back to some state of “normal”. This is exactly what Werner lays out in the Princes of the Yen. An in-depth study of Japan and other great banking empires. Our “new approach” will be one that has succeeded many times in the past. Including during the creation of America. Why? Because this style best achieves rebuilding the US’ industrial capacity – think modernization of infrastructure. Today’s infrastructure and infrastructure for the 21st-century is inherently digital. That’s why capital formation is being directed and pointed at all things AI and digital. This is why all these related industries are points of “national security”. This is what is meant by “Hamiltonian policy”, a notion we’ve discussed before.

In short, exactly as Dines pointed out, you’re going to have to pick sides – US or China. This is what is meant by the new multi-polar world. Believe it or not, for the first time in more than two decades, “we’re actually trying to accomplish something”.

4. Credit expansion is the only way to get growth (PofY), which is why Main Street over Wall Street matters. See the Foundry School to better understand the government’s refocus on centralizing and deploying capital into productive use cases. Centralize the steering of credit, decentralize who receives it.

The key to the entire process is Matt’s highlighting of Richard Werner’s work. Richard wrote the Princes of the Yen, which outlines not only the rise and fall of the great Japanese financial system, but more importantly, the foundations of how dominant banking and financial systems work. A means by which the US economic system has drifted far away from over the last thirty to fifty years.

In simple terms, the keys are state-directed capital and credit allocation to productive uses. That’s all that matters for a budding or dominant economic system. Without it, one dies. Without it, one meanders toward financial engineering practices that eventually kill the entire system. Proper credit allocation (capital formation) is representative of early-stage and highly successful/functioning economic systems. Financialization is the sign of an aging or failing financial system. If you strip out all the complexity and jargon, it’s as simple as this.

As Werner points out, the Quantity Theory of Credit is the origin of all successful banking models that have worked for thousands of years. It started in early Asia before moving through Europe, Germany, Japan, the US, and now back to China. It was the basis of China’s rise as they’ve built out the Belt and Road system over the last decade-plus. It has allowed them to pull economic power and global sway away from the US by way of state-directed capital aimed at globally and systemically important supply chains. By doing so, China created a vast decentralized product and manufacturing hub for the world; for anything and everything at a low price. On the contrary, the US chose the more deadly path. Centralization, consolidation, and a reduction in the number of banking entities. All the while increasing the amount of financialization, leverage, and risk in the fewer and fewer nodes within the system.

https://x.com/CaitlinLong_/status/2099689636738281700

The core thesis, unlike what we’ve seen in the US over the last two decades, is decentralization. In short, you have the combination of centralized capital flows towards a decentralized private sector, which forms the basis of growth. You conquer, so to speak, in numbers.

This is a major paradigm shift from what we’ve become, but it is what we are finally seeing the US wake up to and begin to move back towards.

That’s why it feels so chaotic and out of sync. It’s different than anything we’ve seen in the last 70 to 100 years or more. It is what Hamilton implemented in the US to found our great and successful American experiment. It is what we reimplemented in the 30s to 50s to extend US dominance. But it is what we moved away from post-1971 with the creation of petrodollars and a heavy reliance on financialization and incentivization of lack of productivity (service). It is what stablecoin dollars, Bitcoin, and a SOFR based system are meant to hopefully replace. The brokenness of petrodollar and eurodollars. These steps are an attempt to revert back to something that works – productivity.

Instead of growth, for decades, we’ve implemented policies that promote fewer and fewer entities in industry and banking. The exact steps that choke off growth and kill economic systems. It also leads, as we’ve seen, to a vicious cycle of bad policy design that encourages less competition. All of which only exacerbate the problem.

Eventually, you end up right where we are. In an unproductive and overly financialized economy without the ability to provide because you’ve outsourced everything for the sake of profits, quarterly numbers, and inflated margins for analysts to bicker over. At some point, you wake up and realize the amount of power you’ve given away to others by centralizing your resources and profits into fewer and fewer hands. That’s when you realize those providing to you have decentralized their resources, profits, and state-directed capital into real economic power that eventually unseats you from number one.

For a financial system to work, the entire system must depend on the quantity of credit, as Werner lays out, and if you follow the Japanese story, which I believe we are only 25-30 years behind, then Kevin Warsh is no different than the last Central Bank prince whose specific role was to change the regime. Unfortunately, if we choose to extend, the only option is to become the carry trade for others to piggyback off of. As we see, that game can unproductively go on for decades.

As Dines notes, the QE period is over. The only move to sustain is to provide credit to those who have capacity (Main Street) and guide it into productive use cases (21st-century infrastructure).

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Yesterday, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland won Saxony-Anhalt, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, but is being treated by the media like some kind of Black Swan event, blindsiding us all.

The AfD won 43.8% of the vote, more than doubling its result from five years ago and crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU, which came in at 17.2%. Apparently, if it wasn’t for mail-in voting they would have had a majority.

As it stands, they’re within three seats of an outright majority (maybe they can follow the Liberal Party of Canada playbook and induce a few other MPs to defect).

Naturally, practically every headline describing the result contains some variation of the words “far right”.

We’ve been through this before.

A few years ago I wrote “What Does ‘Far Right’ Even Mean Anymore?” and came up with a working definition:

“Far right” is basically anything that contests the Establishment narrative.

That definition has held up remarkably well.

Because if you listen to the political establishment and its media organs, there are basically only two possible views around the problems facing Western countries.

The first is to double-down on what we’ve been already doing, irrespective of hard data showing that the policies of the last decade have made Canada the poorest performing country in the entirety of OECD nations, not to mention that the track we’re on will keep us there out until 2060…

On CNBC, Joe Kernen reminds Dom LeBlanc of some stark economic realities in Canada

“Minister LeBlanc, this is the last thing Canada needs. And I’m not sure whether you have a good feel for, for changes that need to be made in the economic approach of Canada.”

“The OECD projects… pic.twitter.com/YEyKacDVrY

— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) August 25, 2026

Here in Canada that means some variation on the policies we’ve pursued since 2015, many of them mirroring the European model: historically unprecedented immigration volumes, an ever-expanding temporary resident population, increasingly cumbersome restraints on energy and resource development, and a kind of managed degrowth dressed up as environmental stewardship.

Door #2 is that anyone who has an issue with this is a “far-right extremist”, or more recently “a maple-MAGA”. 

There is apparently no middle ground.

Stipulate that immigration is a overall a good thing but that the volume and calibre of the migrants matters? Far right.

Suggest that a country has both the right and obligation to decide who gets to live there and optimize for higher quality immigrants? Far right.

Expect that people who immigrate to this country should integrate into it, obey its laws and be a net contributor economically, instead of a perpetual drain? 

Careful now. You don’t want to sound like you’re “noticing things”.

Which raises an interesting question after yesterday’s result in Germany:

When will there be an Alternative for Canada?

How Canada’s immigration system used to work

Canada was the first country in the world to adopt a merit-based immigration system, in 1967.

The underlying concept was remarkably simple: select for people who were likely to succeed here.

Education. Language. Skilled work experience. Age. Adaptability. Ability to support yourself.

There were family reunification and humanitarian streams alongside it, of course, but the economic immigration system was unapologetically selective and we unabashedly skimmed the cream across all ethnicities, countries, races and religions.

For awhile there, we had it: The Golden Age of Multi-Culturalism – and Canada was, in fact, a classically liberal paradise. For a while.

This is the system under which my parents, my wife, her mother-in-law, our daughter and my entire extended family came to Canada.

All immigrants. Most of them non-white.

It works fine.

For decades we brought in skilled, educated and motivated people from everywhere. While they retained homages to their cultures and religions, they also worked hard, obeyed the law, they opened businesses, raised families, integrated into Canadian society and, over a generation or two, became part of our “Canadian Mosaic”.

What Changed

That basic architecture continued for decades and eventually evolved into Express Entry, which was launched under the Harper government in January 2015. Express Entry actually made the selection process more competitive, ranking eligible candidates against one another instead of simply processing qualified applicants in chronological order.

What changed after 2015 wasn’t that Canada suddenly abolished the points system, but the Trudeau Liberals made changes to the volume and the pathways.

Permanent immigration targets climbed from roughly 250,000 to 280,000 annually during the Harper years to nearly half-a-million annually by 2024. At the same time, international students, temporary workers and other temporary residents expanded far faster (places like Conestoga College became veritable “diploma factories”).

And somewhere along the way, “temporary foreign worker” stopped conjuring up an image of an agricultural worker filling a seasonal shortage and started meaning practically everybody behind the counter at Tim Hortons.

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program was never designed as a mass pipeline for cashiers and fry cooks, but successive rule changes, plus a much larger companion program that does not require a labour-market test, made low-wage service jobs a normal use of temporary labour.

What makes it worse?

As many of those living in the GTA area are aware: home invasions are up, car thefts are up, assaults are up, so is firebombing Christian churches and anti-Semitic violence. The streets of Canada’s major cities are routinely taken over by Islamic and far-left extremists who openly hate this country and pine for it’s downfall…

Islamist in Canada: “I don’t consider myself Canadian, Canada is a racist colonialist project like Israel; they will be destroyed within 25 years.”

Canada is falling. pic.twitter.com/JakiJUTx3h

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) September 5, 2026

(One wonders, why is she here then?)

And when non-citizens commit crimes, get caught, get released again, commit more crimes, and eventually, finally are convicted…

The final catalyst: The immigration discount on criminal sentencing

This may ultimately be the issue that causes the pot to boil over.

Canadian citizens watched citizens getting tackled by cops grocery stores for not wearing masks,  people got tazed at outdoor hockey rinks. The federal government imposed martial law and seized your bank accounts for donating to the Freedom Convoy.

And now,  they open the news and encounter an endless procession of home invasions, carjackings, sexual assaults, human trafficking cases and violent crimes where some variation of the same phrase seems to invariably appear:

“The accused was already out on release for previous unrelated charges.”

…and they end up being released again, and people can’t help but notice, that many such cases turn out to be, “Brampton men” (IYKYK).

17 Accused in Peel Police Extortion Network Investigation Were Not Canadian Citizens

Peel Regional Police say 17 men who are not Canadian citizens have been arrested in connection with an alleged international criminal network known as “For Brothers,” accused of targeting… pic.twitter.com/h6IPYBe4BH

— Toronto Crime Watch (@CrimewatchTO) May 25, 2026

This has become common enough that Ottawa has finally had to respond. This year the federal government enacted more than 80 changes to Canada’s bail and sentencing laws, specifically targeting repeat violent offenders, home invasions, human trafficking, auto theft and accused persons carrying numerous or serious outstanding charges.

So the problem wasn’t  some imaginary, shared hallucination that came out of a far-right echo chamber.

More corrosive still is the perception that non-citizens who commit crimes have been receiving so-called “immigration discounts” precisely because they are non-citizens and the Supreme Court, in R. v. Pham held that judges may consider the immigration consequences of a sentence.

This has lead to examples such as:

• A Kitchener man who battered his girlfriend was given a conditional discharge to avoid deportation to India
• An Ontario court of appeal reduced the sentence of a man convicted of assault and multiple probation violations by one day in order to prevent a “potentially devastating immigration consequence”. The Crown did not object.
• A foreign resident on a work permit who was working as a Bell Technician who exposed himself to a woman in who’s apartment he was servicing was granted no jail time because doing so would result in deportation. The man feels “stigmatized” and laments that he had to leave the area.
• Finally, this guy, who was caught in a Peel Regional Police sting operation, because he thought he was soliciting sex from a 15 year-old minor. He was convicted, then argued that his immigration status should not be impacted by his sentencing because he still wants to bring his wife to Canada (who presumably still wants to be with him, for some reason). Justice Paul O’Marra concurred,
  

  “A conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences, such as jeopardizing his immigration status, delaying his citizenship, and preventing him from sponsoring his wife, which would likely result in their separation”

Uh, yeah, no shit. That a conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences is the entire point of having a legal system.

The far-right extremist in me can’t help but notice, can’t restrain myself from wondering out loud…

Do we really want anybody here who can’t govern themselves accordingly before they even become a citizen?

Shouldn’t this be the most obvious filter available?

By all means, come to Canada, build a better life, work hard and follow the fucking rules.

Otherwise, don’t come, or get deported.

Too simple.

But try explaining the optics of that to a Canadian citizen who has just watched the state demonstrate zero reluctance to use its full powers against him and tell him that noticing the discrepancy makes him “literally Hitler”. 

At what point does “far right” simply mean “normal”?

One of the more revealing moments in CNN’s coverage ahead of yesterday’s German election came when correspondent Fred Pleitgen described the AfD’s supposedly radical immigration platform.

‘The AfD openly calls for mass deportation of undocumented foreigners and foreigners who have committed crimes”

The CNN dude says “mass deportation of foreigners who have committed crimes” like it’s a bad thing. https://t.co/zvFjiKEMpV

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 6, 2026

Narrator’s note: “undocumented foreigner” is someone who is there illegally.

When a person enters your country as a guest, commits a serious crime against somebody who lives there, they should, as a consequence, lose the privilege of remaining.

Holding this opinion will get you branded  “far-right” extremist.

I suspect a fairly large percentage of Canadians would consider it common sense.

Living in Canada should be considered a privilege for non-citizens, and citizenship should mean something. It should be earned through some combination of productivity, commitment, integration and time.

None of this has anything to do with race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference.

In fact, Canada’s old system demonstrated precisely how unnecessary those criteria are.

This is where the “far-right” branding becomes dangerous

The problem with reflexively branding every objection to the current system as “far right” isn’t simply that the label eventually becomes meaningless.

There is a much worse consequence.

For starters, you eliminate the legitimate middle.

People who simply say “immigration levels are too high” get called racists.

People who say temporary workers shouldn’t displace Canadian teenagers from entry-level jobs are deemed xenophobes.

People who think convicted non-citizen criminals should be deported are branded as extremists.

Eventually some of those people stop caring what you call them.

That’s when some truly unhinged egregores can arise.

I’ve been warning about this phenomenon for years, including in my book, Unassailable: when legitimate grievances are declared impermissible, they don’t just go away.

 They go underground, they tend to mutate, and they resurface as increased polarization, siege mentality and, eventually, real extremism.

We’re already seeing the emergence Canadian groups openly espousing ideas that really are extreme, including ethnic cleansing, as though removing entire populations based on their skin-colour is the only remaining solution to problems the political system refuses to confront honestly.

Somewhere there has to be a rational distinction between “we need to go back to merit-based immigration, at numbers we can assimilate” and whatever the fuck this is. pic.twitter.com/EdJ3J6yFSW

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 1, 2026

As I lamented in my earlier “Canada Was A Liberal Paradise” piece, racism in Canada was for the most part, a thing of the past.

It was over.

Aside from the fringes and the individual Archie Bunker types, Canada was, for a brief, bygone age, a largely colour-blind meritocracy.

Then we made race central to practically everything again: post-nationalism, colonialism. Settlers on stolen land – this isn’t coffee house Marxism by purple haired they/them’s from affluent families anymore – it’s literally baked into the curriculum, it’s being taught in our schools and our universities by an academia overrun with Fabians and Malthusians.  

Meanwhile, any criticism of immigration policy is synonymous with racial animus.

Is it any wonder that there are populist backlashes occurring in Germany, Ceuta, France, the UK?

The Alternative for Canada is not what you think.

I’m not here to tell you that some manner of nationalist, populist party is going to save Canada – I don’t even think the AfD or any of these reaction movements will “save” their own respective countries.

The reason is that I think this is part of a much wider issue: the collapse of the global debt-based monetary system and a Fourth Turning-style destruction of our Industrial Age institutions. The dysfunction we see here in Canada and abroad isn’t the result of the wrong political party or bad policy tracks. Those are symptoms of something much larger.

Populations vote in the wrong political parties, who embark on horrifically bad policy tracks, because there is no workable or tenable solutions to the current problems. Only emergent, alternative systems that are better suited to operating in world’s network-shaped topology and hyper-accelerating pace will persevere, and a big part of that is just staying out of the blast radius of the failing machinery  (much more on this in my new book, The Blueprint: Survive and Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline – my premium membership already has access to it)

However intractable the problems of building a global financial system atop debt-based money, the situation is even more acute here in Canada, where the older generations still believe everything the CBC tells them, and the younger ones are indoctrinated to hate this country from pre-school onward.

In other words, Canada is cooked, and the “Alternative for Canada” is not having a different party in power, it isn’t having some establishment outsider like Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke entering politics (although that would be refreshing), or a firebrand like Kevin O’Leary taking over the CPC (which also would be awesome).

Nor is it becoming “the 51st State” or merging with the US (although anybody who’s ever read Dianne Francis’ book on the topic would find themselves agreeing with a lot of it. It was written before the rise of Trump and TDS infected the majority of the Canadian “Elbows Up” contingent).

For our cousins out in Alberta, it’s not even separation.

All of these things might forestall the inevitable, add a decade or two onto the long descent of The Industrial Age – but the real solution in an era where politics is just institutionalized grift and the masses are intentionally dumbing themselves down, the way forward is through radical personal sovereignty, critical thinking skills, financial independence, and optionality. Lots and lots of optionality.

The Alternative for Canada is you.

If you’re thinking about ways to acquire more personal agency in a chaotic world, check out the executive summary of my forthcoming book The Blueprint, free when you sign up for The Bombthrower mailing list.
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“You just wait until the next bear market…”

Last month, I talked about how many of the legendary investors I’ve long followed as well as many of my contemporary financial commentators (speaking specifically of the contrarian ilk), are almost unanimous in the opinion that the AI trade is well into bubble territory and stocks in general are overvalued. Hell, even I think that and I’m personally “all in” on AI and have a fair bit of equities exposure to it (not a tonne, but it’s there, and the biggest winners in the TSC portfolio lately have all been AI stocks and HPC stocks).

Angela sent me this Diary of a CEO interview with Jeremy Grantham – another legend – and she said it was scary. At his peak he managed something like $165B AUM, but he’s down to $80B or $90B now (he also says the only reason he’s still counted as a billionaire today, personally, is because they include the money he’s given away. Grantham has donated over 90% of his net worth to the Grantham Foundation, which invests and incubates primarily green-tech innovation to combat climate change.

Although Thomas Braziel, whose name you might recognize as a notable distressed asset investor who specializes in crypto i.e. Mt Gox claims, FTX, put out an interesting analysis of Grantham’s green tech foundation’s filings – and surmised that what he’s saying on the talk-show circuit isn’t lining up with where he’s actually allocating the foundation’s …money )

Grantham occupies an exalted perch in the pantheon of institutional investors, so when he opines on something, it tends to get picked up on, which one may find somewhat quizzical, given his lifetime batting average isn’t really in the same league as the likes of Buffet, Munger, Klarman, et al.

His lifetime average returns? The closest analog could be the lifetime average of the GMO Global Asset Allocation Composite, which he co-founded.

Their number? 8.43%. And 0.8% of that was because of a one-time litigation settlement received in 2024

Warren Buffet’s lifetime batting average is pushing 20% (19.8%).

The S&P itself, 10%.

In case you’re wondering how somebody became a billionaire by lagging the major index by 200bp over their entire career, it’s because Grantham is proficient at one thing in particular: not losing money.

The TL;DR from the DOAC interview? A lot of people are about to lose a lot of money.

When Stephen Bartlett told him he was invested in SpaceX, Grantham dead-panned, “Good luck with that”.

Bitcoin? “It’s a zero”.

The interview went a bit viral and I saw a lot of “Billionaire says Bitcoin is worthless” headlines in the mainstream financial press. Grantham has since been on a punditry tour (perhaps in promotion of his latest book, “The Making of a Permabear” – yes, really); and the soundbites that are being repeatedly teased out from them are his “Bitcoin is a zero” sermons, in one case getting into a somewhat heated exchange with Joe Kernen on CNBC – where Kernen, incredibly, makes some of my points far less diplomatically than I have here.

At least it’s not just Bitcoiners getting into scraps! pic.twitter.com/pfJyXM3ZFc

— JOEY (@JoeyTweeets) June 26, 2026

After Grantham trotted out the usual “no use case”, “there’s no there there”, “it’s a bubble”, Kernen straight-armed Grantham in the face with his underperformance over the past two decades,

“You’ve done a great disservice to anybody who’s listened to you over the last twenty years”.

Grantham’s response and attempt at a defence, combined with something else he said in the DOAC interview, are all leading up to my point here, while being 100% oblivious to it:

To Joe Kernen: he said “We’ve been in a bull market since 2009, let’s see how all this stuff holds up when the next bear market hits”

To Steven Bartlett: he cautioned how Amazon sold off a staggering 92% during the Dotcom bust.

During the drive to Hamilton for a board meeting, I listened to this short Alex Hormozi clip and his analogy (which he cribbed from Brian Johnson) hit me full force and I finally had a working metaphor that explained what I’ve been trying to articulate about these living legends of finance.

That they’re underestimating the significance of fiat debasement is true, but it doesn’t really explode in your brain as much as make your eyes glaze over.

The analogy is fish are swimming around in water. Some of them become experts at swimming. They train their entire lives, they practice every day, they study the expert swimmers of yore, and they analyze nearly every aspect of the water they inhabit: it’s PH levels, alkaline, currents, flow – everything.

They know how a slight variance in one factor impacts the others – they know “which way the current is going”.

But over time, the water heats up; they may pick up on this, but they’re never quite prepared for what it means beyond a certain point.

When that point arrives, the water evaporates – and now it’s gas. Steam.

Setting aside for our purposes how this would fry the fish, imagine they’re still alive, but now they’re trying to apply everything they know about swimming in water to this new environment, which is gaseous, not liquid.

They would be flailing and flapping around like the proverbial “fish out of water”.

What happened?

They were never wrong about their fluid dynamics.

The physics changed and they had no model for the new reality.

Hormozi’s short clip was applying this metaphor to AI – which is certainly among the key drivers of the “monetary physics change” that we are now undergoing.

But the point of no return, when the phase shift started, was – I believe, and as Raoul Pal has always said – the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009.

That was when the water started turning to gas.

Grantham’s own yardstick measures the current bull market from then – when the central banks stepped in, when The Big Print started and when interest rate suppression and credit expansion became permanent features of the global monetary system (I would argue that the process started in 1980-82, and the GFC was a major tipping point).

Yes, Amazon came off 92% when the dotCom bubble burst. But anybody who had bought, even at the high right before that, is now up about 4,642.7 %

On the new Sovereign Capitalist site, we can model all this out interactively (see below).

On its surface, Grantham’s fixation on loss avoidance serves a purpose (recall Buffet’s top rules of investing: number one is “Don’t lose money”, number two is “See Rule number one”).

If I ever experienced a staggeringly huge life-changing windfall in one moment, I would carve out a “retire your bloodline”-type allocation and hand it to a guy like Grantham (more likely it would be Vito Maida  over at Patient Capital, here in Canada).

But being good at preserving capital has its own opportunity cost, which is far more pronounced now that we’ve traversed the inflection point into the Exponential Age.

The world has transitioned from flat to hyper-cubed – the architecture is completely different now, and the linear measuring stick known as fiat money is ill equipped for the task of describing it.

To Grantham’s point “you just wait until the next bear market”, there won’t be a next bear market, not until we change that measuring stick.

Until the monetary regime change happens – that “change in physics” – any drawdown, no matter how deep, will be papered over with incessant Big Prints until the system itself completes its metamorphosis.

Today’s post was an excerpt from The Sovereign Capitalist my recently relaunched premium service. This goes beyond a dashboard, it’s more of an operating system for high agency net-producers.  All members get access to the full pre-release version of my new book: The Blueprint – Survive & Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline.

Try it out for a month for $7, when you use the promo code TSC_PREVIEW26 here.

There was a version of this country that worked.

This was a country that used to punch above its weight across all key metrics and in a large part, did so espousing classical liberal values.

Multiculturalism here was both uncontroversial and functional. People came from everywhere, integrated, and got on with building lives, businesses and contributing to that overall ethos Canadian culture.

Minority rights and gender equality stopped being fights and became defaults.

Ontario, the most populous province, ran one of the cleanest grids on the continent for half a century on the back of CANDU, a reactor we designed ourselves. Peaceful, homegrown, zero-carbon, clean energy, and nobody lost any sleep over it. In fact, most people probably weren’t even aware of that.

By every classical liberal measure that actually mattered, Canada was a success story that inspired the rest of the world.

I want to be precise about the word “liberal”. The small-l, “classic” version meant open markets, open minds, equal treatment, and a state clueful enough to stay out of the way. That Canada earned its stature honestly.

Then, in 2015, the big-L Liberals took over the small-l idea. They have spent a decade undertaking what looks like something between a “controlled demolition” and act of subversion.

Start with energy, our single largest missed opportunity

We can’t build pipelines. A country sitting on one of the largest energy endowments on earth cannot get its own product to its own coast or even to its own citizens. In 2017 the Trudeau government changed the rules and moved the goalposts on the Energy East pipeline which resulted in its cancellation.

Canada is sitting on the fourth largest oil reserves on earth, after other political temperate zones: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and we import between 500K – 600K barrels per day, nearly all of it, from the United States (“Elbows Up!”)

When Germany came knocking in 2022, Chancellor Scholz flew here and asked, practically begged, for us to sell them natural gas. Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and that put the Germans (which had wisely demolished their own nuclear power grid) into an awkward spot of having to buy energy from Putin.

Our answer?  There has “never been a strong business case.” Maybe we could interest the Germans in some solar panels and windmills. They went and signed a fifteen-year deal with Qatar instead. Qatar. Not exactly a human-rights exemplar, especially during Pride Month.

We did eventually sign an LNG deal with Germany, off the West Coast, in May of this year. Four years late, for volumes that would have looked modest in 2022. Better than nothing. Slower than everything.

None of this was an accident of incompetence. It was ideology. A decade of WEF-flavoured talking points, degrowth dressed up as climate virtue, and a governing instinct that treated Canadian resource wealth as something to apologize for.

Ottawa’s own reports spelled out the anti-capitalist drift in black and white (Bombthrower covered one here). When the environment file is handed to a former Greenpeace activist pinned to the far left of the spectrum, the pipeline math and the LNG math and the nuclear math all start to make a grim kind of sense.

Speaking of nuclear. The recent strategy was supposed to prove we still build things. “10 New Nuclear Reactors!” Oh boy.

Read past the headline. The plan is:

• two reactors under construction …by 2035, and
• five more “planned” (or “under development”) by… (checks notes)… 2040.

Planned. Under development. Unserious.

Meanwhile…. over in China,  they’re projecting roughly 200 gigawatts of total capacity, which means about 100 new reactors, finished and powered-on by 2040. They finish a reactor in about five years, and they a couple dozen under construction simultaneously. We are going to have started two.

We invented the CANDU. We are now a rounding error in the industry we helped create.

On Indigenous affairs, honesty requires two things at once

Most people can only manage one.

The first is that the historical record is genuinely damning. Broken treaties. Mishandled reserves. The residential schools. Generational neglect. Like slavery in the United States and elsewhere across the world, our treatment of First Nations casts a long shadow, and pretending otherwise isn’t helpful.

The second is that none of us alive today built that system. Nobody alive today bears any culpability for it. How could we?

The dichotomy between responsibility and duty was always so cogently captured in a lecture I remember in college, given by the late Jack Richardson: the great Canadian producer. I remember it well, but I’ll paraphrase:

“When you’re the producer on a record, your job is to deliver the master to the label – full stop.

Anything that gets in the way of that: the bass player dies of a heroin overdose, somebody burned the studio down, the lead singer’s wife left him and now he’s out on a ledge…

…all kinds of things can go wrong and none of them may actually your fault, but every single one of them is your problem.

You have to deliver the fucking record. That’s on you“.

That is exactly where reconciliation should sit. Something we did not cause and still have to remedy… somehow.

But nothing that we do are actual remedies.

Instead of the hard, unglamorous business of clean water, functioning services and honoured agreements, we got theatre: Never-ending land acknowledgements read off laminated cards. Streets renamed, it seems deliberately, to incomprehensible text strings. Empty gestures that move no needle on any stated goal and instead breed the exact resentment they claim to be healing.

A growing share of the public has stopped seeing any of this as a lingering injustice to be addressed but now views it as a permanent guilt-management industry to tune out.

The elephant in the room: Immigration

Immigration was our masterpiece.

For decades we skimmed the cream of the planet. Skilled, educated, motivated people from every culture and country, selected through a points system that drilled down on simple KPI: can you come here, integrate, and build something? Successful applicants kept their heritage, celebrated it, added it to the mix, …and got to work.

We took people on humanitarian grounds too, generously so, but never more than we could economically and culturally absorb.

That gave us extraordinary dynamism. Entrepreneurs and investors who arrived with nothing and hit it out of the park. Chamath Palihapitiya came as a refugee from Sri Lanka and became one of the most influential venture investors of his generation.

Prem Watsa came from India and built Fairfax into a company that earned him the “Canadian Warren Buffett” tag honestly.

Legends, both. We could use as many of those as the world will send us.

Then we changed the filter.

The points system asked whether you could succeed here. The volume model, switched on after (guess when?) 2015, asked almost nothing. The targets stopped being calibrated to housing, services, and absorption capacity, and got calibrated to two different things instead: cheap imported labour for the mega-employers who lobbied for it, and a river of tuition to turn colleges into degree farms selling permanent residency with a diploma stapled to it.

The numbers got loud. Population grew faster in 2023 than in any year since the 1950s, almost entirely through immigration, into a housing market that was already broken. We’ve all seen the graph, I don’t need to repost it. By 2024 Ottawa was admitting north of 480,000 permanent residents a year, with temporary-resident inflows stacked on top that pushed the real figure far higher.

Then, even the Capital-L Liberals blinked. In late 2024 they slashed the targets and Justin Trudeau conceded, in his own words, that they “didn’t get the balance quite right.” Permanent-resident targets came down to 395,000 for 2025 and 380,000 for 2026, with brutal cuts to international students. Mark Carney, having replaced him, kept the lower numbers. Governments do not reverse that hard, that fast, on policies that are working.

Here is the part that gets people shouted down for raising, so let me be clear here:

This is a screening argument, and nothing else.

When you select immigrants, you screen. At least you’re supposed to.

Skills, language, education, and yes, background. When you stop selecting and simply move volume, you stop screening, and you get the entire Bell-curve of humanity – and quite possibly the wrong tail of it. That includes people from low-trust societies who carry their grievances and factional conflicts across the border with them, and it includes the criminal minority that any large, unvetted inflow will contain.

Ethnicity is beside the point here. The removed filter is the entire point.

The failure compounds when institutions respond to the predictable problems by looking away or dismissing credible criticisms as racism. When a serious crime involving a recent arrival gets softened in the media coverage, or when the judge sentencing a convicted violent criminal dials back the penalties in order to avoid deportation, ordinary people notice. They are not stupid.

People start rumbling about “two-tier” justice systems and “immigration discounts” for criminals, and they are correct.

True story: Racism in Canada had been all but eradicated.

This is reason I bothered writing any of this. Because it’s Canada Day. And I see too many reactions to what has happened in this country get boiled down to the lowest-IQ filter that exists: racism.

For what now seems like a bygone Golden Age, racism in this country was basically over.

Structural racism had been excised from the systems and institutions while garden variety cultural racism was confined to relatively few fringe dwellers. Every few families had one of those Archie Bunker type uncles and nobody really took them seriously.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians, born here and immigrants alike, simply did not organize their lives around skin colour. That was the win. That was paradise. We had it.

Some may say we always sorted ourselves, that Little Italy and Little India prove it (“Checkmate, multiculturists!”). They actually prove the opposite. Ethnic neighbourhoods are on-ramps: the first generation clusters for the food and the familiarity, the second scatters to the suburbs and marries out (including inter-marriage with other groups); and the whole thing runs on choice and empties itself by design. A multi-generational bakery on a corner is culture. A Tim Horton’s staffed with TFWs is policy. The paradise ran on the former and its destruction happens on the latter.

Look at where a decade of dismantling this has left us.

For starters, racism is back from both sides, with a twist:

Structural racism came back, only this time wearing progressive branding. Job postings openly signal racial and other identity preferences. Criminal sentencing now weighs a defendant’s race, background and immigration status.  A system that largely made race irrelevant has spent the last decade making it central again, then acts astonished at the reaction.

And because of that reaction cultural racism is now, also back with a vengeance. Resentment festers among perfectly normal people, including fully integrated immigrants from the earlier waves who did everything right and now watch the standard collapse behind them. That Archie-Bunker racism, the crude ambient kind we had mostly shamed out of public life, is back and being said out loud. Grassroots organizations that used to sit at the crank-fringe are growing past it. Social media runs on lowest-common-denominator rage bait, and a lot of it is now straight-up racist.

We spent forty years turning down the temperature on race in this country and it worked. Then, in the name of turning it down further, we cranked it al the way back up.

The title isn’t a joke, it’s the truth.

A classically liberal paradise is precisely what we built. Open, tolerant, prosperous, boringly functional, (“peace, order, good government”) the envy of people who had to flee places that were none of those things. The small-l achievement was real, and it was ours.

The big-L party inherited it, mistook the inheritance for a mandate to undertake a mass civilizational social engineering project, and spent a decade trading competence for platitudes, energy for symbolism, selection for volume, and hard-won racial peace for a fresh cycle of division marketed as inclusivity.

We had this one in the bag.

Now, not so much.

Happy Canada Day.

If you’re a net-producer, high agency Canadian interested in joining a like-minded group for the politically homeless in Canada, check out Ready.ca

If you are new to the Equibit story, please read The Assassination of Equibit, originally released in 2023.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the world celebrated the end of one of history’s most oppressive regimes. East Germans stormed the headquarters of the Ministry for State Security — the infamous Stasi — desperate to seize and protect the mountains of files that documented decades of tyranny. What they uncovered was more horrifying than most could have imagined.

Among the archives was Directive 1/76, issued in 1976 by Stasi chief Erich Mielke. This document formalized Zersetzung — “decomposition” or “corrosion” — a systematic program of psychological warfare designed to destroy “hostile-negative” individuals and groups without the messiness of arrests, trials, or overt violence. The goal was simple and demonic: fragment, paralyze, disorganize, and isolate the target so completely that they could no longer function as a threat — all while maintaining the appearance of normal life.

The Sheer Evil of Zersetzung

Historian Hubertus Knabe, one of the foremost experts on the Stasi, described it chillingly: “The Stasi didn’t try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them… by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships.”

Tactics included:

• Covert home invasions to move furniture, change alarm clocks, or swap everyday items (classic gaslighting)
• Systematic smear campaigns using true, false, and twisted information
• Engineered professional and social failures
• Provocation, anonymous threats, and orchestrated “coincidences”
• Destruction of marriages, friendships, and family ties through rumors and planted evidence
• Sabotage of careers, vehicles, and medical care

Victims often had no idea the Stasi was responsible. Many believed they were losing their minds. Mental breakdowns and suicides were common outcomes.

One victim, Jürgen Fuchs, a writer and dissident, called it “psychosocial crime” and “an assault on the human soul.” Many survivors suffered lifelong trauma, paranoia, depression, and shattered trust. Some received modest compensation decades later, but for most, the damage was irreparable. Families were torn apart. Careers evaporated. Lives were slowly, methodically erased from within.

The Stasi built an enormous network of civilian informants — the Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs). By 1989, there were roughly 91,000 full-time Stasi employees and between 173,000 and 189,000 unofficial informants. This meant roughly one in every 50 to 60 East German citizens was actively collaborating with the secret police — an astonishing level of societal penetration. Some estimates, including occasional informants, run as high as one in six or seven adults.

These informants came from every walk of life: neighbors, colleagues, friends, even family members. Recruitment methods ranged from ideological appeal and bribes to blackmail and threats against loved ones. Once enlisted, they were used to spread rumors, provoke conflicts, sabotage opportunities, and report intimate details for the creation of detailed “psychograms” — psychological profiles used to exploit every weakness.

From East Germany to Canada: The Equibit Case

What happened to Chris Horlacher and Equibit Group bears unmistakable hallmarks of this same strategy — updated with 21st-century digital tools and operating within a Five Eyes democracy.

As documented across the Equibit Factum, technical forensic reports, live videos, court filings, and interviews on equibitlawsuit.com, the campaign against Horlacher and his company included:

• Prolonged surveillance and contact by prime-suspect Marc Godard beginning as early as 2010 — when Chris was engaged in online liberty activism.
• What appears to be the recruitment and corruption of Sergei Sachkov, lead Core developer at Equibit Group, by CSIS.
• Intense and malicious harassment by the Ontario Securities Commission, and demonstrable entrapment efforts.
• Marc’s attempts to involve Chris with questionable individuals post-Equibit, more entrapment schemes via financial crimes.
• Router compromises via the TR-069 protocol, with logs showing impossible 1981 timestamps and persistent remote access.
• DNS man-in-the-middle attacks rerouting traffic through U.S. servers.
• Microsoft ecosystem intrusions where private memos were observed copying themselves in real time.
• De-banking, institutional pressure, and coordinated defamation campaigns.
• Insider betrayal, code forking, rebranding (OCEAN → Tesseract), a coordinated effort to dismantle Equibit Group from within.

Marc Godard’s background in Cognitive Science would have been particularly useful in constructing the kind of detailed psychograms the Stasi relied upon — mapping personality weaknesses, relationships, and pressure points for maximum psychological effect.

This was not random crime or bad luck. It was a sustained, multi-vector operation designed to isolate, financially ruin, discredit, and psychologically break a founder who dared to become a fierce advocate for limited, constitutional government.

Zersetzung Has Gone Global

The Stasi needed a vast human network because they lacked today’s digital omnipresence. In the Five Eyes countries (Canada, USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand), agencies no longer need millions of informants on the ground. They have tools that allow remote, deniable, scalable decomposition: compromised routers, operating system-level access, financial system cooperation, and institutional capture.

What Horlacher has experienced — and meticulously documented — strongly suggests that modern Zersetzung is not only possible in Canada and its allies, but is likely already being deployed against innovators, dissidents, and threats to the established order throughout the country.

A Call to Global Conscience

This is cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. It is extrajudicial psychological torture dressed up in the language of national security. It violates every principle of human dignity and the rule of law.

We call on readers to take immediate action:

1. Visit https://equibitlawsuit.com — read the evidence, watch the videos, review the technical reports.
2. Submit a detailed complaint to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (sr-torture@ohchr.org), including all available documentation and requesting an urgent inquiry into the use of modern Zersetzung-style tactics by intelligence agencies in democratic nations.
3. Contact appropriate NGOs and oversight bodies:  Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Privacy International, and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency.
4. Share this story relentlessly. Public awareness is the greatest threat to these shadow operations.

What was done to Equibit and Chris Horlacher must not be allowed to become the new normal. If governments in the West can wage silent war on their own citizens — innovators, thinkers, builders — using the refined cruelty of the Stasi, then none of us are safe.

The Berlin Wall fell. The files were opened. The world saw the evil and recoiled in horror.

Today, new walls are being built in the digital realm — invisible, pervasive, and far more sophisticated. We must tear them down with the same courage and determination.

The time for silence is over. The time for exposure, outrage, and accountability is now.

Demand an international inquiry. Demand justice for the victims of digital Zersetzung. Demand that this hideous violation of human rights ends.

Because if we do not act, the decomposition will spread — until freedom itself is nothing but a memory.

Stay tuned to equibitlawsuit.com for more updates on the Equibit lawsuits against CSIS and related actors

Two inexorable realities have come into sharpened focus over the last month or so. Both are themes we have been exploring and monitoring – one, since practically the very beginning of this service, the other, over the last year or so.

The first is the unsustainable nature of the global monetary system: we are not unique in calling that out – it’s practically a trope and has been for a long time.

The other is the existential necessity to win the new arms race – which is less about kinetic weapons now and more about computation, information and 5GW.

In the past, when the Soviet Union put as astronaut into space before NASA, it was a humiliation and a psychological defeat – but the USA arguably still held strategic advantage where it counted at the time, which was here on earth, with more nuclear missiles, tanks and military bases than the USSR.

The US space program kicked into overdrive, and NASA was able to slingshot past the Russians, and over time and across more dimensions, the Soviets never caught back up or retook the lead – in anything.

To this day, Russia’s resurgence onto the world stage – articulated through concepts such as Neo-Eurasionism or “Third Rome” (basically their version of “Manifest Destiny”) – is more than anything, an aspirational framework for “getting up to speed”, while rationalizing their inability to do so in traditionalist, volk-ish trappings.

Their high priest of this quixotic mix, is “Fourth Political Theory” author, university professor and philosopher, Alexander Dugin – whose other titles include “Last War of the World-Island” and – perhaps most tellingly, although least known of his works here in the West – “Katechon and Revolution”.

The word “Katechon” (from the Greek: ὁ κατέχων / τὸ κατέχον which translates loosely as “the Restrainer”) is important in the Russian collective psyche because it contains a massive “tell”.On its surface, it’s supposed to encompass Russia’s “state messianism” and symbolize its opposition to The West – their “Antikeimenos”.

The day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dugin posted on Facebook “Now we are in a war of the spirits. Katechon vs. Antekeimenos”.

Antikeimenos (from the Greek: ὁ ἀντικείμενος) is the term St. Paul uses in Thessalonians 2:4 for the figure of the Antichrist. It appears exactly once in the Greek New Testament, in that single verse. The literal sense is “the one who opposes” or “the one set against”.

And therein lays “the tell” – what the Russian collective psyche is admitting to, and trying to come to grips with, and it is this:

If we reframe the Cold War as the first technological contest between Great Powers, Russia has to confront the fact that they lost – and they’ve never been able to recover from it.

In the contemporary pantheon of international relations and political economy, absolutely nobody today thinks of Russia as a “great power”. When you peel back the ideations of “The Fifth Empire” or “The Soviet Union 2.0”, you get to that underlying underdog mentality – trying to recapture super-power status.

They lost the space race. Then the Cold War, and now they can’t even beat the Ukraine.

That was supposed to be an overwhelming military victory, but the Ukrainians, mainly through wholesale adoption of drone warfare, have managed to give the invaders a rough time of it, even penetrating deep into Russian territory using high-altitude balloons to deliver suicide drones.

Make no mistake, all that financial support from the West aside, the Ukrainians have been able to stave off complete defeat through technological means and because cheap, sophisticated weaponry (drones) completely upended the conventional battlefield.Such are the travails of an erstwhile great power that has lost a technological competition. You can bet today’s incumbents – namely the USA and China – understand these stakes, and neither of them has any intention of losing:

• AI
• Energy
• High Performance Computing (which leads us into)
• The Space Race 2.0
• Quantum Computing

This is why the “catastrophic climate change” narrative has been rather suddenly sunsetted in The West (at least, the non-Euro west): we need more energy, including nuclear – lots, and lots of nuclear.

It’s why White House Asset Management (WHAM) is pumping money into quantum computing companies (including, from our wish list: D-Wave, which we hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on).

It’s also why China has moved further out on the interventionist side of the state capitalism spectrum, with mandated “Capital Reallocation” programs where the government has issued structural directives forcing state-owned pensions, insurance funds, and enterprise pools to funnel trillions of yuan directly into equities, while the state-backed “National Team” continues steady, strategic purchases of domestic ETFs to put a floor under major indices.

The Chinese debt overhang on bad real estate loans is even larger than what we had here in the run up to the GFC, so regulators there are pulling out all the stops to keep the balloon duct-taped together:In early 2026, Beijing quietly abolished enforcement of its strict “three red lines” policy. Developers are no longer required to report monthly data regarding debt-to-equity, cash, and asset metrics, freeing up fresh credit channels.

They’ve backstopped an additional 7 trillion yuan under a new “property project whitelist” mechanism, which extends developer loan maturities by up to five additional years to stave off defaults.

Commercial and state banks are aggressively financed to help local governments buy up unsold, completed housing inventory directly from developers to convert them into subsidized public housing (this is a nominally communist country, so why not).

To top it all off, we’re seeing capital flight restrictions – going so far as to prevent technology transfers to the West via acquisition (we covered last month how Meta’s acquisition of Manus was blocked and reversed by state authorities).

Any rational observer of finance and economics knows that all world economies, including The World Economy, is levitating in mid-air buoyed by stimulus, signal suppression and pure white-knuckled will.

In prior years, when all the financial commentators and contrarians were waiting for this to hit a wall, we all marvelled (at least I did) how the system was kept on the rails at all costs – because too much was riding on it to let rational economics and market restructuring take their course.

That was before AI. Before it became apparent that not being number one in this technological arms race had civilizational consequences, like joining Russia as another “also-ran”.

Once again, the contradictions and distortions that this imperative amplifies are bubbling to the surface.

On one hand – all rational analysis of the market is screaming “overbought”. Practically every financial commentator I came up following is looking at this and making comparisons with the dot-com bubble; the AI high flyers now look a lot like Global Crossing, Nortel, L3, VA Linux before they all imploded.

My X feed is absolutely jam-packed with people posting screenshots of 7-figure trading accounts that were ostensibly amassed in under a year trading HPC, AI, chip makers, memory, and now quantum (again).

Zerohedge has remarked on the circular nature of the AI economy more than once:

Note that the above-linked article (from which the screenshot came) is a Tyler Durden original, it is not a repost of somebody else’s article.

Tyler has this annoying trait: he’s always early and he’s often right.

Yet it’s possible the man himself buried the lede (from that screen cap):

“The Infinite Money Glitch”

By all rational and financially coherent measures, the equities markets are overvalued, beyond bubble levels and primed for a catastrophic drop on the order of, pick one, 50%, 75%, 90%. Yes. 90%. We’ve been pumping since 2008 folks. Even further if you go back to the beginning of the equities supercycle in 1982.

After the dot-com bust, we were in a bear market for two years. When the GFC finally hit, it was straight down for a good 18 months. When COVID was coming, the banking system was starting to crack up under the hood (the reverse repo situation in late 2019) but when it came unglued in March, it was about two weeks before the monetary bazookas were unleashed and everything reversed hard of the March low.

What happens after that is instructive:

The Regional Banking crisis erupted, and was even larger in nominal terms than the GFC when it came to the amount of assets tied to bank failures. The Fed threw the taper overboard, did a massive liquidity injection and after a failed attempt to pick and choose winners in terms of which banks to save, caved in to public uproar and backstopped everything.

Liberation Day, Japan-ageddon, Israel/Iran/Gaza barely perturb the trajectory.

If you switch out of linear mode for that long-term chart, and go to logarithmic – you should recognize the pattern:

It’s the same as Bitcoin, which is the same as gold during the Weimar Republic and it’s the same signal being broadcast from every one of those charts.

We should acknowledge that the Nasdaq took 15 years to recover from the Dotcom shakeout, which is a long time to be underwater if you bought in at the tippy-top.

But I believe two things have changed since the GFC:

The first is that tech, despite taking the biggest hit, almost by definition when the Dotcom bubble blew, also became the apex asset class from here on out.

If you look at the long-term chart for the Nasdaq, it basically went parabolic for the first half of the equities supercycle, and formed a double-bottom from the Dotcom crash to the GFC

After that it blasted off and has left everything else in its dust:

This makes perfect sense, because tech is the asset class of choice in a world driven by acceleration and tachyosis.

We can’t put Bitcoin in that chart because it’s basically a divide by zero error. But if we take the commonly held, first market price ever for Bitcoin, which was $0.10, it pencils out to an absurd value. Call it 77,719,900% and leave it there.

It’s not uncommon to hear criticisms of Bitcoin that are simply “all it does is follow tech”.

Yeah, no shit. That’s because it is tech.

The other thing I believe about all this, is Raoul Pal’s theory that after the GFC, the world’s central banks got together and made a deal to never let anything like that happen, ever again.

Which means that central bank balance sheets will grow in perpetuity, and stock market will never have a meaningful bear market – for the remainder of the duration of the current monetary system:

That’s from Raoul Pal’s “Everything Code”, it goes on:

• They don’t understand valuations are a function of debasement.
• They don’t understand why technology rises and valuations can keep rising.
• They don’t understand why crypto is being adopted and is the fastest horse in the race.
• They don’t understand why the dollar keeps rising.
• They don’t understand that energy transition is real and is crucial for the world economy.
• They don’t understand why rates won’t remain high.
• They don’t understand why GPT4/AI is the biggest humanity-scale event since the splitting of the atom.
• They don’t understand why this is all so fucking deflationary. They want their sticky inflation. They will not get it.
• They don’t understand why nothing in their world makes sense.

We understand it. Because we know the cheat code, which is:

Put the chart into logarithmic view.

Look at the X axis.

Then own the assets that are outpacing everything else on that scale.

That’s it.

Get on the Bombthrower mailing list here. Premium members of The Sovereign Capitalist have already received advance copies of my new book: The Blueprint: Survive and Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline – we launch in two weeks, get on the invite list here. 

Follow me on X here.

If you are new to the Equibit story, please read The Assassination of Equibit, originally released in 2023.

Chris Horlacher has documented multiple sophisticated intrusions through his Microsoft ecosystem. These incidents go well beyond ordinary malware and align with key moments in his legal activities. They indicate a close collaboration between Microsoft and the Five Eyes to deliver undetectable spyware onto targeted devices in order to steal information and interfere with the normal functions of the computer.

Key Incidents of Unauthorized Access

• July 19, 2025 – Unauthorized Sharing of Sensitive Memo
  A confidential memo was suddenly made publicly shareable via OneDrive using Chris’s own Microsoft account. He did not perform this action. During the event, his computer’s built-in screen recorder was disabled. Luckily Chris was able to capture the event with his cell phone’s camera.

Watch the incident:

• August 27, 2025 – Spontaneous File Movement
  A critical security report analyzing router compromises was mysteriously moved to the desktop.
• October 27, 2025 – Camera Roll Breach
  OneDrive logs showed someone browsing the Camera Roll folder containing images taken directly by the device, as well as two files related to psychology that provide insight as to the hacker’s identity (more on that in later posts!)

Watch the Camera Roll intrusion:

Mass Windows & BIOS Updates – Highly Suspicious Timing

On August 18, 2025, immediately before a strategy call with his lawyers about upcoming discovery sessions, Chris’s computer began installing an unusually large wave of updates — including Windows, BIOS, and more than a dozen other components. He described it as one of the largest simultaneous update pushes he had ever experienced. Call quality then rapidly deteriorated and the connection was terminated exactly when the discussion turned to sensitive topics.

This event is especially concerning in the context of Bill C-22, Canada’s proposed Lawful Access Act. Part 2 of the bill would require electronic service providers (including software and operating system vendors) to build and maintain technical capabilities to facilitate authorized access to information by law enforcement and CSIS. Critics argue this could effectively compel companies like Microsoft to enable mechanisms for delivering signed updates or payloads that Windows would trust by default. Because Microsoft-signed updates are automatically trusted by the operating system, they represent a powerful and nearly undetectable vector for delivering targeted tools to specific users.

For more on Bill C-22:

• Department of Justice Backgrounder
• Michael Geist Analysis

Nightmare Eclipse Zero-Days and Browsergate

These incidents occurred against the backdrop of major Microsoft security controversies. In 2026, researcher Nightmare-Eclipse (also known as Chaotic Eclipse) publicly released several high-impact Windows zero-days, including exploits targeting Windows Defender and privilege escalation mechanisms. Some researchers have speculated that certain vulnerabilities may have been known internally for extended periods before public disclosure.

Additionally, Browsergate exposed serious allegations against LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft). According to a detailed report by Fairlinked e.V.:

• LinkedIn allegedly injected JavaScript that scanned users’ browsers for over 6,000 Chrome extensions.
• The script reportedly collected detailed device telemetry and extension data without clear user consent or prominent disclosure in the privacy policy.
• This allowed LinkedIn to build extensive user profiles, potentially identifying competitors, corporate tools, and other sensitive software.

The revelations led to privacy lawsuits and widespread criticism. You can read the original report here: BrowserGate.eu

Broader Implications

These events demonstrate deep access into Chris’s systems, precise timing aligned with legal activities, and the ability to manipulate core operating system functions. When combined with other documented technical attacks, they highlight growing risks around proprietary platforms and the potential for state-level exploitation.

Further Reading & Updates:

• Additional technical evidence and interviews in the Media section
• Ongoing lawsuit developments at equibitlawsuit.com

This case raises important questions about digital privacy, corporate responsibilities, and the balance between security and individual rights. Share this post if you believe these issues deserve greater public scrutiny.

Stay tuned to equibitlawsuit.com for more updates on the Equibit lawsuits against CSIS and related actors.

And what you can do about it
(besides complaining).

Palantir dropped a manifesto last weekend. 22 bullet points distilled from Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, posted to X with the casual framing of “because we get asked a lot.” I haven’t seen a reaction so widespread, unanimously opposed and viscerally aghast since James Damore’s infamous “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.

The usual suspects lost their shit. Engadget called it “the ramblings of a comic book villain.”

TechCrunch clutched its pearls at the bits about “regressive” cultures and “vacant and hollow pluralism.”

Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins observed, (via Bluesky, of course), that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in the ether: they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.

He’s not wrong, Palantir sells to ICE, DoD, NYPD, and the intelligence community. It may be a manifesto, but it’s also product literature.

Even Alexander Dugin, the Russian “Fourth Political Theory” philosopher, not exactly known for having a libertarian bent, seemed triggered by it, calling it “the plan of the Western techno-fascism” on X, “Pure Satanism” on his Substack.

Palantir manifesto is the plan of the Western techno-fascism. The superiority of the white race based on the technology. No antisemitism, no sacredness, no socialism of old historic fascism. This time pure capitalist, Jews friendly, profane, materialist. Anglo. Posthumanist.

— Alexander Dugin (@AGDugin) April 19, 2026

Former Greek FM Yanis Varoufakis called it “evil” and put out his own point-for-point on it – he calls it a refutation, it’s actually more of a rant.

So everybody across the horseshoe is big mad. Fine.

The thing is, none of this should surprise anyone. Let’s now look at why the policy this “manifesto” outlines was always going to arrive, with or without Karp’s prosaic stylings.

Karp Didn’t Invent “The Technate”

The merger of corporate power and state apparatus, the “technate” that people are suddenly discovering with horror on a Sunday afternoon, is not a new idea. It’s not even a recent one.

Back in 2013, Eric Schmidt (then Google’s executive chairman) and Jared Cohen (Google Ideas, ex-State Department advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton) published The New Digital Age. The book was blurbed by Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and General Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA. That’s an elite-class blurb list for a book that explicitly argued for the intersection of Silicon Valley and state power, the fusion of corporate infrastructure with national security logic, and the reshaping of diplomacy through private platforms.

In 2013 it was called “transformational.” Kissinger gushing that it was, “a searching meditation on technology and world order” (he would go on to co-author The Age of AI with Eric Schmidt that should be every bit as concerning as Karp’s Technological Republic).

Not too long after that, Google’s Sergey Brin and Klaus Schwab held a fireside in Davos where Herr Schwab pontificated that with the advent of AI, since the algos would be able to predict election outcomes with 100% certainty, they may as well pick the winners anyway and we could do away with elections altogether.

Nobody batted an eye. My timeline certainly wasn’t overflowing with rage over it and the people who were calling attention to it were using facing all kinds of headwinds.

In a conversation with Google founder Sergey Brin, founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, delights at the thought of a future without elections:

“Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now [we’re going] into a predictive power, and your company is very much involved in… pic.twitter.com/9shJlXw3DG

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) August 13, 2023

My personal favourite goto clip about all-pervasive corporate surveillance that absolutely nobody gave a shit about, was this one, also via the darlings of Davos:

This is important to understand:#CBDCs will not be “money”: in the sense we understand it. They will be social credit scores, capped by your personal carbon footprint quota pic.twitter.com/e6ibVwXM65

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) October 4, 2024

Here we have an ex-Goldman Sachs guy running a Chinese multi-national sermonizing about mass surveillance and personal carbon footprint quotas and my timeline was not filled with angry tweets from elite A-listers calling for the dismantling of Ali Baba.

Here in 2026 it’s the exact same structural narrative, now with Karp’s sharper edges and fewer Davos euphemisms, only this one is being called a fascist manifesto instead of drooled over by media elites.

The only major difference I can see is where Davos/WEF inspired technocracy was globalist, Palantir, Karp, Thiel et al are nationalist. Perhaps, a North American nationalist.

(This fits with what I wrote in my last edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist, about the factional rivalry between the intellectual descendants of Samuel Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”) vs his former pupil, Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History”) I posted an excerpt here.

Fukuyama thought the entire world would become one big Neo-Liberal circle-jerk.

Huntington said future conflict wouldn’t be between countries, but between cultures. And some cultures were less compatible with how we live here in the West, than others (Palantir’s point #21).

Overall, the project didn’t change. The faction driving it did.

Driving what? The inexorable drive toward post-Democratic technocracy.

Here’s what nobody wants to hear.

If you’re reading Karp’s 22 points and feeling a cold prickle of recognition, if you’re realizing that what Palantir is describing is the operational blueprint for the next 40 years, there’s something you have to sit with first:

You put your hand up for this.

In case you wondering what makes a company like Palantir even possible…. (find out why, here ) https://t.co/1mOEQ9JkLR pic.twitter.com/aLIjg1Sqw5

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) April 20, 2026

Perhaps not you personally. But collectively, “we”, the Western mass public already ran a dress rehearsal. And we all passed (or flunked) with flying colours.

During the pandemic and in the years immediately after, the political and managerial class was wrong about effectively everything.

The origin of the virus. The (non)-efficacy of lockdowns. The vaccines didn’t work and were in fact, kill-shots for many. The money printing.

The correct response to being that wrong, that publicly, and that unwaveringly, about that much, should have been pitchforks and torches in the streets, if not guillotines.

At the very least, in our enlightened civilization: recall elections, mass firings, inquests and class actions. There should have been a generational reckoning with expertise that got captured by politics, a media cartel that went full agitprop and Chapter-7 bankruptcy for institutional credibility.

That is not what happened.

What happened instead was that people stood on the dots. We wore the masks on the walk from the restaurant door to the table, then took them off to eat, sitting in saran wrap bubbles on the street in the middle of winter.

People snitched on their neighbours. They watched elites throw lavish maskless parties while they got tased by cops at their kids’ soccer games.

In other words: we “followed the science”, even as the science was revised quarterly to match policy because the facts on the ground refused to conform to the narrative.

And now, most people will fight tooth and nail to defend the very system that did this to them.

The pandemic was the trial balloon. The political class, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley watched carefully.

What they learned was this: the population will comply. The population will inform on itself. The population will absorb humiliating, contradictory, demonstrably false directives from authorities, and the dominant social behaviour will be enforcement of those directives on anyone who objects.

The Technate has been an ideation of post-Democratic elites since at least the 1930’s.

It has been moving forward inexorably ever since, but it was probably that event, the pandemic and the populace cucking out at a mass level when the technate became inevitable.

Not because of any single manifesto, book, or CEO. Because a civilization that behaves that way under stress has already told its elites what it will accept.

The Technocracy Is Already Here

The manifesto isn’t about Palantir specifically. It’s the blueprint for what I’ve already been noticing, not just in the US but everywhere, that I’ve been calling State Capitalism.

It’s the fused-lattice model of corporate-state power where the company doesn’t lobby the government, it is part of the governing apparatus, and the government in turn provides the regulatory moat that keeps the company’s competitors out, and to whom they can outsource things that national governments aren’t supposed to be doing.

This is where we’re headed for the next few decades. And it’s where we’re headed precisely because the population demonstrated that it would tolerate it, even while they decried “fascism”.

Ever notice how some people who want to lock you down, censor your speech, cancel you for wrongthink, force an experimental vaccine on you and take away your gas stove think of themselves as “anti-fascists” ?

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) January 15, 2023

Welcome to the Era of Mass Compliance.

Karp’s 22 points are the tidy, sanitized version of what we’ve already said in our “Repricing Sovereignty” piece. The early iterations are already in production. Every ICE deployment, every DoD contract, every integration between federal databases and private analytics, every AI-for-defense procurement cycle, every surveillance-as-a-service rollout is a beam in the Cathedral.

And here’s the part that separates the individuals from the crowd:

If you can’t beat ’em. Own ’em.

Long PLTR. This is straight out of the playbook my premium readers will recognize as “The Post Singularity Stack.” It’s a barbell trade that allocates to State Capitalism on one side, while personally building out sovereign technology on the other.

This isn’t an endorsement of the politics, because frankly, I’m done with politics (“vote harder, mofos”). Politics is a racket to keep the rabble in line.

Stand on the dots. Flap your arms. Good boy.

This will go down in history as the most assinine, ill-conceived campaigns ever produced
Most of these people don’t even know what Elbows Up means
Honestly, it’s like a Monty Python skit pic.twitter.com/9MKFCGOHA8

— Canada has gone mad (@HaveWeAllGoneM1) August 25, 2025

True self-sovereignty can only be acquired individually.

It’s an acknowledgement of the structural reality. We’ve been talking about this for a long time (we call it The Great Bifurcation, and as we always suspected, the branch you wind up in is largely an exercise in self-selection). For the next few decades, The Technate will be the vehicle through which capital will compound, and the only rational response is to own a piece of it. Capital is optionality. Wealth is exit velocity. And by wealth I mean not being economically dependent on The State, not living paycheque to paycheque, and not being one frozen bank account away from being forced into compliance.

There is an ancient Chinese aphorism,

“It is unlucky to remain obstinate in the face of overwhelming odds”.

Being morally aghast while your purchasing power erodes in losing sectors leaves you with neither the moral high ground nor the means to act on it.

The most important points of the manifesto are #5…

And #12:

The people who are panicking at the manifesto are the same people who voted, complied, and shamed their neighbours into the conditions that made it possible. They don’t get to be outraged now.

Some people saw this coming years ago. Some of us even wrote it down.

What happened to many of those people was they got deplatformed, canceled, debanked and generally villainized by the same people who are now screaming about Palantir.

I’m mostly done trying to warn the wider public on where things are going.

Now we’re just buying the ticker.

Get on the mailing list for the follow-up to this (The Pareto Paradox In The Age of Mass Compliance), follow me on X here, or if you want to get a look at The Post Singularity Stack, take the premium trial here ».

The Comfortable Collapse: Canada’s Decade of Managed Decline

Originally via @JoeyTweeets on X

There is a concept in ecology called a “shifting baseline.” It describes what happens when each generation accepts the degraded state of its environment as normal, because no one can remember what things looked like before the decline began. The fisherman’s son thinks a small catch is a good catch because he never saw the ocean his grandfather fished.

Canada is living through a shifting baseline. Not a dramatic collapse. Not a sovereign debt crisis or a currency peg breaking in the night. Something quieter, and in many ways worse: a country getting slowly, structurally poorer, and rearranging its national mythology fast enough that most people haven’t noticed.

The numbers tell a story that the political class, across every party, has spent a decade trying not to say out loud. So let me say it plainly: Canada has been in structural economic and social decline since approximately 2015, and nearly every major indicator of national health has moved in the wrong direction. The question is no longer whether the decline is happening. It’s whether the decline is reversible.

The Productivity Death Spiral

Start with the most damning chart in Canadian economics, the one that should be taped to the wall of every MP’s office in Ottawa: GDP per capita.

A representative Canadian today produces roughly what they produced in mid-2014. That’s not a typo. Over the same period, the average American saw cumulative output growth of more than 16%. Germany, the next-weakest G7 economy, managed over 5%. Canada sits dead last. Flat. A lost decade, measured and documented by the Bank of Canada, the OECD, TD Economics, National Bank, and the C.D. Howe Institute, among others. This is not a fringe narrative. It’s the institutional consensus.

The mechanism behind the stagnation is brutal in its simplicity. Business investment in machinery, equipment, and intellectual property has been in retreat since 2015. Adjusted per-worker investment in the third quarter of 2025 was roughly $15,000 in 2024 dollars, down nearly a quarter from its 2014 peak of $19,400. Real spending on machinery and equipment currently sits below levels recorded in 2008. Canada’s stock of M&E, the actual physical tools and assembly lines and robots that drive output, declined 4.6% over the past decade, from roughly $370 billion to $353 billion in constant dollars. While the machines aged and the factory floors emptied, the US saw investment per worker rise by more than 26% over the same period.

The comparisons with the United States are particularly savage. Canadian workers now receive just 41 cents of new M&E investment for every dollar their American counterparts receive, down from 47 cents in 2015. In intellectual property products, the software, patents, and R&D that define competitiveness in any modern economy, the figure is 32 cents on the dollar. Canada invests just 3.4% of its gross value added in IP products, roughly half the American rate of 6.6%. These are not numbers that describe a peer economy. They describe a country that has quietly opted out of the technological competition.

Canada’s R&D spending has been in perpetual decline for over twenty years, while every other G7 country has seen increases. The OECD projects Canada’s average annual growth rate for GDP per capita through 2060 to be the lowest among 30 advanced economies. Not the lowest growth rate this year, or this decade. The lowest projected growth rate among developed nations through 2060. The institutional bet is that Canada’s relative decline is not a blip but a trajectory.

Where did the investment go? Into real estate. In 2022, 38% of Canada’s gross fixed capital formation was directed toward housing, the highest fraction in the OECD. Germany was second at 33%. Every other country was below 30%. Canada chose houses over factories, speculation over production, and the bill is now arriving in the form of a productivity gap with the United States that has widened from 88% to 71%. By 2024, Canada generated about $143,000 of output per available worker, compared with almost $200,000 in the United States.

The Bank of Canada’s own deputy governor called it a “productivity emergency” in 2024. By late 2025, the Bank devoted a full speech to the problem, warning that Canada was caught in a “vicious circle” where weak investment begat weak productivity which begat weak wages which begat weak investment. When your central banker is using the word emergency and talking about vicious circles, you are well past the point of polite concern. And when their proposed solution is essentially to hope that adversity catalyzes action, you know the institution has run out of ideas.

Meanwhile, foreign direct investment tells its own story. By the end of 2024, Canadian direct investment abroad outpaced foreign direct investment in Canada by nearly $1 trillion. In a single month in 2024, investors poured a record $14.2 billion into US equities while foreign investors sold $11.4 billion in Canadian shares. Capital doesn’t have a nationality. It goes where returns are highest and risk is lowest. And it has been leaving Canada for a decade.

The Population Experiment

To understand what happened to the denominator in Canada’s per-capita math, you have to understand the scale of what was attempted.

In 2023, Canada’s population grew by 3.2%, an increase of 1,271,872 people. That is roughly the size of Calgary, added in a single year. It was the highest growth rate since 1957, and 97.6% of it came from immigration. The following year added another 744,000. By January 2025, the population stood at 41.5 million, with approximately 2.7 million non-permanent residents living in the country.

These growth rates have, as one demographer noted, “never been seen in a developed country” since the 1950s. What makes the Canadian experiment distinct is not just the velocity but the composition. Two-thirds of the non-permanent arrivals came on temporary work or student visas. The international student pipeline, in particular, became a shadow immigration program: institutions facing declining domestic enrollment and reduced public funding began relying on international students whose tuitions were more than five times higher than domestic rates. The 20-hour weekly work limit was lifted entirely in 2022 and only reinstated (at 24 hours) in 2024, after public pressure made the arrangement untenable.

The result was a labor market flooded at the low end. Thousands of international graduates found themselves in a country with no clear pathway to permanence, working multiple part-time jobs in food service and retail, paying rents that consumed most of their income, and in many cases ending up at food banks. The system promised them a future in Canada and delivered precarity. It promised Canadian workers a growing economy and delivered wage suppression.

The apologists will tell you that headline GDP kept growing, and that’s true. Canada posted the second-fastest aggregate GDP growth among G7 economies over the past decade. But GDP is not GDP per capita, and the gap between the two is where the lived reality of Canadians hides. You can grow your economy 2% by adding 3% more people. The math just means every individual got poorer. And that’s precisely what happened.

Budget 2025 proposes cutting temporary immigration from 673,650 in 2025 to 385,000 in 2026, with permanent immigration stabilizing around 380,000. This is an acknowledgment that the experiment failed. But the damage has been done: the housing deficit accumulated, the healthcare system was overwhelmed, and per-capita GDP fell for three consecutive years. You can’t un-break these systems by moderately reducing the rate at which you add people to them.

Housing as a Wealth Destruction Machine

The housing numbers in Canada are so far removed from any rational economic relationship to incomes that they almost resist analysis. In Toronto, a median household would need to devote 77% of its income to cover ownership costs at the benchmark price. In Vancouver, affordability recently touched 30-year worsts. Development charges alone add over $180,000 to the cost of a single-family home in Toronto and Markham, over $135,000 in Mississauga, and more than $113,000 in Coquitlam. These are not prices. They are barriers to entry, designed by incumbents to protect asset values.

Canada has the lowest number of dwellings per capita in the OECD. This is not a new development. But the gap between demand and supply exploded after 2022 when the population began growing by a million or more per year while housing starts flatlined. In 2025, Canada started 259,028 homes, the fifth-highest total on record, which sounds encouraging until you realize that CMHC estimates roughly 430,000 to 480,000 new homes need to be built annually through 2035 to restore affordability. Canada has never come close to this number. Not once. Not in any year since Confederation. And even the 259,000 figure masks a deteriorating picture: Toronto starts fell 31% year-over-year, and CMHC’s own chief economist warned that construction momentum has been fading since September, with the trend entering 2026 from a weaker position.

The result is a generational wealth transfer from young to old that has rewritten the social contract. 70% of Canadians now say homeownership is impossible. Among millennials, almost half have considered delaying starting a family because they can’t afford a suitable home, and nearly a third would consider leaving the country entirely to find affordable housing. When your housing market is driving emigration, you’ve moved beyond a policy failure into something closer to an institutional betrayal.

Meanwhile, 56% of Toronto condos and 48% of Vancouver condos are investor-owned. Canada’s pension funds, including CPP and OTMH, own residential rentals across the country. The system doesn’t just fail to house its citizens. It actively profits from their inability to be housed. For every home built under government-funded programs, Canada loses 11 affordable rental units to rent increases, demolitions, and conversions. The country is running to stand still and losing ground.

The Healthcare Collapse in Slow Motion

The healthcare system that Canadians have historically cited as the core justification for higher taxes and slower growth compared to the United States is disintegrating in real time.

The Fraser Institute’s 2025 report recorded a median wait time of 28.6 weeks from GP referral to treatment across 12 medical specialties. That’s the second-longest wait ever measured. Wait times have increased 198% since 1993, three decades of consistent deterioration. This is not a system under stress. It is a system in secular decline, its trajectory as consistent and predictable as a demographic curve.

Half a million Canadians left emergency departments without being seen by a doctor in 2024. In Ontario, average ER wait times hit 20 hours, with some hospitals reporting 25 hours or more. 16.1 million unscheduled ER visits were recorded nationally in 2024-2025, up from 15.5 million the prior year. Among universal healthcare countries, Canada has some of the lowest numbers of physicians, hospital beds, and MRI machines per capita. Rural communities are watching their emergency departments close outright due to staffing shortages.

The system was built for 25 million people. It now serves 41.5 million and has not been meaningfully restructured. The population grew by 30% since 2000. Hospital capacity did not. And the wait-time data captures only the people still in the system. It doesn’t count the Canadians who gave up waiting for a referral, who drove across the border for an MRI, who paid out of pocket for a procedure their taxes were supposed to cover, or who simply learned to live with a condition that in any other developed country would have been treated months ago.

The Food Bank Indicator

If you want a single data point that captures the lived reality of Canada’s decline, here it is: food bank usage has doubled nationally since 2019.

2.2 million Canadians visited food banks in March 2025, the highest number ever recorded. Food Banks Canada titled its 2025 report “Food Banks as a Lifeline: Canada’s New Normal.” That word, normal, is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

One-third of food bank clients are children, representing nearly 712,000 monthly visits. One in five food bank clients is employed. In 2019, it was one in eight. Employment is no longer a reliable buffer against poverty in Canada. The cumulative CPI increase since 2021 is over 18%, with shelter up 26% and food up 25%, while wages have not kept pace, especially at the bottom.

34% of food bank clients are newcomers who have been in the country for 10 years or less. This is not a condemnation of newcomers. It’s a condemnation of a system that brings people in at a rate it cannot absorb, fails to provide affordable housing or adequate social services, and then acts surprised when those people end up at a food bank. The cruelty is the system, not the people caught in it.

In Ontario alone, food bank visits hit 8.7 million between April 2024 and March 2025. That’s a 165% increase from 2019-2020. The ninth consecutive year of growth. Half the province’s food banks worry they won’t have enough food to meet demand, and two-thirds are concerned about sustaining operations over the next six months.

The Pension Gap and The Senior Poverty Trap

The maximum monthly CPP payment for someone starting their pension at age 65 is $1,433. The average new beneficiary receives $808 per month. Roughly 6% of recipients get the maximum.

Let that sit for a moment. The average Canadian retiree collects about $9,700 per year from the pension system they paid into for their entire working life. In a country where the average one-bedroom rental in Toronto or Vancouver exceeds $2,000 per month.

CPP payments are indexed to CPI, which sounds reasonable until you realize that CPI systematically underweights the things seniors actually spend money on: healthcare, food, housing, and transportation. Grocery prices are still 25% higher than prepandemic levels. The 2% CPP adjustment for 2026 doesn’t even cover the cost of the food inflation seniors experienced in the previous year, let alone the cumulative damage.

Senior poverty had been declining for years, reaching a low of 3.1% in 2020. It’s now climbing again, hitting 5.0% in 2023. Seniors advocacy groups report that retirees are turning down the heat in their homes, buying expired food at discount, and cutting back on social activities because they can’t afford transportation. Less than 40% of Canadian workers have access to a workplace pension plan. In the private sector, it’s under 25%. For young workers, 13%.

The system is structurally incapable of providing a dignified retirement for the majority of Canadians. This was a known problem a decade ago. Nothing was done.

The Brain Drain and the Talent Exodus

A record 29,186 Canadians permanently emigrated in the first quarter of 2025 alone. Over 70% of graduates from the University of Waterloo’s elite software engineering program leave for the United States. A 2018 study found that one in four STEM graduates from Canada’s top three universities left the country, with 81% going to the US.

The reason isn’t complicated. The same software engineer can earn roughly double the compensation in the US, pay lower taxes, and live in a city where housing costs are often more reasonable relative to income than Toronto or Vancouver. Canada creates AI researchers at a world-class level and then watches them walk across the border to build companies that compete against Canadian firms.

The Globe and Mail diagnosed it precisely: Canada is becoming a “sophisticated rentier nation.” It’s a polite way of saying the country is transforming from a workshop into a counting house, living off the returns of capital deployed elsewhere because the domestic environment is too regulated, too expensive, and too uncompetitive to justify investing at home. The country exports talent and imports labor. It exports capital and imports consumption. These are the trade patterns of decline, not growth.

The Demographic Cliff

And then there’s the birth rate, which at this point reads like a biological verdict on the country’s economic management.

Canada’s total fertility rate hit 1.25 in 2024. That’s well below the replacement threshold of 2.1 and deep in “ultra-low fertility” territory, alongside Japan, Italy, and South Korea. British Columbia recorded 1.02, which is to say that the average woman in Canada’s third-largest province is having roughly one child. Nine of ten provinces and three territories recorded their lowest fertility rates ever in 2024.

Half of Canadians under 50 who want children say they’ve delayed having them longer than they intended. Among those aged 35 to 44, the figure is 74%. The primary reason is cost. Housing, childcare, general economic insecurity. When a society makes it economically irrational to have children, people stop having children. This is not a mystery. It’s an incentive structure producing its predictable result.

The country’s response has been to replace domestic births with immigration. In 2021, for the first time, the number of immigrants arriving annually exceeded the number of domestic births. By 2024, more than two in five newborns had a foreign-born mother. The dependency on immigration to maintain population has become so total that any disruption to inflows would cause an immediate fiscal crisis in pension and healthcare funding.

This is not a sustainable model. It is a Ponzi demographic structure that requires ever-increasing inputs to avoid collapse, while doing nothing to address the underlying conditions that made domestic family formation unaffordable in the first place.

The Homelessness Explosion

The final indicator, and perhaps the most visible: nearly 60,000 Canadians were experiencing homelessness on a single night in late 2024. That number has almost doubled since 2018. The proportion sleeping in unsheltered locations, including encampments, grew from 14% to 28% over the same period. Among those who have experienced homelessness, 28% had also experienced an eviction, with disproportionate impacts on Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities.

Walk through downtown Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton, or Halifax today and you’ll see a street-level reality that would have been unrecognizable a decade ago. Tent encampments in public parks. People injecting drugs in broad daylight on transit platforms. The normalization has been so gradual that residents have adjusted their routes and lowered their expectations without ever being asked.

The government’s own 2025 poverty report acknowledged that “policy makers built the social safety net for a different era” and that “the current system isn’t flexible enough to adapt to meet current realities.” This is a remarkable admission from the institution responsible for the system. It is also, characteristically, paired with no meaningful plan to fix it.

The Policy Mirage: Why the Carney Government’s Proposals Won’t Fix This

Mark Carney came to office with a rare credential for a politician: actual experience in the economic domain. Governor of the Bank of Canada during the financial crisis, then head of the Bank of England during Brexit. The theory was that his technocratic seriousness would translate into the kind of structural reforms Canada needed. Instead, Budget 2025 delivered a grab bag of spending commitments, transfer payments, and sloganeering that leaves every root cause of decline untouched.

Start with the centerpiece: Build Canada Homes, the new federal agency tasked with “doubling the pace of construction” to 500,000 homes per year. The initial commitment is $13 billion and 4,000 modular homes across six sites. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has estimated the agency will deliver roughly 5,000 homes per year, or about 26,000 by 2030. Canada needs 430,000 to 480,000 annually. Build Canada Homes, at the PBO’s own estimate, covers about 1% of the target. One percent. For $3.5 billion a year. With no clear performance metrics, no mechanism to override municipal zoning fragmentation (there are over 800 residential zones in Gatineau alone), and a mandate weighed down by competing requirements to use Canadian-made and climate-friendly materials, which means by definition not the cheapest option.

B.C. developers have already expressed skepticism. The Fraser Institute points out that Ottawa can’t efficiently downsize its own office footprint despite years of effort and ample funding. The government took from 2017 to 2023 to reduce its office portfolio from 6.0 million to 5.9 million square meters. This is the institution that is going to build housing at scale. Meanwhile, the budget quietly retreated from the Liberal platform’s commitment to work with municipalities to reduce development charges by 50%. The Canadian Homebuilders Association noted this omission immediately. In Toronto, those charges exceed $130,000 per apartment and $180,000 per single-family home. Until those come down, no amount of federal prefab housing changes the math.

Then there’s the affordability strategy, which is really a transfer strategy. The renamed “Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit” (formerly the GST Credit) gets a 25% boost for five years, providing a family of four up to $1,890 in the first year and about $1,400 thereafter. This is a cash transfer to help people afford food whose price was driven up by the same monetary and immigration policies the government pursued. It’s the economic equivalent of breaking someone’s leg and handing them a crutch. The $20 million allocated to the Local Food Infrastructure Fund to ease “immediate pressures with food banks” works out to roughly $9 per food bank user per year. The government is also developing a “National Food Security Strategy” which, true to form, promises to “strengthen domestic food production” without specifying how, when, or at what cost.

The broader fiscal framework is similarly hollow. Budget 2025 promises to “catalyze $500 billion in new investment” and to “enable $1 trillion in investments over the next five years.” These are projection numbers, not commitments. They assume that a combination of trade diversification, Buy Canadian mandates, $925 million for AI, $334 million for quantum computing, and defense spending reaching 2% of GDP will somehow attract a volume of private capital that a decade of declining competitiveness has repelled. The budget cuts 40,000 civil service positions and claims spending will grow at less than 2% annually, compared to nearly 9% over the previous decade. But it also layers on $150 billion in new measures while promising to close a $15 billion annual gap between revenue and operating spending “by Budget 2028.” These numbers don’t reconcile. They’re aspirational, and everyone in Ottawa knows it.

The most revealing initiative might be the smallest: the “Canada Strong Pass,” which gives families free or discounted access to museums, historic sites, and parks, plus a 25% VIA Rail discount for young adults. This is what the government offers a generation that can’t afford homes or children: a subsidized train ticket to look at the country they’re being priced out of. It would be satire if it weren’t real policy.

What’s missing from the agenda is everything that would actually reverse the structural decline. There is no corporate tax reform to close the competitiveness gap with the United States, where 2017 reforms sharply reduced the US rate and undid Canada’s business tax advantage. The capital gains inclusion rate hike was cancelled, which is welcome, but a defensive measure rather than a growth catalyst. There is no regulatory rollback proportionate to the problem. The interprovincial trade barriers, estimated by the IMF to be equivalent to a 21% tariff and by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business to cost up to $200 billion annually, were supposed to be eliminated by July 1, 2025. The legislation was tabled, but the barriers remain largely intact because the federal government doesn’t actually control most of them. Provinces do.

There is no plan to address the fundamental structural distortion that channels Canadian capital into real estate rather than productive assets. The financial system’s bias toward residential construction is well documented and completely unaddressed. There is no immigration reform that ties intake to housing capacity, healthcare capacity, or per-capita GDP targets. The reduced numbers in Budget 2025 are a concession to political pressure, not a structural redesign. When political winds shift, the numbers will shift back.

And there is no answer to the brain drain. The budget allocates nearly a billion dollars for AI and quantum computing, which is fine, but the people trained by those programs will walk into a labor market where their American counterparts earn double the salary, pay lower taxes, and face lower housing costs. Until the total compensation equation changes, the talent will keep leaving and no amount of “attract foreign researchers” policy language will change that. You don’t solve an outflow problem with inflow rhetoric.

The Carney government’s theory of change appears to be that confidence and stability, combined with trade diversification and defense spending, will catalyze a wave of private investment. It’s a theory well suited to a central banker’s worldview: set the conditions, signal credibility, and let private capital do the work. The problem is that Canada has been setting conditions for a decade while watching capital flow in the opposite direction. At some point, you have to ask whether the conditions themselves are the problem, not just the signaling.

The Comfortable Collapse

None of this happened overnight. None of it happened by accident. And none of it is irreversible in theory, though the window for reversal narrows with each year of inaction.

Canada’s decline is the product of specific policy choices: a deliberate preference for real estate over productive investment. An immigration system calibrated to suppress wages rather than build capacity. A healthcare system left unreformed for decades. A housing market treated as a wealth vehicle for incumbents rather than shelter for citizens. A tax and regulatory environment that repels capital and talent in favor of managed stagnation. And now, a government that has correctly diagnosed the disease and prescribed an aspirin.

The country still has extraordinary advantages. Natural resources that most nations would kill for. Proximity to the world’s largest consumer market. World-class universities and research institutions. A relatively stable political system. These assets are real. But they are being squandered at a rate that should alarm anyone paying attention.

The danger of the shifting baseline is that by the time people notice the fish are gone, the ocean has changed beyond recognition. Canada is not there yet. But it’s closer than the national conversation suggests, and the comforting myth that everything is basically fine, that Canada is still somehow doing better than it looks, is the most dangerous narrative of all.

The numbers are in. The institutions agree. The decline is structural, it is accelerating, and the only people who deny it are the ones whose incentives depend on the denial. The current government offers ambitious slogans and modest programs. It promises to “build Canada strong” while presiding over every trend that makes Canada weaker. And if history is any guide, it will continue to do so until the shifting baseline has shifted so far that the country Mark Carney inherited is unrecognizable to the country he leaves behind.

Bank of Canada. “Toward a Virtuous Circle for Productivity.” Speech, November 2025.
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2025/11/toward-a-virtuous-circle-for-productivity/

Canadian Centre for Housing Rights. “Everything You Need to Know About Build Canada Homes.” September 22, 2025.
https://housingrightscanada.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-build-canada-homes/

Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. “Housing Starts Up 5.6% in 2025 from 2024.” January 16, 2026.
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/media-newsroom/news-releases/2026/housing-starts-december-2025

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https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/2025-was-canadas-year-of-mark-carney-what-have-we-learned-about-his-economic-policy-agenda/

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https://www.conservative.ca/just-the-facts-not-building-canada-homes/

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https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/federal-government-wants-build-4000-homes-despite-years-real-estate-mismanagement

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https://itif.org/publications/2025/05/27/underinvestment-in-capital-equipment-hinders-canadian-productivity-growth/

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https://liberal.ca/plan/

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https://liberal.ca/cstrong/costing/

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https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/canada-at-a-crossroads-volume-4-capital-ideas-attracting-investment-boosting-productivity/

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https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2025/11/10/prime-minister-carney-outlines-budget-2025-measures-buy

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https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2026/02/prefabricated-housing-canada/

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https://cdhowe.org/publication/canadas-investment-crisis-shrinking-capital-undermines-competitiveness-and-wages/

Robson, William B.P., and Mawakina Bafale. “Underequipped: How Weak Capital Investment Hurts Canadian Prosperity and What to Do About It.” C.D. Howe Institute, September 12, 2024.
https://cdhowe.org/publication/canadas-capital-crisis-growing-threat-falling-business-investment-productivity/

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https://economics.td.com/ca-productivity-bad-to-worse

The Hub. “A Trillion-Dollar Gap: 12 Charts Highlighting Canada’s Capital Flight Crisis.” January 26, 2026.
https://thehub.ca/2026/01/26/a-trillion-dollar-gap-12-charts-highlighting-canadas-capital-flight-crisis/

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