Month: September 2025

Authored by Mikkel Thorup via InternationalMan.com,

Canada is often portrayed as a land of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity. Reality, however, tells a different story…

Statist policies, crushing taxes, bloated bureaucracy, and a society overtaken by woke ideology have shattered Canada. This is a cautionary tale for those looking at Canada as an ideal living space. If you are asking yourself what living in Canada is like, let me explain: Canada is not a land of fulfilled dreams but of enduring harsh conditions and barely getting by.

As if economic hardships aren’t enough, Canadians are also oppressed by the Orwellian newspeak that woke culture is creating. If you speak your mind, you’re labeled a fascist. If you question social policies, you’re accused of microaggressions.

There are no best places to live in Canada anymore. As a Canadian, I see little chance of Canada becoming livable again. Since I founded Expat Money in 2017, I have been helping expats build their Plan-Bs to protect their wealth and freedom and leave countries like this one.

Let’s look at the unfortunate condition that Canada has fallen into.

The Restrictions Imposed During Covid

The strict quarantine measures and harsh government interventions implemented in Canada during the COVID-19 hysteria were shameful. The government expanded police and administrative powers to smash public backlash against its COVID policies.

A significant protest movement called The Freedom Convoy began in early 2022. Truckers and citizens held large demonstrations in Ottawa against vaccination mandates, harsh pandemic restrictions, and the government’s authoritarian tendencies.

Former Prime Minister Trudeau used extraordinary powers to freeze the bank accounts of protesters and crack down on activists. Individual and property rights were arbitrarily violated.

The Canadian government imposed mandatory vaccinations on federal employees, healthcare workers, and those in the transportation sector, turning personal health decisions into state mandates. Those who were not vaccinated were suspended from their jobs, their travel rights were restricted, and they were ostracized from society. Even the private sector was coerced to impose vaccinations under government pressure.

Moreover, harsh lockdowns and restricted entry into the country forced businesses into bankruptcy. Massive numbers of people lost their jobs, and the government’s financial structure was severely damaged.

Woke Culture And The End Of Free Speech

The problems aren’t limited to elections. In recent years, woke ideology has overtaken Canada’s politics, education system, and workplace. This “progressive” ideology has replaced individual freedoms and meritocracy with the so-called principle of inclusivity and equity. As a result, freedom of speech has been destroyed, social engineering has increased, and social polarization has deepened.

In Canada, laws enacted under the guise of “combatting hate speech” have imposed mandatory language use by the government, determining how individuals should speak.

Now, we have another Bill C-11 to update the Broadcasting Act. The government’s media watchdog, the CRTC, will now be able to monitor online platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Spotify. Bill C-11 is a censorship tool to kill free speech in Canada. The government may have sugar-coated the law by saying, “We support Canadian content,” but at its core, it’s an attempt to take control of the internet. The government deciding what content is “sufficiently Canadian” will soon become a matter of deciding what content is appropriate, approved, and safe.

What about Bill C-18? This is another example of an intervention that legislates internet censorship under the pretext of “protecting the independent press.” Bill C-18 requires internet platforms (especially companies like Google and Meta) to pay media outlets for news content. The government is turning content sharing into an economic penalty to extract money from big tech companies.

Because of this law, platforms like Google and Meta have decided to remove news content completely. In other words, the government’s move to “access information” has actually restricted access to information.

Similarly, due to cancel culture, academics, business people, and members of the media are censored, fired, and subject to social lynching when they voice different views. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, especially in business and academic institutions, cause decisions to be made based on identity rather than merit. Canadian universities have been degraded from institutions that encourage intellectual freedom into ideological centres where a singular type of thinking is imposed. Companies must prioritize political correctness over efficiency and productivity in business life. Canada has shifted from a society based on individual freedom and voluntary cooperation to a system governed by the ideological impositions of the government.

Assisted Suicide And Moral Decline

Indicators of Canada’s political and economic collapse can also be traced to the individual level. The rapid increase in Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) applications in Canada has led to deep debate on personal freedoms, ethical values, ​​and the role of the state in the country.

Canada has the fastest-growing assisted suicide program in the world. When MAiD was legalized in 2016, it only included individuals with terminal illnesses. However, over time, the criteria were relaxed and expanded to include psychological disorders or illnesses that do not have a natural death period. In 2021, approximately 10,000 people ended their lives under MAiD. This number constitutes 3.3% of all deaths. Even people who were experiencing financial difficulties or housing problems resorted to euthanasia, causing heated arguments in the public domain.

In the face of all the challenges, assuming Canada has a functioning social welfare state would be unwise. Canada’s health system is seriously unreliable because of long waiting times, overburdened hospitals, and staff shortages.

Before moving to Canada, be mindful that you can wait months to years for doctor’s appointments and surgeries. The shortage of doctors and nurses severely disrupts health services. Excessive bureaucracy and limited private health services make the health system even more inefficient.

Federal Government Overreach

The federal government’s drama is not Canada’s only political issue. The political conflict between the federal and provincial governments is becoming a serious problem.

There are several main disagreements between the federal and provincial governments:

• First, the federal government’s carbon tax has drawn fierce criticism from energy-independent provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario.

• Second, the federal government demands that the provinces spend more on healthcare financing, while the provinces say they are underfunded and subject to excessive federal intervention.

• Third, immigration has exacerbated the housing crisis and the burden on public services in large provinces such as Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. The provinces demand more funding, saying they shoulder much of the cost burden, but funding is unavailable.

• Fourth, the federal government’s policies restricting fossil fuel use continue to economically harm provinces such as Alberta and Saskatchewan, which depend on oil and gas.

It’s no surprise that many people in Alberta and the Prairie provinces responded positively to Trump’s annexation proposal. It reflects a deep and long-standing frustration with federal control over energy policy. At the same time, a grassroots “Make Alberta Great Again” movement is gaining real traction. Pro-separation initiatives are picking up momentum, with growing calls for a referendum on Alberta’s independence.

Even Bill 54, passed in May 2025, lowered the threshold required to trigger a referendum on the province’s sovereignty. Now it’s easier for separatist groups to push for a vote.

I was in Alberta last year and met with several people involved in the movement in person. We spoke at length about the political landscape, their frustrations, and their hopes for Alberta’s future. Many of them told me that, while they believe strongly in the cause, they also know how easily their involvement could make them political targets. That’s why they’re working on their Plan-B strategies to protect themselves and their families if things take a turn for the worse.

Over-Regulation And High Taxes

Strict government regulations and high tax rates in Canada negatively impact economic growth and entrepreneurship by increasing the financial burden on individuals and businesses.

Let me give you an example. Ontario’s total income tax payment can be as high as 53.5%. These high tax rates reduce the disposable income of individuals and businesses and restrict economic mobility. Under the guise of “Tax the rich” and “Pay your fair share,” the Canadian government began taxing capital gains over $250,000 CAD at up to 66.6% starting in 2024. Being an entrepreneur or creating economic productivity in Canada is one of the government’s favourite activities to punish.

High Cost Of Living

Rising real estate prices, the cost of essential consumer goods, and transportation have greatly increased the economic burden on individuals. Real estate prices have reached astronomical levels in cities like Vancouver and Toronto. This fact makes home ownership nearly impossible for the middle class. The lack of affordable housing options is threatening life in Canada.

With average home prices pushing $730,000 CAD ($536,000 USD), double-digit inflation on food and energy, and yet another round of carbon taxes, everyday life in Canada has become flat-out unaffordable. More and more people are waking up to the reality that they can live better, in places like Latin America, for a fraction of the cost and without being punished for simply trying to get ahead.

Most people seeking to migrate to Canada think about living in Toronto. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto is around $ 2,500 CAD ($1,700 USD). If your job is in Vancouver, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is around $2,700 CAD ($1,900 USD).

Living expenses in Toronto and Vancouver are sky-high, and if you’re hoping Montreal offers a more affordable alternative, you’ll be disappointed—it’s just as costly. Factor in additional expenses for your family, and Canada quickly becomes an impractical place to invest in or build your future. It is difficult to see the benefits of living there.

The rapid growth of Canada’s immigrant population has also become another socio-economic issue. Canada does not have a dynamic market economy that can absorb all immigrants without lowering the standard of living of other citizens. Therefore, economic difficulties have not only caused immigrants to become targets but also a threat to social peace.

Elections In Canada

Do you recall the political debate that flared up after Trudeau’s resignation, revealing Canada’s polarized politics? Canadian politics was left in confusion about which way to turn after U.S. President Donald Trump hinted at annexing Canada as the 51st state.

What an absolutely painful circus to watch unfold. After being thoroughly humiliated by Trump and losing whatever political capital he had left, Trudeau stepped down, hoping to give the Liberals one last shot at survival in the next election.

The Liberals wasted no time in installing Mark Carney, a globalist even more elitist than Trudeau, as Prime Minister. As a career technocrat, Carney’s credentials read like a who’s who of globalist power centres—Goldman Sachs, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, and the World Economic Forum.

When I saw that the so-called conservative Pierre Poilievre was positioned to run against Carney in the snap elections on April 28, 2025, it became obvious that the entire contest was pure theatre. Poilievre played his part well, talking tough, staying on script, and never crossing the lines he wasn’t supposed to. In an election where the outcome was never in doubt, Carney picked up where Trudeau left off.

What’s truly hilarious is that Canadians rallied behind Carney, thinking he was the tough guy who could stand up to Trump, as if a globalist banker could salvage national pride. They saw him as the unifier for the challenges ahead, not realizing he was just the next polished face of the same worn-out agenda. They did not hesitate to choose a copy of the same man as their hope, as if they had forgotten why they had withdrawn their support for Trudeau.

Watching these painful realities from a distance, I feel compelled to speak the truth. Liberals and conservatives are inflicting irreparable wounds on social cohesion without knowing that the system itself is rigged. Political scandals, unfulfilled campaign promises, and a lack of transparency continue to fuel growing skepticism toward Canadian leaders. My only hope is that more people begin to realize there are far better places to live and truly thrive outside of Canada.

Canada is no longer worth the debate. Broken systems, high taxes, lost freedoms, there’s nothing left to fix. The smart ones aren’t waiting. They’re departing.

Conclusion

It’s time to stop calculating the pros and cons of living in Canada. There are no advantages at all. Canada is a country stuck under high taxes, failing public services, ideological impositions, and an increasingly authoritarian government. Buying a house has become a dream, healthcare a lottery, and freedom of expression a luxury.

Even worse, despite all these problems, there is no will to fix Canada’s future. Canada has become divided by ideological wars between ever-growing state control and failed economic policies. Simply put, the best place to live in Canada doesn’t exist.

The answer for those looking to secure their future is to look beyond Canada. If you don’t want to be penalized for your success, crushed by high taxes, and deprived of your fundamental rights, now is the time to explore alternative countries that genuinely value freedom and opportunity.

*  *  *

The truth is, Canada’s decline is just one piece of a much bigger global pattern. The warning signs are everywhere: collapsing economies, overreaching governments, and shrinking personal freedoms. You don’t have to wait until it’s too late—or stay trapped in a system that’s stacked against you. There’s a better way forward, and the time to act is now. That’s why we’re urging you to join Doug Casey’s urgent online video event, where he’ll reveal his proven strategy to survive and thrive during the coming collapse. You’ll learn exactly how to secure a real Plan B with second passports, offshore banking, and the kind of freedom insurance that governments can’t take away from you. Reserve your spot here before it’s too late.

Former FBI Director and Trump special counsel Robert Mueller claims he has Parkinson’s disease, and “cannot comply with a request to testify this week before a congressional committee investigating the government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigations,” the NY Times originally reported Sunday evening before stealth-editing their article to lead with the committee having withdrawn their request. 

It’s a little unclear how it went down since the Times never issued a correction.

Anyway, this sudden Parkinsons’ diagnosis came shortly after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said it would subpoena Mueller to testify on Tuesday over the FBI’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein while he was director of the FBI. 

Of note, committee chair James Comer (R-KY) wrote in a letter to Mueller; Because you were F.B.I. director during the time when Mr. Epstein was under investigation by the F.B.I., the committee believes that you possess knowledge and information relevant to its investigation.”

In 2008, the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, negotiated a so-called nonprosecution agreement with Mr. Epstein’s lawyers. Under the deal, federal prosecutors declined to charge Mr. Epstein but he pleaded guilty to a lesser state charge of soliciting a minor for prostitution. As part of that agreement, Mr. Epstein served 13 months at a local prison, where he was allowed to leave custody and work out of his office six days a week.

After federal prosecutors indicted Mr. Epstein in 2019, the deal reached in 2008 was widely criticized, as it was seen as far too favorable to Mr. Epstein, who, according to court documents, continued to abuse underage girls in the years that followed. It is not clear how much involvement Mr. Mueller had in the Epstein investigation. -NYT

The Times then spends a considerable portion of the article ‘selling’ the notion that Mueller’s too sick to testify over Jeffrey Epstein – with people such as former AG Bill Barr (also linked to Epstein) having noted Mueller’s relatively recent frailty in his memoir. 

During a key meeting to discuss the findings of Mr. Mueller’s investigation in 2019, Mr. Mueller’s hands “were trembling” and his voice was “tremulous,” Mr. Barr wrote in a memoir published in 2022.

“I knew he wasn’t nervous, and I wondered if he might have an illness,” Mr. Barr wrote.

Mr. Barr wrote that after the meeting, he and the deputy attorney general at the time, Mr. Rosenstein, discussed Mr. Mueller’s condition.

“Wow,” Mr. Barr said he said to Mr. Rosenstein. “Bob has lost a step.”

Indeed. 

Others in Comer’s crosshairs include; James Comey, the former F.B.I. director; Hillary and Bill Clinton; and Eric H. Holder Jr., Merrick B. Garland, Alberto R. Gonzales, Jeff Sessions and Mr. Barr, all former attorneys general.

Did you catch that Bill Clinton’s been seen walking around with a defibrillator? 

Poor guy might not be able to testify either! These things happen. 

Authored by Hannah Frankman Hood via the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER),

A nineteen-year-old college student is suing her former high school for negligence because she graduated despite being unable to read or write.

The student, Aleysha Ortiz, graduated from Hartford Public Schools in the spring of 2024 with honors.

She earned a scholarship to attend the University of Connecticut, where she’s studying public policy. But while she was in high school, she had to use speech-to-text apps to help her read and write essays, and despite years of advocating for support for her literacy struggles, her school never addressed them.

Her story is shocking, but unfortunately, it isn’t isolated. At 24 Illinois public schools, not a single student can read at grade level. Nationwide, 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth grade level. Put a different way: only 46 percent of American adults gained even a middle-school level mastery of literacy—let alone high school or collegiate levels.

In a first-world country where we spend nearly $16,000 per student per year to educate our children, that’s a horrifying statistic.

Literacy is supposed to be the bedrock of a free and liberally educated society. As the Washington Post’s motto so aptly reminds us, “democracy dies in darkness.”

Illiteracy is a form of darkness, and an illiterate populace is not one equipped to handle the demands of a world filled with forms and papers and words, let alone be the voting citizens of a democratic society.

What Do Literacy Stats Actually Mean?

Officially, the United States reports a basic literacy rate of 99 percent (which should perhaps be called into question, if students like Aleysha Ortiz can graduate with honors and still be illiterate).

But “basic literacy” is a bit of a sales pitch. It sounds impressive, but in practice, “basic literacy skills” means a K-3 grade level of reading—things like Hop on Pop and Amelia Bedelia.

“Functional literacy” is what actually matters: the ability to read and understand things like forms, instructions, job applications, and other forms of text you’ll encounter in your day-to-day life. It measures both technical reading skill and comprehension—your ability to decipher the words, and your ability to discern their meaning.

An estimated 21 percent of American adults (~43 million Americans) are functionally illiterate, meaning they have difficulty reading and comprehending instructions and filling out forms. A functionally illiterate American adult is unable to complete tasks like reading job descriptions or filling out paperwork for Social Security and Medicaid.

Perhaps worse still is the statistic that 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth-grade level. Most of us don’t think about reading in terms of grade level, so this statistic feels intuitively bad but practically meaningless. What is a sixth-grade level?

Books written at the sixth-grade level are intended (in both literacy and comprehension skills) for eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Think of books like A Wrinkle in Time, Percy Jackson and The Olympians, and The Giver.

They’re good stories, but they don’t require the same vocabulary and mental acuity as making sense of a tax form. This is an excerpt from The Giver:

Garbriel’s breathing was even and deep. Jonas liked having him there, though he felt guilty about the secret. Each night he gave memories to Gabriel: memories of boat rides and picnics in the sun; memories of soft rainfall against windowpanes; memories of dancing barefoot on a damp lawn.

More complex than Dick and Jane or Hop on Pop, obviously. But this isn’t an adult level of comprehension. If your reading abilities cap out here, you’re going to encounter a lot of text in your day-to-day life that’s difficult to decipher—often things that are important for you to be able to comprehend, like the terms of a lease agreement or the instructions on a medication.

Has It Always Been Like This?

Our public education system has been plagued by literacy struggles for decades. But American literacy was not always in such poor condition. Famous American historical texts are particularly interesting to study as an example.

Second only to the Bible, the most popular work of the Colonial Era was John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It sold millions of copies, and Benjamin Franklin described it as being found in nearly every colonial home. As Harriet Beecher Stowe later wrote, “no book, save the Bible, has been more read by the common people.”

Its language is not watered down for the literarily meek:

“Mr. Worldly-Wiseman is not an ancient relic of the past. He is everywhere today, disguising his heresy and error by proclaiming the gospel of contentment and peace achieved by self-satisfaction and works. If he mentions Christ, it is not as the Savior who took our place, but as a good example of an exemplary life. Do we need a good example to rescue us, or do we need a Savior?”

This is, again, well above a sixth-grade level. Today, “heresy” is considered to be a college-level word. “Exemplary” is eleventh grade.

Pilgrim’s Progress was used for both spiritual and literacy instruction, and Protestant early America (especially in New England) valued a literate population, one where every man could read his own Bible.

Today, over half the American population cannot read and understand that passage. So what happened?

America’s Literacy Woes: A Brief History

Alas, our literacy crisis has existed for nearly as long as our public education system. In the 1950s, mere decades after the public school system entrenched itself as part of American life, Rudolf Flesch wrote a scathing book titled Why Johnny Can’t Read, in which he pulled no punches about our already staggering literacy failings.

At the time, official reports were that around 95 percent of American adults were literate. But Flesch, and other critics like him, were raising growing concerns about functional literacy and reading comprehension. Not “can Johnny see the words on the page and know what each one says,” but “can Johnny understand what he’s reading?”

Flesch argued that the answer, in many cases, was no.

We trundled on. In the 1980s, Reagan’s administration published the landmark paper titled A Nation at Risk, in which Americans were warned about our falling academic test scores—including our literacy—and that if the trend wasn’t corrected, it would lead to a national crisis.

Fifty years later, the trend has not been corrected, and we are a nation in risky waters, especially considering the financial lengths we’ve gone to trying to improve it. As a nation, we spend nearly $16,000 per student per year on our public K-12 education. Nationwide, we spend $857.2 billion per year on public K-12 schools.

If that isn’t buying literacy for all, then what exactly is it paying for?

The issue, in part, is the approach. In the Sold a Story documentary podcast series published in 2022, Emily Hanford started a controversy by pulling back the curtain on how reading instruction is done in America. For decades, schools have been instructed to teach children to read using the whole-word method (or the look-say method), not phonics, despite the clear empirical evidence that whole-word methods do not create literacy.

Phonics is the cheat code that allows readers to decode language: memorize 26 letters and their corresponding 44 sounds, and unlock the lifelong ability to sound out nearly any word you will ever encounter in every language using the Roman alphabet (about 3,000 languages, making it the most widely-used alphabet in the world).

Children learn to read first by learning the alphabet and memorizing each letter’s sounds, then slowly stringing those sounds together into words: h-o-p o-n p-o-p. Over time, they build the muscle to decode longer and longer words, building their comprehension skills along the way.

The whole-word method, on the other hand, bypasses phonics altogether.

Children are taught to read by recognizing words, not by sounding them out, in what one critic calls ‘a psycho-linguistic guessing game.’ If they don’t recognize a word, they’re encouraged to guess its meaning by context clues—in the early years, by looking at the pictures in a picture book; in later years, by gleaning the context from the words around them. If you experienced Dick and Jane readers, you were exposed to early whole-word education. This approach to reading is mere word memorization, not true literacy mastery. The concept of phonics—prerequisite to meaning-making and accurate decoding—is never even introduced in many school systems.

Once we learn to read, we often use the whole-word method as a shortcut—you’re likely reading this sentence by recognizing the words, not by sounding them out. But if you bypass the ability to sound out words you don’t know (and to phonetically write words you don’t know how to spell), you break the foundation of actual literacy. This is what many public school classrooms have been doing for decades—teaching from a long-disproven method we know puts students at risk of illiteracy.

But even this is only part of the problem. The methods for tracking student progress and understanding their level of mastery are also broken. Some kids are fully conscious of their struggles to read, like Aleysha Ortiz. But other students come home with glowing report cards, and no one, students or parents alike, realizes that anything is wrong. This is why ACT scores are falling while high school GPAs are rising. Grade inflation has rendered report cards meaningless as a measure of overall academic performance.

Some of the problem is nuanced—GPAs include things like diligence in homework and class participation as well as test results, while ACT scores measure only rote academic performance—but teachers are also often pressured to keep their pass rates high. Funding and policy are often tied to student performance and graduation rates, so schools are incentivized to keep students passing and moving through the system, even when they’re not learning.

To many, it may be inconceivable that teachers would continue to teach in a way they know doesn’t work, bowing to political pressure over the needs of students. But to those familiar with the incentive structures of public education, it’s no surprise. Teachers unions and public district officials fiercely oppose accountability and merit-based evaluation for both students and teachers. Teachers’ unions consistently fight against alternatives that would give students in struggling districts more educational options. In attempts to improve ‘equity,’ some districts have ordered teachers to stop giving grades, taking attendance, or even offering instruction altogether.

Grade inflation, social promotion, and a general disinterest in individual outcomes keep kids shuffling along the conveyor belt. Aleysha Ortiz used speech-to-text apps to help her write her high school essays, which were strong enough for her to graduate from Hartford Public School with honors. Like Ortiz, students keep getting passed through the system, passing tests and advancing from grade to grade without ever actually learning the core skills they need to survive in the world.

Which is how we’ve ended up with a population where 54 percent of American adults don’t have the literacy skills to read this article, and with a country that will, very quickly, drop behind the world in its overall ability if we don’t turn things around.

Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,

Left-wing media outlets pounced this week to attack President Donald Trump’s new appointee for the Department of Homeland Security’s election-integrity czar.

Outlets including the Associated Press and ProPublica accused Heather Honey of being an “election denier” for the doubts she has cast over the 2020 election outcome.

However, Honey’s supporters pointed to the fact that she has the receipts to back up her skepticism—including evidence that Pennsylvania, a hotbed for vote fraud by many accounts, finished with 121,240 more votes than voters.

With all counties reporting, PA ended its 2020 election with 121,240 MORE votes than voters. Certifying an election this way is illegal.

Heather Honey’s work has never been refuted. She’s uncovered enough evidence to overturn the fraudulent 2020 election in multiple states. https://t.co/3udeFIlgC3 pic.twitter.com/bAB71Rdwce

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) August 27, 2025

“Heather Honey’s work has never been refuted,” wrote Liz Harrington, Trump’s former campaign spokesperson. “She’s uncovered enough evidence to overturn the fraudulent 2020 election in multiple states.”

Trump could have clinched the election with Pennsylvania and Georgia—another hotly contested battleground state where questions over rampant fraud have yet to be fully resolved.

Left-wing activists, including Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, waged several lawfare attacks on Trump and his allies to ensure that previous efforts to investigate were punished.

Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani was sued for raising questions about the after-hours ballot counting at the Atlanta county’s State Farm Arena following video evidence suggesting that an election official had pulled cases of hidden ballots from beneath a table and scanned them multiple times.

Honey—who worked closely with Trump’s campaign lawyers such as Public Interest Legal Foundation chair Cleta Mitchell—played significant roles in the efforts to challenge Georgia’s final ballot count and the forensic audit of Arizona’s election, which uncovered widespread irregularities.

According to Mitchell, she confirmed more votes than voters in Michigan, as well.

“Her expertise is the study of systems to identify vulnerabilities that could be exploited by potential fraudsters and she was struck by what she saw in 2020 and started applying her expertise to research on election systems,” Mitchell wrote in a post defending Honey following the media smear attack.

Let’s review why the leftist media hate Heather Honey’s appointment as Deputy Asst Secretary at DHS for Election Integrity (thank you @Sec_Noem !)

Heather is a professional open source investigator who had never researched elections before 2020. Her expertise is the study of…

— Cleta Mitchell (@CletaMitchell) August 27, 2025

The decision for media outlets to target Honey reportedly came directly from Democracy Docket, the anti-integrity activist group founded by notorious election lawyer Marc Elias after he was forced out of the Perkins Coie lawfirm during John Durham’s investigation of the Steele Dossier scandal.

SCOOP: Heather Honey, an election conspiracy theorist tied to Cleta Mitchell, was appointed to a new “election integrity” position at DHS. Honey boasts a long history of promoting election conspiracies and has questioned the 2020 election results. https://t.co/PnKRX3h4I4

— Democracy Docket (@DemocracyDocket) August 25, 2025

Leftists may be justifiably worried about the Trump administration’s efforts to close many of the voting loopholes they have long exploited to pad the voter tallies with dubious or outright illegitimate ballots.

In addition to red-state redistricting to counter Democrats’ longstanding gerrymandering efforts, Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have floated the possibility of stationing ICE agents outside of polling precincts to deter illegal voting in blue states.

“Democrats are cheaters and hate nothing more than an honest and well-informed leader who is ON to them – leaders like Heather Honey,” Mitchell wrote in her post.

“Having Heather inside the Dept of Homeland Security is an enormous step toward fixing our broken election systems,” she added.

“That’s why the leftist media is howling and having public meltdowns over Heather’s appointment.”

While the shock of the brazen ballot manipulation—much of it the result of unprecedented mail-in voting during the COVID era—may have marked a low point in America’s history, some have since pointed out that the loss had a silver lining.

The four years of Biden allowed Trump and his allies time to regroup, while Democrats continued to lay traps that cost them political capital and set precedents for how Trump could proceed to hold them accountable.

It also allowed him to identify who the true loyalists were to ensure that he could hit the ground running with his ambitious agenda.

“Sometimes it feels like the 2020 election being rigged against Trump was a blessing in disguise, because otherwise … the same elites who wrecked everything would be back in charge now,” conservative influencer Hans Mahncke wrote on Friday.

Sometimes it feels like the 2020 election being rigged against Trump was a blessing in disguise, because otherwise Pence would have spent the second term sabotaging Trump from within and the same elites who wrecked everything would be back in charge now. https://t.co/pgIKRhEC3S

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) August 30, 2025

Authored by Paul Bradford via American Greatness,

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that the military would cease using a Microsoft program that relied on Chinese engineers. This obviously presented a major security issue, which Hegseth noted.

“If you’re thinking ‘America first’ and common sense, this doesn’t pass either of those tests,” Hegseth said of the program.

“The use of Chinese nationals to service Department of Defense cloud environments? It’s over.”

He also declared that the DOD had delivered a formal letter to Microsoft, chiding the tech giant for breaching the trust of its government and for allowing such a problem to arise. The Pentagon promises to do more audits of its Microsoft-provided programs and other tech initiatives for China connections.

Microsoft is one of the worst offenders in this CCP connection.

Its co-founder, Bill Gates, always finds an opportunity to praise China. In March, Gates gushed over the communist state’s tech advances and warned that any American attempts to counter Chinese growth would stifle global innovation.

The tech giant has a large presence in the country, generating fears that this would allow the CCP access to our national security operations.

The “digital escorts” program that the DOD just revoked, confirmed these fears.

Microsoft’s Chinese engineers handle some of the most sensitive material the Pentagon processes.

As ProPublica reported in July:

Microsoft uses the escort system to handle the government’s most sensitive information that falls below “classified.” According to the government, this “high impact level” category includes “data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin.” The “loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability” of this information “could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect” on operations, assets, and individuals, the government has said. In the Defense Department, the data is categorized as “Impact Level” 4 and 5 and includes materials that directly support military operations.

Former CIA senior executive Harry Coker told the outlet, “If I were an operative, I would look at that as an avenue for extremely valuable access. We need to be very concerned about that.”

The ChiComs may even inspire some of Microsoft’s domestic operations. The tech giant played a critical role in setting up the censorship industrial complex that has been weaponized against conservatives in the U.S. and elsewhere. The CCP would be proud of such an endeavor.

Microsoft cultivates close ties with China because its dominance of the market makes its executives think it’s too big to punish. It’s only the operator who can serve the government’s national security needs in certain areas. Any concerns about communist subversion are ignored when it’s the only option available.

These practices likely run afoul of antitrust law, making Microsoft a prime target for a Federal Trade Commission investigation. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has made it a priority to crack down on Big Tech malfeasance in the market. Microsoft’s actions don’t just violate free market principles—they also put our national security at risk.

The FTC announced a probe into Microsoft’s bundling practices last December. The tech company allegedly uses this strategy to make itself seem the best option for government contracting while unfairly cutting out the competition. This lack of serious competition cements Microsoft’s cavalier attitude towards China and its reluctance to change that behavior. If no other company can challenge Microsoft’s stranglehold, there’s little motivation to correct the tech giant’s errors.

The administration wants to mandate a simple standard for companies it does business with: put America first. Microsoft and other tech giants fail this basic criterion. Previous administrations allowed them to skate by due to their monopolies. It’s time to change that for the sake of the national interest. We can’t allow China to further undermine our defense capabilities because we’re afraid of upsetting Bill Gates.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans 20 years ago this week on August 29, 2005.

The storm brought destruction to the city, and the scale of damages as well as the U.S. government’s delayed response shocked the world.

But, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, while Katrina remains the costliest hurricane to have hit the U.S. since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s records started, its already devastating death toll of around 1,400 people was eclipsed by the loss of life caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017.

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NOAA believes that at least 2,900 people died as a result of the storm, and its impact can be felt on the island to this day.

Because of Puerto Rico’s territory status, federal help was also slower to arrive on the island and there is still a need for more disaster assistance, as some of the damages have still not been repaired and the COVID-19 pandemic slowed down efforts even more.

In the case of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Maria alike, deaths caused indirectly by the storm and in the aftermath of it outnumber those caused directly by it.

Adjusted for inflation, Katrina caused an economic damage of $201 billion, with the share that was insured standing at $104 billion adjusted for 2024 inflation. 

Maria caused $115 billion in damages.

Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas and Louisiana the same year, has a final tally of $160 billion.

Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York and New Jersey in 2012, caused $89 billion in damages.

From compact city-states to island nations, many of the world’s most densely populated jurisdictions share one thing in common: limited land area.

While population growth plays a role, land mass area is often the stronger driver of population density.

In fact, 13 of the 20 most densely populated nations and territories are islands.

This infographic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, visualizes the jurisdictions with the highest population density in 2025, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Macau Has the Highest Population Density Worldwide

Below, we show jurisdictions by population density in 2025, measured in people per square kilometer.

Macau tops the global list with a staggering 23,167 people per square kilometer.

This semi-autonomous region of China is densely packed due to its popularity as a gambling hub and its limited land mass. Over the past 25 years, the population has increased by 185,000 residents across an area stretching just 33 km².

Monaco follows with 16,024/km², reflecting its luxury economy, tax benefits, and constrained geography. As a result, Monaco is home to one of the most expensive real estate markets globally.

Meanwhile, Singapore and Hong Kong also rank highly, demonstrating how city-states or city-like regions dominate this metric.

As we can see, many of the most densely populated places are island nations or small territories. Notably, Sint Maarten, Malta, and Bermuda each have over 1,300 people per square kilometer.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out this map on population density in North America on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.