OTTAWA, Ontario (LifeSiteNews) — The federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fall economic statement includes massive payouts for mainstream media outlets ahead of and after the 2025 election.
On November 21, Finance Minister Chrystia Freelanddeliveredthe Liberal Government’sFall Economic Statementin the House of Commons, which includes legacy media subsidies which will cost taxpayers $129 million over the next five years.
“To ensure a strong and independent press can continue to thrive in Canada the Fall Economic Statement proposes to enhance the Canadian journalism labour tax credit,” the Department of Financewrote.
Beginning in 2019, Parliament changed theIncome Tax Actto give yearly rebates of 25 percent for each news employee in cabinet-approved media outlets earning up to $55,000 a year, to a maximum of $13,750.
However, the Canadian Heritage Department sinceadmittedthat the payouts are not sufficient to keep legacy media outlets running. The department recommended that rebates be doubled next year to a maximum $29,750 annually.
This suggestion was adopted by the Trudeau government in theFall Economic Statement,which increased the rebates to 35 percent on newsroom salaries up to $85,000, totaling a maximum rebate of $29,750. The temporary tax credit is set to apply for the next four years.
While media subsidies were to set to expire March 31, 2024, they have now been expanded to 2029 past the next general election. The increased payouts are expected to cost taxpayer $129 million in the next five years and an additional $10 million for every subsequent year.
The Trudeau government’s decision has been roundly condemned by Canadians on social media, many of whom are pointing to it as Trudeau’s attempt to make up for the failure of Bill C-18.
Bill C-18, theOnline News Act, was projected to increase legacy media revenue by forcing Big Tech companies to pay to publish Canadian content on their platforms.
However, instead of paying the fees, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, blocked all access to news content in Canada, while Google has promised to do the same. As a result, Canadians have been blocked from viewing legacy media outlets’ social media platforms.
“This is just a massive bailout using public dollars for the government’s blunder on Bill C-18,” Canadian academic and law professor Michael Geistwroteon X, formerly known as Twitter. “News outlets could previously claim a max of $13,750 per employee. That now increases to $29,750 or by 116%.”
“Note that this is retroactive as it applies to expenditures from the start of the year,” he added. “It’s a $60M gift to the news sector, to off-set the lost revenues due to its own legislation. So the industry lobbied for Bill C-18 and then lobbied for a bailout.”
Similarly, Canadian politician and CEO of theWestern StandardDerek Fildebrandtsaid, “Ottawa is turning journalism into little better than supply-managed dairy farming. It is quickly becoming impossible to run a media company of any scale without taking the damned bailout money.”
Additionally, Royal Canadian Air Force Veteran Rex Glacerpointed outthat thanks to the payouts, “Legacy media is now nothing but employees of the Liberal Party of Canada whose job is to help Trudeau win the next election, congratulations on your pay raises!”
The renewed media bailouts come as trust in mainstream media is polling at an all-time low with Canadians.
According torecent studyby Canada’s Public Health Agency’s (PHA), less than a third of Canadians displayed “high trust” of the federal government, with “large media organizations” as well as celebrities getting even lower scores.
Large mainstream media outlets and “journalists” working for them scored a “high trust” rating of only 18 percent. This was followed by only 12 percent of people saying they trusted “ordinary people,” with celebrities garnering only an eight percent “trust” rating.
For several years I had a business on a university campus and witnessed the supervision of the west in real time. I have many stories and accounts to share on this matter but what is important is that most rationalists already knew of the dangers of postmodern philosophy and see it as a kind of dangerous mind virus closely related to cultural marxism.
In 2013, I witnessed a dramatic acceleration of this dangerous philosophy penetrating the student body and faculty at Ryerson University in Toronto. That university has since changed its name to the bureaucratically named Toronto Metropolitan University because Egerton Ryerson, after whom the university was named, was smeared as a racist in a targeted campaign of historical revisionism.
Honking for Freedom Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Nonetheless, during my time operating on campus, I observed the daily tactics of psychological brainwashing used effectively through social media and in student groups often funded by foreign extremist organizations targeting younger students. It was quite concerning to see students arrive during frosh week normal, upbeat, and positive in their first 18 months, only to transform into miserable, degenerate victims with grievances against all aspects of society to the point where it mimicked mental illness.
Here we are a decade later, and the underlying postmodern worldview has taken over many of our institutions, including government, in particular, bills C11 and C18, which aim to censor speech, independent journalism, and publicly shared opinions. However, the political right and conservative establishment are guilty of the exact same censorship through blacklists, controlling and co-opting grassroots political movements, and funding partisan platforms that merely spoon-feed conservative opinions, in the same manor as the legacy media.
During my time operating at Ryerson, I would play music or podcasts in our store with the hope of countering the effects of postmodern brainwashing. One of the podcasts I discovered and aired was a YouTube channel called "Sargon of Akkad," referencing the historical Mesopotamian figure believed to be one of the very first emperors dating back to 3500 BCE.
Sargon of Akkad | Youtube Channel
For quite some time, I didn't know the name of the figure commenting on the Sargon of Akkad Channel, who eventually revealed himself as Carl Benjamin, one of the dissidents pushing back against what was then called #GamerGate - the neo-progressive, postmodern push for "wokeism" in video games at the time. I aired Sargon of Akkad as a conversation piece to help persuade students away from victimization indoctrination, and in a strange way, it helped determine which student clients would be problematic constantly requesting refunds, and which students should be given preferential treatment. The market has spoken, and the market taught me that SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) were not good for business. "Get woke, go broke" hadn't yet been popularized, but I already experienced it.
Over the years, Carl (Twitter @sargon_of_akkad), Callum (Twitter @AkkadSecretary), and Jon (Twitter @WGthink) grew the Sargon of Akkad YouTube channel into a podcast platform in Swindon, England, with several employees, two studios and numerous tallented creators.
After seeing my friend Larry Lepard on the excellent macroeconomics show called 'Brokenomics,' where he discussed the collapse of the current financial system and the uncertainty of the US Dollar reserve status, I was connected with the host Dan Taubb, the host of Brokenomics, and asked if I could come on as a guest. I offered to fly to England to do the podcast in person, thinking they would appreciate the gesture.
In addition to appearing on Brokenomics, more on that later, I was also invited to guest co-host an episode of the Lotus Eaters with Dan and Connor, and I titled the segment "WTF is wrong with Canada." It was one of those moments when you meant to say Deputy Prime Minister, but "Attorney General" came out of your mouth. [Listen to CGP Grey’s Podcast Hello Internet | EP1 "Being Wrong on The Internet" to understand this phenomenon.]
Lotus’s Eaters #739 | WTF is Wrong with Canada?
Nonetheless, Dan and I planned to discuss the origins of the Freedom Convoy and the myriad of issues that have arisen since then on 'Brokenomics'.
I spent three days with the Lotus Eaters team, preparing for segments, essentially working out of their office, hanging out, and going to dinner and pub nights. A special thanks to the producer of Lotus Eater, Jonathan, whose purple hair long predates the SJW fashion signal, and my guess is that it's the inspiration for the logos and branding guide for Lotus Eaters, all around the same color. Jon is one of the most genuine people I have met in a long time and always dons an epic anti-woke T-shirt.
After the third and final day at the Lotus Eaters studio, I arrived back at my hotel at night and was packing up to leave Swindon for London when a video from Carl on his old Sargon Of Akkad YouTube Channel popped up on my laptop, where he discussed the Lotus Eaters vision as an honest alternative media not tied to any political party. Carl addressed the importance of philosophy and reexamining our personal philosophies, something I know I have done throughout the years, particularly when I first encountered wokeism on the Ryerson University campus. It was as though Carl, many in his audience went on a journey of philosophical discovery as did many of us in politics as we could see the storm of encroaching extremism on the horizon. No surprise, then, that Carl and his vision for an honest alternative media space is similar to that of many clamouring for change, but the ability of the Lotus Eaters to execute and not be corrupted by any political establishment is admirable.
Brokenomics | Canadian Truckers
Now, a few words about Carl Benjamin specifically because many people have privately DM'd me asking about him.
Carl Benjamin is one of the most genuine and, I believe, incorruptible people I have met in quite some time. While I'm sure we have things we disagree on, we clearly share a philosophical framework, (as do many of you who supported the Freedom Convoy and this Substack) regarding the importance of unfettered free speech and open discourse, specially with those with whom we disagree. Carl is very kind, very open, and exactly what you see on screen, although in person, there is less of an edge; a calmness that is quite surprising. He is willing to engage with absolutely anyone on any topic without malice and with extreme authenticity. I did see something in Carl I never imagined, and I share it with him.
As someone who has hired and administered many staff throughout my career, Carl Benjamin has a unique gift for spotting talent. His ability to spot the perfect talent is weapons grade and of all the business owners, managers and executives I’ve worked with over the years, his ability to spot talent is the best I’ve ever seen. No one else comes close. I asked him what his secret is, and it turns out it’s just instinct. Regardless the method he uses, the entire Lotus Eaters team, including Connor, Dan, Callum, Stelios, Beau, Tom & the others are all shockingly talented without the egomaniacal attitude or arrogance that many talented people in the public space emanate. Harry was away and we didn’t have the chance to meet but I can't say enough good things about all of them and how they all personify the virtues of proper British etiquette and class particularly Josh.
Their individual desire to lay outside the control and influence from the political establishment and in the case of Connor who left the Conservative Party because it had joined the uniparty is in my opinion one of the primary reasons they are so credible in their assessment of the legacy media and philosophical changes in the west, concerns most of us share.
During my time at the Lotus Eaters headquarters, I had some of the most intellectually stimulating conversations I have had in quite some time. From Dan, the one who invited me and the host of Brokenomics—an economist, former investor, and venture capitalist, to Connor, an unapologetic Vatican I social conservative with experience in political policy, who recently went public to steelman feminist Helen Joyce on points he vehemently disagreed with but would not allow his audience to take her comments out of context, thereby forcing intellectual honesty, something we rarely see in legacy media or politics.
Stelios is a philosophy professor and the host of The Symposium, concerned with helping to revitalize the institution of thought around classical liberalism and how such a philosophy can interact with conservatives to combat the woke mind virus. Josh, a psychological researcher and scientist turned Lotus Eaters contributor, is the libertarian on the team and has an amazing sense of humor and is as quick-witted as Dan. I wish I had more time to speak with Beau, a brilliant historian, and Callum, who has been there since the beginning, as I understand. However we were all quite busy working, and there were only so many hours in the day. To say the entire team works extremely hard is a massive understatement, and it's reflected in their vast archive of excellent content.
As I have mentioned in numerous interviews and earlier articles on this substack I produce podcasts and work with my own small team when I’m not on the road trucking, and I sympathize with the many daily small business struggles that Carl and his team push through every day. It is for that reason I ask you to please check out Lotuseaters.com and consider a monthly subscription for as little as 5 pounds a month. I promise you will find it enlightening, and we need to help amplify our allies who are not tainted with the cancer of political party partisanship. In my opinion the Lotus Eaters team will be a power voice in reviving English culture. Help them.
It was a surreal experience to be among Carl and his team 10 years after I first stumbled upon his Sargon of Akkad youtube channel, and I never would have imagined I would help contribute to their platform. However, as Scott Adams, someone I connected with Dan Tubb while I was in the UK, would say, “it’s just more evidence that we are living in a simulation.”
‘Wuhan Cover-Up’: RFK Jr. Exposes Fauci, Gates as ‘Frontmen’ for Military-Medical-Industrial Complex
Below is the introduction to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest book, “The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race,” which details how a cartel of run-amok military, intelligence, public health, biopharmaceutical, tech and media interests successfully positioned biosecurity at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. The book, available now for pre-order, will ship on Dec. 5.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, November 17, 2023
------------------------------------------------
On my seventh birthday, January 17, 1961 — three days before my uncle, John F. Kennedy, took his oath of office as United States President — his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, appeared on national television to deliver his farewell address, which history increasingly regards as one of the most important and prophetic speeches in American history.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
President Eisenhower took special care to include an expanded definition of his term “military-industrial complex” that would include the top bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Eisenhower warned that the federal government’s rising medical and scientific technocracy posed its own unique threats toward our democracy and freedom.
“In this revolution, [scientific/medical] research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government …
“Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity …
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded …
“[W]e must also be alert to the … danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Eisenhower ended his speech with an admonition that echoes now in rebuke as we emerge from theCOVIDera that trampled the core principles that had, for 240 years, maintained America as the global exemplar for democracy, constitutional government, and personal freedom.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward thesupreme goals of our free society.
Eisenhower had recognized that America could not be both a democracy at home and an imperial power abroad. But to justify its existence, that cartel would drum up endless wars and emergencies that ensured its own wealth and power while transforming America from an exemplary democracy into a national security state abroad and surveillance state at home.
Seven years later,Dr. Anthony Faucijoined the National Institutes of Health, where he would never face combat. There he began a fifty-year sojourn that would put him at the summit of the nation’s scientific and technological elite, an apex that he would use to militarize and monetize medical research and to consolidate the seamless alliance between government, science, the military and intelligence agencies, and private contractors in ways that would consummate President Eisenhower’s worst nightmares about the threat this cartel posed to democracy.
The cartel would reach its apogee in 2022. As the COVID pandemic commenced, the rising medical technocracy — with Anthony Fauci at the helm — took on all the menacing features President Eisenhower warned against.
A powerful syndicate, composed of government public health technocrats, a rapacious pharmaceutical industry, military and intelligence officials, and media and social media titans, appropriated awesome new powers to override constitutional and civil rights, censor information, suppress dissent, and engineer compliance with arbitrary diktats.
These mandates culminated in mass submission to inoculation with risky, ineffective, shoddily tested, and unlicensed vaccines. And no one isliable for any damagethey cause.
Claiming unprecedented new powers as necessary to fight the war against germs, government and industry officials predictably abused them, dealing blows to democracy with no discernible benefits to public health.
Just as the CIA and military apparatus paradoxically profit from war, not peace, the medical cartel and itsBig Pharmaallies benefit from illness, not health. Dr. Fauci and his cronies amplified this power through an orchestrated propaganda campaign bent on maintaining a level of public terror and germophobia.
The eminent sociologistC. Wright Millshad anticipated Eisenhower’s prescient warning four years earlier in his durable 1956 work,The Power Elite. Since World War II, America had been dominated by “a permanent-war economy,” in the words of the maverick sociologist.
This war establishment maintained its power and profits by creating a constant, free-floating state of anxiety and animosity.
“For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without a foreseeable end,”Mills wrote. “Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed aparanoid reality all their own.”
Three days after Eisenhower’s farewell address, on a frozen day in Washington, I sat under a clear sky in a frigid bleacher and watched my uncle, the incoming president, John F. Kennedy, take the oath of office. In his own inaugural in 1933, at the height of a terrifying global depression, JFK’s idol Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had warned the nation that fear was the most potent tool of totalitarians.
In Europe, despots from the left and right had wielded public fear of the same depression to transform Russia into a communist nation and Italy, Germany, and Spain into fascist totalitarian states. FDR had preserved both capitalism and democracy by a steady hand and confidence thatkept fear at bay.
My uncle’s truncated administration would be a three-year battle to secede from the reign of fear. His first bitter battle with his security apparatus occurred three months later during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Even as he took public blame for the calamity, he realized that his military brass and CIA panjandrums had lied to him to trick him into allowing an invasion they knew would fail.
Their plan was to trap a young president, faced with this humiliating failure three months into a presidency, into complying with the demands of his Joint Chiefs for a full US invasion of Cuba, something that JFK had vowed never to do.
I chronicled this struggle in my 2018 book, “American Values.” JFK recognized that the CIA’s function was no longer securing US interests. It had devolved into a rogue agency, taking on the implicit ambition of US multinational corporations, including oil companies andBig Agriculture.
In this case,CIA’s partnerswere Texaco,United Fruit Company, and the American mafia. JFK recognized that the CIA’s essential function was no longer national security but providing the Pentagon and its military contractors a steady pipeline of continuous wars.
In May 1961, now only four months into his presidency, my uncle stood inside the Oval Office telling his closest aide that he wanted to “splinter the CIA in a thousand piecesand scatter it to the winds.” Between November 1961 and February 1962, hefired the agency’s three top officers— Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell, and Richard Bissell.
“American Values” recountsmy family’s sixty-year fistfightwith that agency. Today, powerful pharmaceutical companies have joinedBig Oilas the engine of US foreign policy, and US intelligence is still playing the same insidious role.
This book explores that history.
My 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” also examines the rise of the biosecurity agenda and the remarkable alliance between Western public health regulators, military and intelligence agencies, and odd allies at the apex of the Chinese military in creating the bugs that cause pandemics and crafting responses that have advanced the agenda of a security and surveillance state.
Their efforts hide the shadowy influences of these puppeteers who manipulated every feature of the pandemic. The coordination of these forces is nowhere more evident than in their orchestration of the cover-up of the origins of the COVID bug.
The biosecurity agenda — Pandemic Preparedness and Response (PPR), as it is euphemistically called — is the organizing principle of the post–Cold War military-industrial complex — or, more accurately, the military/medical-industrial complex.
CIA and Pentagon planners played key roles in a series of over a dozen tabletop simulations, beginning in 1999, that served as secret training exercises for tens of thousands of US officials and foreign leaders in responding to global pandemics with a series of authoritarian “countermeasures” that function as a coup d’état against democratic and constitutional rights.
This syndicate includes the Pentagon and intelligence apparatus, pharmaceutical companies, traditional media and social media platforms, andBig Data— which all have incestuous financial entanglements with each other that drive clear but perverse incentives to develop and periodically release infectious bioweapons and reap profits and power from the response.
Anthony Fauci and billionaire Bill Gates became the visible faces of pandemic response, but in this book I expose them as frontmen for a much larger enterprise: a military/medical-industrial complex driven by elements within the CIA and Pentagon, which — even more than Anthony Fauci — contributed to creating the COVID-19 coronavirus in aChinese lab, dictated the official countermeasures, managed and controlled the vaccine rollout, and managed the cover-up of the source.
Hiding their role in the creation of the COVID-19 coronavirus is critical because its exposure would reveal the corruption and the players. It is their Achilles’ heel.
The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy, who is on leave from CHD and is seeking the Independent party nomination for president of the U.S.
The media say X is placing Apple, IBM, and other ads near pro-Nazi content, but it's not. We tried various ways to replicate Media Matters' research and couldn't. The real goal of Media Matters isn't to fight antisemitism. It's to destroy X as a free speech platform.
Democrats’ Need To Censor And Spread Disinformation Behind Media War On Elon Musk’s X
We could not replicate Media Matters’ finding of corporate ads placed near neo-Nazi and white supremacist content
by @shellenberger & @galexybrane Media Matters President Angelo Carusone (left), Elon Musk (center), and George Soros (right). [Sources: Instagram & Getty ]
On Thursday, Media Matters For America published an article alleging that the social media platform X has been placing ads for major companies next to pro-Nazi content. “As X owner Elon Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories,” wrote Media Matters reporter Eric Hananoki, “his social media platform has been placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.”
In response, major companies, including Disney, Warner Bros, Comcast, IBM, and Apple, have pulled ads from X in a blow to the company’s revenue.
However, according to the X Safety team, Media Matters’ report was done by making a fake X account and then curating posts and ads to manipulate the account’s timeline. “These contrived experiences could be applied to any platform,” X argues.
X’s analytics suggest that Media Matters repeatedly refreshed the timeline of the account it created to cause X to generate ads near hateful posts. The account, X says, saw thirteen times the number of ads a median X user sees.
According to X, in at least one instance, the Media Matters author was the only user to see a specific ad placement. “Of the 5.5 billion ad impressions on X that day, less than 50 total ad impressions were served against all of the organic content featured in the Media Matters article,” X Safety wrote.
We should not blindly trust X’s defense of its ad policy. X obviously has a bias in how it measures its trust and safety.
And so Public attempted to reproduce Media Matters’ methods to see if we found ads next to the content in question. We created an account and followed eleven of the neo-Nazi accounts in Media Matters’ report starting yesterday, November 19.
After refreshing both X’s “For You” page and “Following” page more than ten times and scrolling through the timeline each time, we did not observe ads next to white nationalist or pro-Nazi content.
We followed more extremist accounts and repeated this process after following thirty accounts. Still, we did not find ads on the timeline. We also opened each account’s page and did not observe ads there. Nor did we find ads under the replies to their posts.
Media Matters did not respond to our inquiry about the exact methods it used for its report.
It’s possible that Public’s methods did not exactly replicate Media Matters’ or that our account was too new to see ads. It’s also possible that X has already changed its ad policy in response to Media Matters, or there are fewer ads on the platform now that major advertisers have left.
In any case, both Public’s test and X’s analysis suggest that the ad incidents Media Matters found were very rare.
Despite the lack of verified evidence behind Media Matters’ claims, its tactics are highly effective. For companies, any association with racism or Nazi ideology is a major liability and they are easily swayed to pull advertising.
In 2020, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), along with other advocacy organizations, got hundreds of companies to boycott Facebook, leading the platform to remove content that groups that ADL disliked. In 2017, another advertiser boycott forced YouTube to ramp up its censorship.
And yet the head of Media Matters, Angelo Carusone, has himself made prejudicial remarks. He wrote, publicly, on a blog, that his boyfriend was “adorable… despite his jewry,” and that a friend leaned conservative “as a result of his possession of several bags of Jewish gold.” Carusone wrote “lighten up Japs” about the Japanese. And he wrote dismissively of “trannies.”
Carusone told the Washington Post, which rushed to his defense, “It’s true: I wrote some gross things on my blog while I was in college. A few posts parodying living my life as if I were a self-loathing, bigoted Limbaugh right-winger. And every time Media Matters takes some meaningful action, some awful people bring it up to try to stop us. And every time, I will acknowledge that the writing was gross and apologize because the context only explains; it doesn’t excuse.”
While we applaud Carusone for acknowledging his past prejudice, the episode underscores that the Left’s concerns with X have nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with its need to control the information voters receive.
What, then, is going on here, exactly? Why is Media Matters leading a disinformation campaign and advertiser boycott against Elon Musk’s X? Who is Media Matters, exactly? And what’s its real agenda?
Please subscribe now to support the free speech movement and to read the rest of the article!
