This is now part of a 3 part series about men’s place in the western world and how to reclaim our world.

There is a moment in every crisis where someone has to step forward. Not because they have all the answers, but because waiting is no longer an option. For most of human history, that someone was clearly defined. Today, that clarity is fading — and the cost is becoming impossible to ignore.

Making decisions has become passé.

For most of human history, the male role was simple and unforgiving — protect the tribe, feed the tribe. Life was binary. You were the hunter or the hunted. You made good decisions quickly, or you died. There was no committee. No second opinion. No time to scroll through options. The stakes clarified everything.

The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” The hunter-gatherer didn’t have the luxury of hesitation. Survival demanded presence, instinct, and the courage to commit.

Somewhere along the way, that changed.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment the pendulum swung, but the shift is undeniable. What was once instinct has curdled into paralysis. A creeping fear of making the wrong decision has replaced the far more dangerous habit of making no decision at all. COVID didn’t create this weakness — it exposed it. It accelerated a decline that had already been quietly gathering momentum for decades.

G. Michael Hopf captured it plainly: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.”

This isn’t purely a male crisis, but it cuts to the heart of a role that is, for men, instinctual. The protector. The provider. The one who stands between his people and whatever is coming through the dark.

The hunter-gatherer who led his tribe needed a specific set of tools — courage, composure, wisdom, and above all, accountability. A wrong decision in the field wasn’t an abstract failure. It had consequences. But those consequences also built something: experience, calibration, the seasoned judgment that comes only from having been tested. The willingness to be wrong — and own it — was itself a form of strength.

Today we are not fending off wolves or rival tribes. But the moments that demand decisive action still come, and not everyone is equipped to answer.

A good friend — we’ll call him Steve — learned this firsthand.

Steve believed he was having a heart attack. He drove himself to the hospital and walked through the emergency doors to find a waiting room packed with sick people and a line that wasn’t moving. He knew, the way men have always known things in survival moments, that waiting would kill him.

So he did what his instincts demanded.

He sat down. Not in a chair — on the floor. When that drew curious glances but no action, he went further. He laid flat on the cold, hard hospital floor, in the middle of a crowded room, and let the scene speak for itself.

It worked immediately. Staff descended on him. Within the hour he was in surgery, getting the procedure that saved his life.

Most people wouldn’t do what Steve did. Social conditioning runs deep — don’t cause a scene, don’t break the rules, don’t take up too much space. But Steve’s instinct cut through all of that. He assessed the threat, committed to a course of action, and trusted himself. The hunter in him took over.

The contrast came during the darkest stretch of the pandemic.

Another man drove his ailing wife to the emergency entrance of a hospital, only to find a sign on the door: “If you are unwell, do not enter the hospital.”

He stopped cold.

His brain locked. His chest tightened. He sat in the car with his sick wife beside him, unable to move — not because the answer was unclear, but because someone had placed a rule between him and his instinct. Every message he had absorbed — follow the guidelines, defer to authority, don’t make waves — jammed the signal.

When he finally called 911, the dispatcher gave him the only answer that mattered: “You’re going to have to do what you feel is necessary.”

That simple sentence shook him loose.

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It is worth asking how we arrived at a place where a man needs permission to protect his wife. Where a sign on a door carries more weight than the instinct forged over thousands of years of human survival. The Spartans had a saying — a warrior who hesitates in battle does not hesitate alone; he takes his brothers down with him. The stakes today may look different, but the principle holds.

The decision-making muscle, like any muscle, atrophies without use. Generations raised in comfort, conditioned to defer, trained to seek consensus before acting — they freeze when the moment demands they move.

That is the real cost of weak times. Not softness in the abstract, but paralysis in the specific — in the parking lot, in the waiting room, in the moments that cannot wait.

The role of protector was never about being fearless. It was about acting despite fear. Trusting the instinct. Making the call. Owning what follows.

That instinct still lives in us. It simply needs to be exercised.

The world does not pause while we deliberate. Threats don’t wait for consensus. The people who depend on us don’t have the luxury of our hesitation. Steve’s story didn’t end on a hospital floor because he refused to let it. The other man’s story could have ended in a parking lot — and nearly did.

The call to step forward is not always loud or dramatic. Sometimes it is quiet, internal, and deeply personal. But it is always there. The question is not whether the moment will come. It is whether, when it does, you will be the kind of man who moves.

That is the oldest job there is. And it is still worth doing well.

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Marco Pfeiffer grew up lower middle class in Germany and heard the same things you heard in Canada. Money doesn’t grow on trees. A penny saved is a penny earned. He came to the United States at 26 for what was supposed to be a two-year posting — a line on the resume, a chance to learn real English. He stayed. Within ten years, with no American work history and a shaky command of the language, he was Chief Financial Officer of a $150-million company, working sixty, eighty, ninety hours a week.

He had the title he’d wanted his whole life. And, in his own words, corporate had killed his spirit.

Then in 2016 he lost the job. Two or three months out of work, on a salary well above average, he discovered something that rattled him: he was completely dependent on that paycheque. He owned one rental house at the time — a place he used to live in and decided to rent out rather than sell. An accidental landlord.

That was the hinge. He went back to work in finance, but from that point on he bought every rental property he could and learned how to scale. By 2020 he owned 25 single-family homes generating $400 to $500 a month each at roughly a 10% cash-on-cash return. That replaced the CFO salary. He walked away from a career he’d poured tens of thousands of hours into and never looked back.

The advice that’s supposed to keep you there

Marco’s central claim is one worth sitting with:

Middle class financial advice is designed to keep you in the middle class.

Not accidentally. By design. As he put it on the show — the system is not broken, the system works exactly as it is designed.

Consider what you were taught. Save. Live within your means. Get out of debt. Pay the house off early. There’s nothing wrong with living within your means, Marco says, and he isn’t preaching recklessness. But nobody ever taught you that debt comes in two kinds. Bad debt sits on things that lose value — your car, your credit card. Pay those off fast. Good debt sits on appreciating assets that cash flow, ideally enough to cover the debt itself.

So why does a billionaire take out a mortgage? Because long-term fixed debt is a bet against your own currency. Your $2,000 payment ten years from now isn’t $2,000 today. Inflation shreds your purchasing power — and it shreds the real value of your debt right alongside it. That’s how Washington carries forty trillion dollars without the roof falling in. Forty trillion isn’t what it was thirty years ago. Tell someone in 1996 that number and they’d have told you to get off the crack pipe.

Which brings us to the friendly little chart your bank hands you at signing. Make one or two extra payments a year and you’ll clear that thirty-year mortgage in twenty-two. How thoughtful. Marco’s response: do you really believe they’re telling you that because they want less of your interest?

The middle class is a tax trap

Here’s the part that stings for anyone on a T-4.

When you get paid, the money is gone before you see it. Say the cheque is $10,000 and the rate is forty percent. You see $6,000, and you build your entire life around $6,000 — the car you can’t afford, the mortgage you can’t carry, the restaurants you don’t go to. The other four thousand never existed as far as your daily life is concerned.

Marco pays tax on what’s left at the end of the year. You pay tax before you’re allowed to live. Same country, same rules, entirely different game. There’s a saying in the States he’s fond of: there are two tax codes, one for the educated and one for the uneducated, and both of them are legal.

None of this is taught in school. Not how the tax code works, not how to keep more of what you earn, not how compounding works, not how to open a chequing account. You learn plenty of other things. Marco’s read: the foundation of the whole arrangement is to keep us financially and economically illiterate, because people on the hamster wheel don’t leave the hamster wheel.

Nineteen forty-three

If you want a single date that explains the modern taxpayer, it’s 1943.

Before that, an American who earned $10,000 was handed $10,000 and then wrote a cheque to the government. People hated it — visibly, viscerally, every single year. So during the war a senator had a glorious idea: take it out of the paycheque so they never see it. Temporary, of course. Wartime measure.

Three or four generations later we don’t merely tolerate it. We can’t imagine any other arrangement. And when a portion comes back the following spring, we say thank you — for the return of our own money.

The same trick, Marco notes, that took the dollar off gold for a few months. Fifty-odd years and counting.

And it’s worth remembering what came before all of it. For roughly 140 years — until 1913 — the United States had no income tax at all. It went from a handful of colonies to one of the most prosperous nations on earth funded by tariffs and by bonds that citizens chose to buy when they agreed the bridge was worth building. Marco is a free-market man and no great fan of tariffs. But he’ll say this much: used properly, with no income tax on the other side of the ledger, it is not a bad way to run a country.

Which is precisely the argument we’re making in Alberta. Let the resources and the businesses fund the roads, the schools and the hospitals. Keep a small consumption tax on what people actually use. Keep government to the few things government is for. That’s not a fantasy. That’s a description of North America for most of its history.

The Canadian problem — and the way around it

Marco is straight with us, and I appreciate it: what he did in the US is close to impossible to replicate here.

We don’t have thirty-year fixed mortgages. Our access to credit is tighter. And the ratio that matters — rent to home value — simply doesn’t work. He can buy a solid $200,000 house in Mississippi or Alabama and rent it for $2,000 a month. Try that on a $700,000 Calgary property renting at $2,000. You aren’t even covering the mortgage. He’ll say it plainly: Calgary is a fine real estate market and a poor rental market.

So his philosophy is this — go where your money is treated best. Americans in New York and California do exactly the same thing, investing in states where the numbers work.

Can a Canadian do it? He’s already helped Canadians, a Brit and an Australian do it. You won’t get the best rate and you’ll put more down. After two or three deals, the terms improve because the lenders know you. And he doesn’t use banks at all — he uses private lenders, which in the US is a multi-billion-dollar industry of institutions that simply aren’t banks. He hasn’t taken a bank loan in about eight years.

His view of the banks, on why you’d hand them your savings in the first place: whatever you give them, they lend out ten or twelve times over.

Why a house beats a screen

One last thing, and it’s the part I liked best.

Real estate isn’t fashionable right now. Everyone wants the stock that’s up twenty percent. Marco owns stocks and trades them, so this isn’t purism. But take a run-down house that’s an eyesore on the street, renovate it, and hand a family a home they’re happy in — you have built something. It’s hard to tell that story about a click on a screen. Shares used to come with a certificate you put in the safe and were proud of. Now it’s numbers and clicks and nothing to hold.

Same reason I keep telling you to get some silver. If the machines go dark tomorrow, a hundred Maple Leafs in your hand is a different feeling than a balance you can’t reach. Tangible. Dirt, or metal, or a roof over a family.

He’s coming to Alberta

Marco already had a ticket to the Vancouver conference this format grew out of — small world. He’s never been to Alberta, he wants to come, and he says he feels strongly about our cause. So the invitation is open and public now: come north and teach Canadians how to put their money where it’s welcome.

Find Marco: LinkedIn — search Marco Pfeiffer, and send him a message. He answers, he coaches people who ask, and he doesn’t advertise it.

This episode’s sponsor: NuggetStacker. I’m not your investment advisor — but get some gold and silver and protect your family’s wealth. Link and discount code at unscrewthenews.com. Free delivery in Canada on orders over $600.

Coming up: Capitalism & Morality, Calgary, September 11 and 12. Great speakers, real conversation about freedom in the West. Use UTN10 for 10% off your ticket.

Share this out. Get more eyeballs on this information. The shadowbans only work on people who stay quiet.

Let’s stay sane together. Keep your head on a swivel. — Bruce

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There’s a particular kind of number that stops you.

Nicolas Hulscher gave me one this week. His team at the McCullough Foundation took the FDA’s own briefing document — the one prepared for the officials who voted to approve the new mRNA flu shot — and ran the risk-benefit calculation the FDA didn’t run.

To prevent one hospitalization from influenza, two people had to die of unexplained causes. Around four thousand had to suffer an adverse event. About three hundred had to suffer a disabling grade 3 reaction, the kind that stops you from carrying on with your day.

That’s not an activist’s estimate. That’s their data, arranged the way any honest regulator would have arranged it.

The risk ratio for unexplained deaths came out at 2.55 — two and a half times more death with the mRNA product than with the traditional flu shot. And that ratio appears nowhere in the FDA’s document. Hulscher’s word for the omission was fraudulent. He was careful about it. He said they were supposed to do that comparison, as far as he’s aware, and they didn’t.

They approved it anyway.

I asked him the only question that matters here. How? How does an agency that exists to protect the public sign off on that?

His answer was blunt: they’re captured. Particularly by Moderna. He said someone must have given those officials large sums of money, because he can’t find another explanation. One of the key people involved in the approval has spent his entire career working on gene therapy injections.

We’ve all watched the revolving door for years now. You work at the FDA, then you work at Pfizer, then you’re back. I asked whether that’s still a regular occurrence. “Very regular,” he said. “Very, very regular.”

Can they be unbiased?

“They can’t be. It’s impossible, literally.”

The industry that doesn’t want to cure you

We opened on cancer, and I’m glad we did, because it sets up everything else.

Calgary spent something close to a billion dollars on a new cancer institute. Beautiful building. And the treatments inside it are the same treatments we’ve been running for decades — chemotherapy and radiation, at over a hundred thousand dollars per patient per year, with results that don’t justify the price.

Hulscher’s point isn’t that no one is trying. It’s that the only things that get approved are the things somebody can own. Patentable biologics. Gene therapies. Immunotherapies. Anything you can’t put a fence around never makes it out of the lab.

He gave me an example I hadn’t heard. Health Canada approved a clinical trial for dandelion root in cancer. The animal work was startling — implant mice with human tumours, give them dandelion root, and the tumours don’t grow. Human trials were supposed to follow.

They never happened. It “mysteriously never happened,” as he put it.

Meanwhile cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the world and the rates keep climbing. Whatever we’re doing isn’t working. It is, however, generating large profits.

And now Moderna is out on a media tour promoting an mRNA cancer shot for melanoma, without publishing data. Same platform. Same lipid nanoparticles that travel to every organ system. Except instead of telling your cells to make spike protein, this one tells them to make tumour neoantigens — mutated tumour proteins — which then get expressed on your heart muscle cells and your neurons and flagged for destruction by your own immune system.

They gave people the shot that produced turbo cancer. Now they’re selling the shot that’s supposed to fix it.

Sixty-four million mosquitoes

We changed gears to something I hadn’t expected to be talking about in 2026.

Google — the company that opened with “don’t be evil” as a mission statement — has filed an experimental use permit with the EPA to release tens of millions of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes into the wild in California and Florida. Hulscher’s figure was 64 million. He called it one of the largest open-air biological experiments in American history.

The stated purpose is suppressing mosquito-borne illness. In Florida there have been roughly five West Nile cases. Hulscher isn’t sure what’s being suppressed.

What he is sure of is the ecology. Birds, bats, frogs and fish eat mosquitoes. Knock out the mosquitoes and you knock out their food source, and that cascades.

He’s also sure of the business model, and this is the part worth sitting with. Google already did a smaller release in Fresno. It worked — the population dropped. Then they stopped, and the mosquitoes came roaring back within a season.

Which means the product isn’t mosquito suppression. The product is a subscription. Contracts with municipalities and states, renewed every year, forever, because the moment you stop paying, the problem returns. That’s the end goal: a release program in every state.

Gates has been at this longer. He funds Oxitec, which released millions of GM mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. He funds the World Mosquito Program, which has put billions of bacteria-infected mosquitoes into the environment worldwide.

The difference now is that a web browsing company is doing it on U.S. soil.

Where the viruses went

Remember hantavirus? Ebola? H5N1?

Hantavirus is done. Dead-end outbreak, over months ago, and Hulscher says he predicted it would be a dead end shortly after it started. Secretary Kennedy later confirmed it. The fear campaign was intense and it was for nothing.

Ebola is still being pushed as the worst outbreak ever. What doesn’t get said is that it isn’t going to become a pandemic. Ebola spreads through infected bodily fluids. It spreads in the Congo because the infrastructure isn’t there and people share rooms and treatment is limited. There have been thirty or forty Ebola outbreaks in thirty years, most of them in the Congo. This is not new.

So why run the cycle?

Because fear is the funding mechanism. The more fear, the more support for developing vaccines, and the more likely people are to take them when they arrive.

Then Hulscher dropped the detail that made the whole thing click. They began developing mRNA Ebola shots for the Bundibugyo strain a few months before that outbreak was declared.

You can’t make that up.

Create the fear, sell the fix. We’ve watched this play run so many times it should be embarrassing to still be describing it.

The good news, and he offered it himself: not as many people are buying it. A large number have woken up. We’re in a better position than we were five or six years ago.

The house of cards

Last item, and it’s a big one.

The researcher whose name sits on the study regulators and the American Academy of Pediatrics have used for two decades to say vaccines don’t cause autism is expected to plead guilty to money laundering and wire fraud. He’s accused of stealing more than a million dollars in CDC grant money — money earmarked for autism and genetic disorder research.

He was indicted over a decade ago and spent years as a fugitive. He was on HHS’s most wanted list. Germany extradited him back to the U.S. and he’s been in federal custody since.

I asked Hulscher the obvious question. Does the fraud touch the science?

He was careful. He can’t prove statistical manipulation. But he said if the man was stealing at that scale through grant fraud, it wouldn’t surprise him if the same hands were using statistical tricks or falsifying data to produce the result they wanted. His position: it needs to be investigated, and every paper carrying his name should now be in question — including the one in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Is it the card that pulls down the house, or is he a patsy so everyone else can say the mess has been cleaned up?

Hulscher doesn’t think they’ll be able to use him as an exit. But he might. They may try.

And on Fauci — the DOJ is talking about indictments. Hulscher’s read is that contempt of Congress is the easiest charge to land, since Rand Paul’s committee already voted to hold him in contempt and the criminal referral is submitted. Beyond that, prosecution requests have gone to fifty state attorneys general.

There are people online organizing a GoFundMe for his legal defence. He was the highest paid employee in the United States government. I think he’ll manage.

What’s next

Hulscher’s team is finishing a comprehensive paper on mRNA injections and cancer. They’ve identified 35 separate mechanisms by which these shots can induce or accelerate cancer, and they take apart the new mRNA cancer vaccines and explain why they’ll be hazardous and why they’ll fail.

Watch for it.

This man has taken more incoming than most people could stand and he keeps publishing. If you want to follow his work directly, it’s at nicolashulscher.com.

Get this episode in front of somebody who still thinks the agencies are on their side.

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Capitalism & Morality Calgary 2026 — September 11 and 12 at the Croatian Cultural Centre. VIP dinner Friday evening, full program Saturday. Use UTN10 for 10% off your tickets.

Let’s stay sane together. Keep your head on a swivel.

— Bruce

By Bruce Scholl — Unscrew the News

A wound closes when you take the dirt out of it. Leave the dirt in and it festers, no matter how many times you tell the patient he’s healed.

That’s Canada in August 2026.

Start with the part nobody wants said plainly. On December 10, 2020 — the week the first doses landed — the Public Health Agency of Canada told Canadians the odds of a serious adverse reaction were “extremely rare — less than one in a million.” In the same news release, they announced a $75 million compensation fund with a third-party administrator and fifty contracted physicians.

You don’t build that for a one-in-a-million risk. You build it because you expect claims.

That’s the pattern, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

The courts have ruled. Twice.

On January 16, 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal found the 2022 invocation of the Emergencies Act unreasonable and beyond Ottawa’s legal authority. Unanimous. Chief Justice de Montigny on the panel. In a move the court almost never makes, the judgment was signed simply “The Court.”

The protests were disturbing and disruptive, the court said — and fell well short of a threat to national security. The emergency regulations violated section 2(b) of the Charter because they were overbroad and drew no line between lawbreakers and bystanders. The Economic Order — banks compelled to disclose customer information and freeze accounts without a warrant or judicial authorization — violated section 8.

257 accounts frozen. 196 arrested. 110 charged.

When the provinces were consulted hours before invocation, only Ontario, B.C. and Newfoundland appeared to support it. Alberta was not with them. They did it anyway.

That ruling upheld Justice Mosley’s 2024 decision, which found the invocation lacked justification, transparency and intelligibility. Mosley went out of his way to say he had sympathy for the people at that cabinet table and might have agreed with them in the moment. He ruled against them anyway, because the threshold is the threshold.

So what did Ottawa do? On March 17, 2026, a new government under a different Prime Minister appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Nobody resigned. Nobody was demoted. Nobody lost a pension.

And last week it got worse

On August 17, Blacklock’s Reporter published records showing where the blacklist actually went.

It originated with the RCMP. Names, birth dates, telephone numbers, other personal information. Sent by unencrypted email.

It didn’t stop at the banks. It went to the Canadian Bankers Association, the Mutual Fund Dealers Association, the Canadian Securities Administrators, the Ontario Securities Commission — and Ontario regulators forwarded it to somewhere between one thousand and two thousand brokerages and firms. No restrictions on further distribution. None.

A 2023 Inquiry of Ministry had already confirmed it went to the Canadian arms of foreign banks: Bank of China, State Bank of India, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Habib Bank, Mizuho, Wells Fargo, Hana Financial.

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Chrystia Freeland authorized it. At the time she told the country to be very, very careful to get the facts exactly right, and said the RCMP had supplied names of leaders, organizers and people whose trucks were in the blockades.

Her own assistant deputy finance minister, Isabelle Jacques, later testified about those names: there was no verification, and no follow-up.

Nobody on that list was ever notified. There’s been no recall, no accounting, no way for a Canadian to learn today whether a compliance desk in Toronto or Beijing still has a file on him because he honked a horn in February 2022.

That isn’t an emergency measure. It’s a permanent record of political undesirables, created without a warrant.

The people at the bottom

The Vaccine Injury Support Program: 3,557 claims as of December 1, 2025. Two hundred and fifty-two approved. Just over $21 million paid.

Oxaro, the private firm hired to run it, had taken $56.2 million from Ottawa by early 2024 — at a point when it had paid out $11.2 million to injured Canadians. Four dollars to the administrator for every dollar reaching the injured. The program was run so badly that PHAC took it back in-house in April 2026, after an audit and years of complaints.

Carrie Sakamoto has been on this program. Michelle Worton has been on this program. Leighton Grey is running two class actions out of Alberta. Most of these people took the shot — many because they were told to, to keep a job, board a plane, see a dying parent. They are the government’s own best-case scenario, and the answer they got was a case number and silence.

September 8 to 11, the Allison Inquiry hears their testimony in an Ottawa committee room. No subpoena power. Just parliamentarians and citizens doing the job Ottawa has refused to do for five years.

No amnesty without confession

In October 2022 — before any inquiry, ruling or resignation — The Atlantic ran Emily Oster’s “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” Nobody knew anything, everyone meant well, keeping score holds us back.

Amnesty isn’t something you declare for yourself. The injured party grants it, and it comes after the confession, not instead of it. What was offered was absolution first, admission never — and it only ever flowed upward, toward the people who gave the orders.

Grant the first three months. Genuinely. But mandates ran into 2022. “We didn’t know” covers the fog. It doesn’t cover the eighteen months after it lifted, when the policies stayed and the questions got you fired.

I’m angry, and so are millions of Canadians, and that anger is not a communications problem to be managed. It’s the correct response.

Four things would end it:

Drop the Supreme Court appeal. Two courts have ruled. Compensate the people frozen without a warrant.

Notify everyone on the blacklist. Who received it, and recall it.

Open the VISP books. Every claim, denial, and administrative dollar.

A real inquiry with subpoena power — and name the individuals who signed off, not “the government.”

Forgiveness is available in this country. I believe it’s required of me. But forgiveness follows repentance. You don’t get to skip to the part where everyone feels better.

The dirt is still in the wound.

Let’s stay sane together. Keep your head on a swivel.

— Bruce

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I bumped him. That’s the first thing I owe him publicly. I had a paper calendar mix-up, got Mitch Sylvestre on Saturday, and moved Peyman Askari to Sunday. He took it well. Said he’d been bored either way. That’s a good sport.

Peyman was born in Iran in 1983, three years into the war with Iraq. He tells the story of his mother having to call her brother to come and sit in the house so it was protected, while his father was out somewhere trying to make money, and bombs were landing outside. That’s the childhood. Then Canada — West Vancouver, a computer science degree, a PhD in computational neuroscience, a software company. Then 2020, and like a lot of us, he stopped being able to look away. He volunteered with the National Citizens Inquiry. He interviewed Canadians. And in 2025 he put his name on a ballot in West Vancouver–Sunshine Coast–Sea to Sky.

Now he’s in Florida, and he’s helping other people leave.

That’s the part that stuck with me. He’s not moving Bay Street bankers. He said doctors, lawyers, law enforcement — he’s helped an RCMP officer — border security, military. People who are supposed to believe in the thing. He said they’ve lost faith in the Canadian project. He mentioned Armed Forces veterans who told him that if the Americans ever came across, the flag’s going on the porch and they’re not fighting.

I don’t like hearing that. I’m not leaving. But I’m not going to pretend I’ve never looked at the exits either.

The most useful twenty minutes of the conversation was on the Clarity Act, and I’d encourage you to go back and listen to it twice. Here in Alberta we spent the winter gathering signatures. When it came time to turn them in, a judge stayed the whole thing — the count, the transfer of the information to the government, all of it — on the argument that First Nations needed to be consulted. On a citizen-led petition, which has nothing to do with the government.

Peyman’s read is blunt. Quebec’s question went to the Supreme Court, the Court kicked it to Parliament, and Parliament wrote itself a law about when and how a province may leave. His objection is that a federal statute cannot amend the constitution, and that’s effectively what was attempted. And then the duty to consult inside that act — his position is that it was never written as a permission slip you go and collect before you’re allowed to hold a vote. It’s a thing you settle on the way out the door.

Whatever you make of that, it is a real argument, and it’s one you almost never hear made in plain language on Canadian television. Which is roughly why this show exists.

He also thinks the attack on the movement was surgical rather than clumsy. First through the courts, because a judge’s signature gives the whole thing the appearance of legitimacy. Then through the calendar — because a question stacked on a question, with a referendum window that can’t sit too close to an election, pushes the whole exercise down the road. “They’re trying to tire you guys out,” he said. Cool your jets. Lose steam.

I told him I’ve noticed something else. The movement has deliberately avoided having a single leader, so there’s no one target. But look back at it and they’ve gone after whoever happened to be standing at the front on any given week. Jeff Rath. David Parker. Mitch Sylvestre. Whoever shows up next.

And Peyman put the flip side of it on us, which I think is fair. He brought up David Parker’s line about the school library — ask a room who’s worried about what their kids are reading and every hand goes up, ask who ran for trustee and the room goes quiet. Peyman’s version of that is harsher: a lot of people’s patriotism runs about a week, then they vote for half an hour, then they go back to Netflix, and the politician does the math and realizes nobody’s watching. Except that this time a lot of people did step up, and they got crushed for it. Lich. Barber. The Coutts Four. Helen Grus. He called them sacrificed, and said we weren’t organized enough to help them.

There’s more in the episode than I can fit here. Bill C-9 and what the Justice Centre is apparently already hearing about. What happened to British Columbia and why he insists it’s the Lower Mainland and not the province. A BC Nurses Union funding arrangement where the money went up and the ratio went the wrong way. His view of Mark Carney, which is unprintable in places and which I mostly share.

And the three things a Quebec delegation reportedly brought to Alberta when this started: line up governments abroad who’ll recognize you, get an agreement with the First Nations because otherwise it gets torpedoed, and make sure you have a Premier who’s actually on board. One of those three is looking shakier than the others heading into November.

October 19 is the referendum. November 6 is the UCP AGM. The last one was spicy. This one’s going to be spicier.

Before you go — August 29, 1:00 p.m., the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton. Alberta Prosperity Project campaign kickoff. Bring your kids, bring your dog, bring your neighbour. Pack the grounds.

And September 11 and 12, Capitalism & Morality here in Calgary at the Croatian Cultural Centre. VIP dinner Friday, full program Saturday. I’m on the media panel and I’ll have the merch table. Code UTN10 takes 10% off.

Thanks as always to NuggetStacker — gold and silver, 1-866-644-2121, free delivery anywhere in Canada on orders over $600. Not investment advice. But I own some.

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Stay sane. Keep your head on a swivel. — Bruce

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Mitch Sylvestre doesn’t sleep much, and after fifty-three minutes with him you understand why.

The CEO of the Alberta Prosperity Project joins Bruce Scholl with two weeks to go before the campaign kickoff — August 29, one o’clock, on the steps of the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton. Buses are running from across the province at about sixty dollars return. The last gathering drew 17,800 people by drone count, in winter coats. This one is in August, and Mitch wants tens of thousands.

His argument for showing up is blunt and it cuts both ways: a big crowd encourages our own side and sends a message to the other one. A thin crowd sends the opposite message, and the other side gets to point at it.

Then there’s the document. A draft Alberta Constitution — five years in the making, started in 2021 by the Black Hats out of Medicine Hat, the same people behind the Alberta Bill of Rights. It goes live on the APP website Monday or Tuesday, with a feedback link built into the first pages. Mitch is emphatic that it is a discussion paper and nothing more. Elected judges. Term limits. MLAs with little power and most questions put directly to the people. A living document that’s hard to change but not impossible.

He walks through the three-day constitutional weekend APP hosted in Edmonton — Bruce Pardy, Eva Chipiuk, Dennis Modry, Keith Wilson, and the Black Hats in one room, with Mitch in the corner taking notes. Pardy’s premise, that government begins with zero authority and only receives what it is explicitly handed, got the lawyers out of their chairs. Mitch loved it. He also asked Pardy whether he could stand at a town hall and promise it would work, and got told no. He’s honest about that, and about the unresolved treaty questions underneath it.

From there it opens up. The 1982 patriation that Albertans had no say in, and the transfer of power from Parliament to the judiciary. A Citizens’ Initiative petition that was supposed to trigger a vote and instead triggered a vote about having a vote. A judge who said, in effect, that some questions the people should not be allowed to ask. Danielle Smith, who APP actively recruited and who Mitch — a UCP constituency association chair, CA chair of the year, the party’s biggest fundraiser last year — now says is governing for a minority of her own base. A nomination race where the scrutineers counted 53 more ballots than signatures and the incumbent lost by one, and when he took it to the party he was told to take them to court.

There’s a new Wild Rose Women initiative aimed squarely at a gap in the movement, Bill C-9 and the Mennonite Church presenting on it at the rally, digital ID dressed up as child protection, and the story of a small-town retailer who got shut down in January of the COVID years, read the essential services list, discovered bike repair was on it, and reopened.

Mitch’s closing case is arithmetic. There are a lot of us and a few of them. They print the money, they control the media, they make the rules — and none of it works unless we listen.

October 19 is the vote. August 29 is the start.

Get on a bus, get the Constitution, and get involved: albertaprosperityproject.com

• Rally: Saturday, August 29, 1:00 PM — Alberta Legislature, Edmonton. Campaign kickoff.

• Buses: From across Alberta, ~$60 round trip. Book at albertaprosperityproject.com

• Referendum: October 19, 2026

• Draft Constitution: Digital release Monday or Tuesday at albertaprosperityproject.com — includes a feedback link. Discussion paper, not a final document.

• Wild Rose Women: New APP initiative, launched this week. Pins available.

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Dr. Judith Curry came back on the show this week, and I didn’t waste her time with the philosophy. I brought numbers.

The $600 million question. In May, Ottawa and Alberta each committed up to $600 million toward carbon capture between 2030 and 2040, with Alberta’s industrial carbon price climbing to $130 a tonne by 2040. Curry does climate risk work for energy clients. I asked her if she’d put her own money in.

No. Worth developing the technology and keeping it in your back pocket, she said, but big engineered carbon capture won’t change the climate in any way. It’ll help bureaucrats check a box. There are no ancillary benefits — it’s a sunk cost with unintended environmental consequences waiting at scale. She also pointed out something that should embarrass Ottawa: the environmental activists don’t like it either, because it lets the petroleum companies off the hook. Her read is that it’s something cooked up by politicians and oil companies who want business as usual with a politically palatable wrapper.

The emissions cap. First compliance period 2030-2032, roughly 27% below 2026 attributed emissions. What does that do to global temperature by 2100? Pretty much nothing. Even taking the climate models at face value, one estimate had the US hitting net zero by 2050 and moving planetary warming by a few hundredths of a degree. Canada’s number would be smaller still.

Can Canada change the climate at all? There’s nothing Canada can do — with one grim exception she raised herself. Clear-cutting the entire boreal forest would genuinely shift the carbon balance and the planetary albedo. Somebody actually floated that, on the theory that snow cover reflects more sunlight than trees. Her verdict: absolutely no sense.

The grid at minus 35. We talked about net zero electricity mandates in a jurisdiction that runs weeks below minus 35. She walked through Texas, where the gas infrastructure froze, the wind wasn’t blowing, and they came very close to very big trouble. Canada’s pipelines are hardened for cold. American ones aren’t, which is why the US still leans on coal for peak demand. Her point: you can’t get rid of the coal until you harden the gas. People look for shortcuts and get caught short exactly when they need power most.

Your insurance bill. I asked what insurers are actually pricing. She isn’t seeing global warming in it. Her clients are asking about El Niño next spring and which regions to watch for tornadoes. What’s driving Canadian premiums, in her view, is fire — and building more expensive things in more exposed places. She pointed at California, where the state capped increases, the insurers left, and people were uninsured when the big fires came.

Jasper. Fuel load management failures conceded by Parks Canada and the Canadian Forest Service. The RAPTAC rappel program cut. Lookout towers gone. New water bombers arriving in 2031. I asked how much of Canadian wildfire loss is climate and how much is management. Natural variability plays a part — El Niño and La Niña years differ, and there are multidecadal regimes. The human-caused global warming component, she said, is negligible to non-existent. The management piece is the part you can actually impact. And blaming fires on global warming gives people an out from investing in figuring it out.

Attribution studies. Those papers that appear within days of a heat wave announcing it was made X times more likely — science or press release? Press release. She named the UK group led by Friederike Otto and their stated goal of building evidence for lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. Her words: voodoo science, very weakly supported.

And carbon itself. Carbon is necessary for life. Carbon dioxide is greening the planet — over 80% of the land surface is greener than it was decades ago. It probably contributes some percentage of observed warming; she won’t pretend to know how much. But the argument that warming is dangerous has never been made thoroughly, and it is most definitely not dangerous for Canada. We’d probably do better a little warmer.

Which is the part nobody in Ottawa will say out loud. Most of this country is uninhabited because it’s too cold.

Dr. Judith Curry held faculty positions at Colorado, Penn State and Purdue, chaired the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, and retired as professor emerita in 2017 over politicized bias in climate science. She runs the Climate Forecast Applications Network and is on X at @CurryJA.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube or Rumble. Share it out — get more eyeballs on this information.

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One month out: Capitalism & Morality Calgary, September 11-12.

Croatian Cultural Centre. I’m on the media panel — How to Beat Regime Media — and I’ll have a UTN merch table set up, so come find me. Roughly 26 speakers, including Frances Widdowson, Amy Eileen Hamm, Nadine Wellwood and James Ostrowski. VIP dinner Friday evening at 6:00 with Tamara Lich as guest of honour. Main program Saturday, check-in 8:00 am. Saturday night there’s a screening of Silencing Detective Grus with Helen Grus there in person.

Tickets: capitalismandmorality.com — use UTN10 for 10% off. Price steps up September 1, so don’t sit on it.

This episode is brought to you by Snoot! Spray.

Drug-free chlorine dioxide nasal cleanser. No steroids, no antihistamines, no neti pot on the bathroom counter. It rinses out what you’ve been breathing in — and if you live anywhere downwind of a Canadian summer, you know exactly what that is.

Let’s stay sane together. Keep your head on a swivel. — Bruce

Michelle Worton is describing what it takes to get a doctor to believe her. Not to treat her — just to believe her. And she says: “Every doctor’s appointment I go to, I feel like it’s a court case. I’m just presenting a court case. Please believe me. Please believe me.”

She is a twenty-year healthcare professional. She sat on her own regulatory college’s board. She built the first independent dental hygiene clinic in northern British Columbia from the ground up in 2015 — the first one north of Kelowna and west of Edmonton. She knows how to read her own labs and her own imaging. And she still has to go into every appointment like a defendant.

Here is how she got there.

By November of 2021 the emails were arriving from Bonnie Henry. Michelle was sitting at the college board table when mandatory vaccination came across the agenda. She had already been asked for her vaccine status by members of the public and by her own patients before they’d confirm an appointment. Her employees were being asked too. She was being called irresponsible. She raised her concerns at the board table — the product wasn’t stopping transmission, vaccinated people were still getting COVID — and the direction came back that it was an order from the Provincial Health Officer. The order itself described the unvaccinated as a public health hazard. She and one other hygienist resigned from that board.

Within an hour of the first dose: racing heart, blood pressure irregularity, chest tightness, shortness of breath. Within forty-eight hours of the second: her life, in her words, changed forever. Neurological symptoms, vision changes, tinnitus, vertigo, loss of temperature regulation, loss of bladder function, a short hospitalization. She went to a doctor and described her symptoms and was told it was menopause.

She was 42. She had no pre-existing conditions. She backcountry skied with a sixty-pound pack and coached her kids’ soccer.

Five years later she is bedbound most of the time. She has permanent vision loss. She reports eighty to ninety percent sensory loss in all four limbs — she can’t feel her feet on the ground and can’t tell when her fingers are touching. She describes pins, needles, burning and electric zaps through her entire body every minute of every day, for five years.

The part I keep coming back to is the geography.

She took her Canadian imaging to the United States. A leading neurosurgeon looked at it and told her she had brain compression. Canada had looked at the same imaging and told her migraines. She had brain surgery in the States. By the time she got there she had lost sight in her right eye. The surgery alone was just under $148,000. All in, with the three-month follow-up, roughly $205,000. A later American visit ran about $30,000. She sold her dental practice. Her community in Fort St. John and people across Canada crowdfunded the rest.

In 2024 she went back to the US and got the full diagnostic picture in thirty-six hours, because somebody ran the right tests. She came home with a treatment plan and was told it isn’t British Columbia policy to work with international doctors. The treatments exist here. She describes them as heavily gatekept. She was denied the last one on the list in mid-July of this year.

And then there’s the program.

Michelle applied to VISP. Two of the three medical experts on the panel agreed there was a temporal relationship between her injections and her conditions. She was rejected anyway. She has been in appeals since September 2024. When the program was pulled from Oxaro and handed to the Public Health Agency of Canada, her accepted appeal was transferred to the new program — and she had to wait for letters in the mail and then argue, again, from a hospital bed, why an appeal that had already been accepted should be considered. Five years in, she says the new federal portal still doesn’t work.

Part of why she can’t get a Canadian doctor to write it down, she says, is what happens to the ones who do. She points at Dr. Charles Hoffe — the Lytton family physician the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC issued a citation against in February 2022 over his public statements, and didn’t drop until February 2025. Three years of process. Her American records say COVID vaccine injury in plain language. In Canada, she says, good luck getting a doctor to put that on paper.

She explains the mechanism plainly, and it’s the coldest thing in the hour: if a condition wasn’t reported during the clinical trial, there’s no established causation. No causation, no support. Some people injured in the trials themselves, she says, were treated at the NIH — and their outcomes never made it into the trial data.

CANrise19 came out of that. She co-founded it with Julie Woods, who is also injured, after the two of them turned out to have been treated at the same American medical institute. Registered nonprofit, July 2024. Free membership, no barriers. Formal support groups running eight to ten weeks, confidential, camera optional — you can show up in bed and cry for the hour and nobody will judge you, because everyone in the room has been there. A private list of doctors willing to listen, which they will never publish, to protect the doctors. Around two thousand people and growing. They’re waiting on charitable status so they can build a medical care fund modelled on React19’s, which has issued $1.8 million for private care in the States. CANrise19 is the Canadian member of the COVID Vaccine Injury Alliance — twenty-plus organizations worldwide, Australia, Scotland, the UK, Denmark.

She also told me something about censorship I hadn’t heard put that way. She only found the peer-reviewed literature on post-vaccine syndrome after she got a VPN — in an American medical office, filling out intake forms. Papers published in 2021 that she had never once seen from inside Canada. For years she thought she was the only one.

She’ll be in Ottawa.

Michelle is testifying at the Allison Inquiry, September 8 to 11, in a parliamentary committee room. Roughly 800 Canadians have applied to tell their stories; about 40 will get to do it in person. For most of them it will be the first time anyone with lawmaking power has been required to sit and listen. She was blunt about the cost of getting there: many of them do not know what their lives will look like next year.

She is grateful, on the record, to Dean Allison, and to Shawn Buckley and Teresa Buckley for carrying it.

One last thing she said, and I’m going to leave it here, because I’ve been chewing on it since we stopped recording: “Many of us are called anti-vaxxers. That’s insulting. I wouldn’t be in this situation if that was the case. No one wants to be in this situation. This isn’t a career choice.”

There is a gaping wound in this country and it is five years old. Acknowledgement would go a long way.

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The Allison Inquiry press conference is tomorrow — August 13, 10:00 a.m. Eastern — at allisoninquiry.com/live. The inquiry itself runs September 8–11 in Ottawa. You can still register to submit your story at allisoninquiry.com.

September 9 in Ottawa — CANrise19 and Rainey Media are screening the documentary Why Can’t We Talk About This? at Capital City Church. Michelle and Julie will both be there. Injured Canadians and anyone who wants to understand this are invited.

CANrise19 — canrise19.com. Free membership, support groups, and a story registry. If you’re injured, you are not alone and you are not crazy.

Sponsor — NuggetStacker. Protect your family’s wealth with gold and silver. I’m not your investment advisor, but I do think every family should hold some. Free shipping across Canada on orders over $600. Use the link at unscrewthenews.com for a discount.

Sponsor — Snoot Spray. A shower for your nose. QR code is in the top left corner of the video, or snootspray.com/UTN for 30% off, which helps with the shipping from the States.

Coming up — Capitalism & Morality Calgary, September 11 (VIP dinner) and September 12 (full-day program), Croatian Cultural Centre. Speakers include Frances Widdowson, Amy Eileen Hamm, Tamara Lich and Nadine Wellwood. Prices go up September 1. 10% off with code UTN10. I’ll be there on the media panel and selling merch — come say hello.

The views expressed by guests on Unscrew the News are their own. Nothing in this episode is medical advice — talk to a physician about your own health decisions.

Share this out. Get more eyeballs on it. We’ve got to wake Canadians up.

Stay sane. Keep your head on a swivel.

— Bruce

That project became a systematic review of autopsy findings in deaths following COVID-19 vaccination. He tells us he was warned by faculty that continuing the work would end his career before it started. He continued anyway.

He joins me from the McCullough Foundation in Dallas for a wide-ranging conversation about what happened next — and about the research he’s put out since.

What we cover:

• The internship nobody would sponsor. How a cold email to Peter McCullough turned into a published systematic review, and what it was like presenting that work inside one of America’s most prominent public health schools.

• Retracted, then republished. Hulscher says the paper became the most-accessed research article in the world before Forensic Science International pulled it — a retraction he argues violated COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines. He describes resubmitting it, passing peer review a second time, and seeing it published in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law. He also walks through the fact-check pieces and profiles written about him since.

• The Fauci hearing. His read on the Senate testimony, the repeated invocations of the Fifth Amendment, the questioning around early-treatment suppression and gain-of-function funding — and his concern that a single prosecution becomes a way to close the books on everyone else.

• The mRNA flu shot. The FDA has approved Moderna’s mRNA influenza product for adults over 50. Hulscher says he went through the FDA briefing documents and argues the reaction data and the absence of a placebo-controlled arm should have stopped it. We talk about what that means for the promise of placebo-controlled trials for new vaccines.

  

• RFK Jr. vs. the machine. Is the Health Secretary being overruled, or is he going along? Hulscher gives his honest read.

• Why he says the problem is the platform, not the payload. His explanation of lipid nanoparticle biodistribution, spike protein persistence, and why he frames much of the resulting injury as autoimmune in character.

• AI-designed pathogens. A story he broke days before we recorded: researchers used AI sequence-generation models to design 16 synthetic bacteriophages not found in nature — and produced viable, replicating organisms. Hulscher went looking at the funding and found the Gates Foundation. His argument is that the threshold has now been crossed, and the capability doesn’t stay in friendly hands.

• The sun. We close on something near to my heart: the modern fear of sunlight. Hulscher makes the case for full-spectrum exposure, vitamin D, and mitochondrial function — and points to research he says shows sunscreen users facing higher rates of major skin cancers, plus benzene contamination found in a fifth of products tested.

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Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, is an epidemiologist and administrator at the McCullough Foundation. He holds a Master of Public Health in epidemiology from the University of Michigan and has contributed to more than thirty published studies. Find him at nicolashulscher.com, on X at @NicHulscher, and at thefocalpoints.com.

The views expressed by guests on Unscrew the News are their own. Nothing in this episode is medical advice — talk to a physician about your own health decisions.

Share this out. Get more eyeballs on it. Let’s stay sane together. — Bruce Scholl

Three hundred episodes. I wanted to mark it with something that looks forward rather than back, so I called Fergus Hodgson.

Fergus runs Econ Americas out of Colorado. He is a week away from moving to Calgary for a month to put the finishing touches on Capitalism & Morality — September 11 and 12 at the Croatian Cultural Centre — and he says something early on that reframes the whole conversation.

He didn’t arrive at this from theory. Jason Lavigne took him on a speaking tour around Alberta at the start of the year, and by the end of it he’d stopped thinking of the place as his mother’s hometown. “This is my tribe. These are my people.”

He is not building an event about independence. He is building an event about the people who would have to hold it together afterward.

Nation and state

The distinction he draws is old and most of us have stopped using it. A nation is a people — shared values, shared character, a way of living. A state is a government. Ideally the two line up. His argument is that in Canada they never have. Quebec is a nation stuck inside somebody else’s state. So, he says, is Alberta.

Which leads to the line I keep coming back to: he has little interest in a province breaking off and then resurrecting Ottawa on the prairies. “What’s the point?” If a free Alberta is going to mean anything, the people have to be free first, and the government follows from that rather than the other way round.

So the event is only partly political. Yes, there’s a secession panel — Darcy Gerow leads it, last slot of the day, which Fergus cheerfully calls the spiciest. But there’s also Lorraine Moller, a four-time Olympian, on the psychological resilience that makes athletes succeed. There’s Steve Cooksey, who bills himself as the Diabetes Warrior, on what he calls unplugging from the medical cartel. Fergus doesn’t want a room full of people waiting for an election to save them.

Who’s coming

The names alone are worth the ticket. Tamara Lich is guest of honour at the Friday VIP dinner. James Ostrowski — a dozen books, a new one out this week — gives the lunchtime keynote, Why Gun Rights Come First, and Fergus makes the point that Alberta is already one of the most armed places in the world, so nobody is importing an ideology here. Michael Wagner, who has written about Alberta independence for years. Corey Morgan. Bruce Pardy. Drew Barnes and Rick Strankman on a panel about winning at retail politics. Phil Hart, the Idaho state senator, on the freedom caucus model — and Fergus’s pitch that the UCP needs one of its own, a bloc of MLAs who won’t be intimidated.

Mailyn Salabarría comes up from Cheyenne. She grew up in Cuba and got out, and she’s speaking on what Fergus calls microstates and she calls free cities — the argument that Monaco, Liechtenstein, Singapore point the way, and that decentralizing to Edmonton isn’t decentralizing far enough.

There’s a panel on thriving as a thought criminal: Frances Widdowson moderating, with Amy Eileen Hamm, Lorraine Moller and Nadine Wellwood. Frances and I don’t agree on everything. I’ll be honoured to be in the room with her anyway.

And it isn’t all ideas. Brett Oland, CEO of Bow Valley Credit Union — the event’s gold sponsor — is on a panel about the economic opportunity in an Alberta that stands up on its own. Fergus is blunt that he wants entrepreneurs and investors in that room, not just philosophers.

And on the Saturday evening, Helen Grus comes out from Ottawa in person for a screening of Silencing Detective Grus, with a Q&A after.

I’m on the media panel — How To Beat Regime Media.

The parts that will get him called names

Fergus doesn’t hedge, and I’m not going to pretend he does. He talks about a “natural aristocracy” leaving Canada for the United States — roughly a million Canadian-born people down there against roughly a quarter million American-born up here, by his figures — and he ties Alberta’s prosperity to a demographic shift he plainly doesn’t welcome. He says the same thing about Colorado, that the cowboy spirit he remembers a generation ago has been covered over.

He knows what he’ll be called for saying it. His answer, more or less, is that he’s past caring, and that he doesn’t blame people who are more careful.

He’s also on record that he had nothing to do with the Alberta white paper. He’s been living in the States, and the people running it didn’t want any appearance of American influence. He doesn’t blame them for that either.

The practical bit

Roughly 25 speakers, most talks capped at ten minutes with questions after — Fergus is running it like a fire hose on purpose, with an exhibit hall and a bar so you can step out when you need to. Buffet lunch, light breakfast items, drink ticket included. Business casual; he wants the room to look like what it’s trying to build.

VIP dinner is Friday September 11 at 6:00 pm. The main event is Saturday September 12 — check-in opens at 8:00 am, program starts at 8:30.

Tickets are at capitalismandmorality.com. Regular is $200 right now, $225 after August 13, $250 after September 1. VIP $500 includes the Friday dinner with the speakers.

Use UTN10 for 10% off.

I’ll be there selling merch. Come say hello.

Sponsor — NuggetStacker. Protect your family’s wealth with gold and silver; a subscription lets you set it and forget it. Free shipping across Canada on orders over $600. Questions: 1-866-644-2121. Use the link at unscrewthenews.com for a discount.

Also coming up — the Allison Inquiry, Ottawa, September 8–11. Four days of testimony from injured Canadians in a parliamentary committee room. Write your MP and ask them to be in the room.

Stay sane. Keep your head on a swivel.

— Bruce

There’s a moment about forty minutes into this conversation where Carrie Sakamoto says something almost in passing, and then apologises for repeating herself: “I don’t know how many times I have to say it. We were promised care and it’s not happening.”

That sentence is the whole episode.

Carrie grew up in an Air Force family. Both her parents served — that’s where they met. She was raising three kids with her husband on an acreage outside Lethbridge when COVID hit, the country school shut down, and her mother moved in because her apartment building wouldn’t let residents into the hallways. She watched the news like everyone else. She had taken vaccines her whole life for travel. She got the flu shot. When the Prime Minister said on television that everything coming into Canada was safe and effective, she had no particular reason to doubt it.

She took AstraZeneca on April 21, 2021. Sore arm, nothing more. Then Alberta pulled AstraZeneca, and the messaging pivoted overnight: mixing was fine, mixing was good, here are all the reasons mixing is actually better. On June 18 she took a Pfizer dose.

Her health fell apart that day.

What follows is a sequence most Canadians have never heard described from the inside. A burning sensation in her brain that triggered uncontrollable vomiting — a sensation she still lives with, medicated, five years on. An emergency room that treated her for a migraine and sent her home. Four hours later, back where she started. A drive back to the hospital where she caught her own face in the side mirror and thought she was having a stroke. Bell’s palsy, steroids, fluids, sent home again with an assurance it would pass in a few weeks.

Then the other side of her face started going numb.

The third time, they admitted her. Seventeen days. She couldn’t swallow, so they put in feeding tubes. She was in and out of consciousness. Her doctor brought colleagues in on a laptop to look at her, because none of them had seen severe Bell’s palsy presenting like this. On the fifth day he sat down with her and her husband and told them what they believed had happened, and that they were required to report it to Ottawa.

She could not see her children for seventeen days. COVID rules: one visitor per day, adults only, chosen from a list of two. Her kids watched her get sick and then watched her disappear.

The part nobody plans for

Carrie is careful to say she received good care in hospital. What she wasn’t prepared for was everything after.

The acreage had to go — she couldn’t help run it, and her husband couldn’t leave her alone in it. He was a music promoter, and nobody was promoting concerts in 2021, so he got a trucking licence. They moved into town so the kids could get around without her driving, because she couldn’t drive. She lives with fatigue from the Bell’s palsy and from the medications, and short-term memory loss from being on those medications for five straight years. She was on nothing before this. She’s now on five or seven a day; she isn’t sure which, and says so on air, and then loses her train of thought mid-sentence and names exactly why.

The federal Vaccine Injury Support Program accepted her claim. It then denied the medications, the treatments, the hearing aid for her hearing loss, the glasses, the psychologist. She has been handed between twelve different case managers. She ended up in an appeal caused by the program’s own error. The program has since changed hands and, in her words, it hasn’t helped at all — she doesn’t know a single person it has actually helped.

The out-of-pocket costs get covered by a GiveSendGo a friend suggested she start.

On the show, Bruce recalls figures from his earlier conversation with MP Dean Allison and Shawn Buckley: roughly $55 million allocated to the program, something on the order of $35 million absorbed by administration, and a share reaching injured Canadians reported at around 2%. Carrie’s response is the one that stays with you — the government doesn’t seem especially curious about where the rest of it went.

The label

The moment she spoke publicly about what happened, she was called an anti-vaxxer.

She took the vaccine. That’s how she got here. She says it out loud and laughs at how little sense it makes, and then gets angry, then talks herself back toward generosity: people are frightened of things they don’t understand, and she’s found that sitting down and talking with them works.

She started a TikTok account at a friend’s suggestion, mostly so that other injured people could find her rather than to convince the doubters. Twenty-five thousand followers in two months. She woke up one morning and it was gone — misinformation. She’s lost several accounts since.

What she found instead was CanRise19, a Canadian non-profit built by and for the vaccine-injured, founded by Michelle Worton and Julie Woods. Free support groups, weekly, running about nine weeks. Zoom rooms large and small. A newsletter. Carrie now holds the chair of community outreach there and volunteers her time helping other people through the VISP paperwork — the same paperwork that has consumed five years of her own life. When Bruce asked whether anyone was helping people navigate the program, her answer was one word: “Me.”

Ottawa, September 8–11

The Allison Inquiry is a citizen-led inquiry taking testimony from injured Canadians in a parliamentary committee room in Ottawa, September 8 through 11. Carrie is speaking on the first day. Around 800 people have applied to testify. CanRise19 will be on the ground supporting the witnesses.

Her argument for it is simple and hard to argue with: “Any time that we’re given space to tell our stories, it’s a step in the right direction.” Documented. On the record. Real, not rare.

She’s also looking forward to something more human — meeting, in person, people she’s only known through a screen for five years. She doesn’t leave her house much. Most of her functioning happens at a computer.

Bruce’s addition: for five years, every parliamentarian now dismissing this inquiry could have listened to these Canadians at any point, anywhere in the country. They chose not to. Injured Canadians have been writing their MPs and MLAs asking them to be in that room. You can write yours too. That’s the ask this week.

The lawsuit

Carrie is the class representative in a proposed class action against the Government of Canada and the Province of Alberta, filed by Rath & Company. It began as her individual claim in 2023 and was expanded. The court has not yet certified it as a class action — that decision is what she’s waiting on now.

If it’s certified, Albertans injured after a COVID-19 vaccination are covered without having to do anything. And as Carrie puts it: when they win, it becomes precedent, and it opens the door for the rest of the country.

Everything on the file is public at rathandcompany.com under the class action section.

Reach her

Carrie is on X and on Facebook under her own name, and can be reached through canrise19.com.

Allison Inquiry | Listening to Canadian Covid-19 Vaccine Injured

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Coming up — Capitalism & Morality Calgary, September 11 (VIP dinner) and September 12 (full-day program from 8:00 am), Croatian Cultural Centre. Speakers include Frances Widdowson, Amy Eileen Hamm, Tamara Lich and Nadine Wellwood. Prices go up shortly. 10% off with code UTN10.

Stay sane. Keep your head on a swivel.

— Bruce

JJ Carrell spent 24 years on the southern border, went back into ICE when the President asked retired agents to return, and came out saying the program he re-enlisted for does not exist.

JJ Carrell is not a critic of immigration enforcement. He is a career enforcer of it — 24 years with the Border Patrol in the San Diego sector, task force command, ICE deportation officers working under his supervision. When the President called for retired agents to come back, he came back, three to four ranks below where he had finished, and spent roughly six to nine months on a fugitive operations team.

His verdict on what he found is blunt: there are no mass deportations. He calls the claim a propaganda line and says the people running the program know it.

The argument is structural, not political. In his old command, a field office of 100 officers required a full chain — one at the top, two assistants, three watch commanders, ten first-line supervisors. What he found instead was two or three supervisors total, with no second, third, or fourth line above them. That is roughly forty officers to a supervisor in a mission where every arrest carries legal and physical exposure. He is emphatic that the officers themselves are not the failure: he describes them as professional, technically sharp, and high-integrity. There are simply not enough of them, and nothing above them to drive the mission.

His second point is the one that will cost him friends. The command structure administering removals today is, in his account, the same command structure that administered the border under the previous administration. He did not expect the people who presided over the opening to execute the closing, and says he predicted the failure publicly before he ever went back in.

What he says should have happened on day one: a deportation agency created entirely outside DHS, reporting directly to the President, fifty substations, military logistics and airlift, stood up by executive order on national-security grounds. He laid the full version out in a five-part series on his own Substack.

He was named ICE’s national employee of the week. The following Monday, after his books and podcast work surfaced, he was told he was no longer needed.

He is not sparing the administration on the way out. He calls Trump a failure and compromised, and says the Republican Party is no different from the Democrats. That is an enforcement hardliner breaking with the administration on enforcement — which is a considerably harder thing to dismiss than the usual criticism.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Who JJ Carrell is
02:30 Going back into ICE
05:50 "There are no mass deportations"
08:30 Why he predicted the failure
10:15 Forty officers, one supervisor
13:20 What should have been built instead

JJ Carrell's books, documentaries and podcast: jjcarrell.com

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“The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci, former White House chief medical adviser, in contempt of Congress.” — OAN

Maybe a bit hyperbolic, but perhaps science died the day that Anthony Fauci claimed to be science.

The line was delivered to Chuck Todd on June 9, 2021, and it has never stopped echoing: a lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, he said, quite frankly are attacks on science. By November he had compressed it further, telling a Senate hearing that he represented science. Not that he practised it. Not that he interpreted it. That he was it.

That claim could have had something to do with the degradation of trust in science, medicine and doctors. Once a man declares himself the embodiment of a discipline, every question about his judgment becomes heresy, and every heretic becomes a target. The hubris in this person left such a putrid taste in the world’s mouth that the hearing, although the answers were obvious, was hard to look away from.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but to me this seems like a turning point in the effort to expose the truth. Finally.

Here is what it looked like. On July 29 he sat for roughly three hours in front of the committee and answered nothing. Gain-of-function funding in Wuhan: nothing. Fort Detrick: nothing. Reporters noted he wouldn’t even tell them what colour his tie was. After saying the line “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution” 111 times while still holding a blanket pardon, it felt like the chickens may have come home to roost.

And that pardon is the whole knot. Biden’s preemptive grant covers 2014 through January 2025 — which is precisely why Rand Paul argues the Fifth doesn’t apply. You cannot incriminate yourself for conduct you can no longer be charged with. Fauci’s lawyers say the exposure is new testimony: anything said in that room today falls outside the pardon and opens fresh ground. Paul has conceded the question has probably never been tested in court. So a document issued to end the matter forever is now the reason it can’t be closed. That is what pre-emptive absolution buys you.

Much of what chairman Rand Paul stated would be echoed by most of the public:

“It is secrecy that destroys trust. It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy. Trust cannot be ordered. It has to be earned.” — Opening Statement of Chairman Rand Paul

Fauci’s version is that the whole thing was a trap. He spent his opening statement accusing Paul of an “unhinged obsession” with him, pointed to the public release of his personal diary, and said the only reason for the summons was to get him to say something — anything — that could put him behind bars. His attorney, ordered away from the witness table for trying to speak, later called the vote a crude political stunt. Take it for what it’s worth. It’s the account he gave, and it belongs in the record next to Paul’s.

The vote went down party lines, and the referral is being hand-delivered to the Justice Department rather than put to the full Senate — a floor vote was never going to survive. The shortcut is the part worth sitting with. If a chairman can skip the chamber and refer a witness on his committee’s say-so alone, every future chairman can too. Tools built to reach one man never stay pointed at one man. Ask anyone who cheered the last round of contempt referrals.

Which brings it home. Canada ran its own version of the pandemic — the mandates, the frozen accounts, the doctors disciplined for saying the wrong thing out loud — and we have held no hearing at all. No 111 invocations. No referral. Nothing. The closest thing on the calendar is the Allison Inquiry, September 8 to 11 in Ottawa, where the vaccine-injured will finally give testimony in a parliamentary committee room. It is not a subpoena and it is not compelled evidence. It is people telling the truth into a microphone because nobody with power will ask them for it.

Science didn’t die. Science is fine — it’s a method, and methods don’t have egos. What died was the pretense that a man in a chair could stand in for it, and that questioning him was a form of vandalism.

The autopsy took five years. The body was in the room the whole time.

Peter MacIsaac spent 29 years on the fire line. He says the smoke over your house is a policy decision. | Episode 297

The Americans are annoyed with us.

That’s the polite version. What actually happened is that Canadian smoke drifted south, negotiations got tense, and somebody in Washington said out loud that it’s hard to make deals with a country that can’t manage its own forests. Feelings were hurt. Statements were issued.

And my first thought was: they’re not wrong, and I know exactly who to call.

Peter MacIsaac fought wildland fire for the Nova Scotia government for 29 years. He was a game warden. He was a trained wildfire investigator. He was incident commander on more than a hundred fires, including some big ones north of us up toward Edmonton. He’s 68, he’d rather be hunting and fishing, and he keeps writing books because he can’t stand watching this happen.

The new one is called Don’t Die in Wildfires. He came back on the show to talk about it, and about the part nobody in government wants discussed.

The 2010 problem

Here’s Peter’s argument, and it’s the cleanest version of it I’ve heard him make.

If you genuinely believed the climate was going to hand you more and bigger fires, what would you do? You’d buy more equipment. You’d hire more people. You’d build more capacity. That’s not ideology, that’s just arithmetic.

Starting around 2010, he says, Canadian provinces did the opposite. Firefighting budgets came down. In Nova Scotia around 2013 they took down the fire towers — low-tech, worked 100% of the time, better than anything electronic anybody’s managed to replace them with. Gone. The full-time helitack team went too.

If you’ve never worked a fire, the helitack team is the whole ballgame. They’re the tip of the spear — a small crew of highly trained people dropped in by helicopter, often rappelling down on ropes, hitting a fire while it’s still four or five hectares. They’re on it and putting water on it before ground crews can even get close. Peter said that down east, the helitack crew would routinely be working a fire for an hour before anybody on the ground arrived.

Take them away and those same four-hectare fires become fifteen-thousand-hectare fires. Sixty-thousand-hectare fires.

Which is exactly the pattern Peter says shows up in the national data after 2010: fewer fires, but far bigger ones.

That’s not a climate signature. That’s a response-time signature.

What we’re buying instead

This is the part that made me put my head in my hands.

The de Havilland DHC-515 — the successor to the CL-415, the best water bomber anybody makes — is being built right here in Calgary. In bulk. Peter says Canada isn’t scheduled to take delivery of any of them until roughly 2032, because Europe looked at the same shortage, saw where they were being manufactured, and got in line first.

We build the best firefighting aircraft in the world and we can’t have any for six years.

Meanwhile in Nova Scotia they just bought new helicopters — and not one of them can deliver a helitack team. They leased four fixed-wing aircraft off New Brunswick for a $6.5 million budget lease, and they aren’t skimmers. Every single drop, they have to fly back to an airport, land, take on water and fuel, and fly out again. A helicopter can be fuelled on site. These can’t.

New Brunswick was getting rid of them because New Brunswick figured out they needed pontoons.

The five-day story

In 2023, Nova Scotia had record fires. The Premier was in the press every day asking for help.

Peter put together a team of recently retired professionals — five or six guys, more than 200 years of combined experience — and offered to deploy inside the incident command system in overhead positions. Not on the nozzle. They know they’re past that. Command and coordination roles, where 200 years of experience is worth something.

Turned down. Five days in a row. While the Premier was on television asking for help.

He made a video about it. It went around the world.

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What you can actually do

Here’s why I keep having Peter on. He doesn’t stop at the diagnosis.

His position is that if you live in forested Canada — and once you’re a hundred miles north of the U.S. border, that’s most of us — it isn’t a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. So the book is a field manual, and you can start today.

The five feet closest to your house is the most dangerous ground on your property. Dried brush, a woodpile stacked against the wall — a fire blows through and your house is gone. He works outward from there in three zones, all laid out in the book.

Roughly 90% of homes lost in a wildfire are lost to embers, not to a wall of flame arriving at your door. Which means most of what saves a house happens before you leave: windows shut, duct tape over the vents, air exchangers off.

Buy a cheap above-ground pool. Four or five hundred dollars. Fill it in spring when the wells are high. That’s a couple thousand extra gallons sitting on your property, and if you look after it, it lasts years.

Lay out five or six garden hoses with the taps on. When a crew comes through, they can’t save every house. They save the ones where they can knock down an ember fire without stopping to run their own lines.

Two escape routes, not one — and drive them. When did you last actually drive the road you’re planning to leave on? Construction and downed trees don’t send warnings.

Go bags in both vehicles. Peter’s got one in his, his wife has one in hers. Medications especially. People evacuate without the prescriptions they can’t live without and then find out how long Jasper residents were away from home.

Two-way radios, about $150, with the channels written on the side in Sharpie, for when the grid’s down and the phones don’t work. I picked mine up at Costco.

And the one that ties it together: run the drill. A couple of hours with your family, once, so everyone knows their job. Because the goal is to be the household that makes the evacuate-or-defend call in the first two minutes instead of the household that panics.

Peter also runs through how a private citizen can use the same Incident Command System governments use — you and your neighbours, radios, assigned roles, everybody knowing who does what when the alert comes through. It’s a military structure and there’s no reason a rural road can’t run it.

The last word

Peter’s expecting a knock on the door one of these days over what he writes. He’s not being dramatic about it — he just says that once a book is in your hands, they can’t censor it. One copy can pass through a hundred people.

That’s the same reason I started this project three years ago and archive every episode offline.

Get the book. It’s the price of a couple of coffees at Starbucks for something that will very likely matter in your lifetime. And if it helps you, go leave him a review — that’s how the algorithm carries it further, and Peter’s fairly confident the Canadian government would rather it didn’t.

Full episode is up now on YouTube and Rumble.

Let’s stay sane together. Keep your head on a swivel.

— Bruce

There is a moment in the July 29 Senate hearing that tells you everything.

Senator Josh Hawley leans in and asks Anthony Fauci what day of the week it is. On the advice of counsel, Fauci declines to answer. What colour tie are you wearing? On the advice of counsel, he declines. What colour is the carpet in front of you? Same answer.

Then Hawley springs it: you don’t have privilege. You were granted a full pardon, and you know it, and your lawyers know it — which is why they’re squirming in their seats right now.

This is the man who told a reporter that an attack on him was an attack on science itself.

What a trial lawyer sees

My guest this week is Leighton Grey, KC. He isn’t commenting from the cheap seats. He spent the pandemic in Canadian courtrooms fighting COVID cases, and cross-examination is a craft he’s studied for years and taught to other lawyers at seminars. When he says Hawley’s questioning was beautifully built, he means it as a technician.

Grey’s read on the legal position is worth sitting with, because most of the coverage has muddled it.

The Fifth Amendment protects you from being made an instrument against yourself. But a pardon removes the jeopardy — and where there is no jeopardy, there is no privilege. Grey points to a US Supreme Court decision from roughly 120 years back: one who has received a pardon cannot stand on his privilege. It’s a principle with deep roots in the common law tradition, and it operates in Britain and Canada too. Our own version lives in the Charter.

The nuance people are missing is that a congressional hearing is not a courtroom. There’s no judge, no jury, no prosecution. Fauci’s pardon still shields him from being charged — but it does nothing to shield him from a contempt citation for refusing to answer a body that subpoenaed him. Contempt has teeth. Steve Bannon did time for it.

Grey’s honest prediction: the contempt vote probably fails. Fauci still has too many friends in that House, and the American press is running cover for him and painting Rand Paul as the villain of the piece.

And there’s a loose thread nobody has pulled yet. If that pardon was signed by autopen rather than by Joe Biden’s hand, what is it actually worth? Trump has said publicly he won’t disturb it — but a president’s forbearance isn’t the end of the matter. Others can attack it by other means.

The iceberg

Grey sees two roads out of this, and only one of them is any good.

On the first, Fauci becomes the Nixon of the story. He absorbs every sling and arrow, everyone equally culpable walks away clean, and the whole thing dissolves into the next news cycle. That, he says, would be a real pity.

On the second, the hearing cracks something open — a genuine avenue for public scrutiny into what these drugs did, who was harmed, why, and who is responsible.

Because Fauci is the tip of it. Grey’s own framing: the little part sticking out above the waterline, with something enormous underneath that we can only guess at. Consider what the man controlled. As head of NIAID and in his role at NIH, no medical research grant in the United States got approved without passing his desk. That is not a scientific position. That is a gatekeeping position — and it explains why the journals of that era read the way they did, and why serious scientists like Jay Bhattacharya and Peter McCullough couldn’t get published and got cancelled instead.

When Fauci said I am science, Grey argues, he was making an accurate statement about power, not a boastful one about knowledge.

One detail I raised on the show that still stops people cold: the head of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH was Fauci’s own wife. He was, functionally, married to his own ethics oversight.

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Bringing it home: the Allison Inquiry

September 8 through 11, in the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, Canadians injured by these drugs will testify under oath.

Grey has been calling for a royal commission for five years. What we got instead was the National Citizens Inquiry — the single greatest record of what happened to Canadians during COVID — which the mass media almost entirely ignored, and which no MP or MLA saw fit to attend. Danielle Smith hinted at an Alberta inquiry when she ran in 2022; what arrived were the Manning and Davidson reports, and both were left on a shelf.

So the Allison Inquiry matters. Roughly 800 people have applied to be witnesses. Shawn and Teresa Buckley, who were the engine of the NCI, are involved again. Dean Allison is carrying it, and Grey admits he was astonished that his own party leadership didn’t kill it — one phone call and the whip could have ended it. Poilievre told him to go ahead.

Grey’s framing has stayed with me all week: the pandemic is an open wound on Canadian society. Not just the physical harm — the loss of trust, the loss of any confidence that this is a country you can be proud of. He describes the NCI as one of the only times since 2020 that felt like the Canada he grew up in. There were tears. There was laughter. He believes God was in that room.

Meanwhile the federal compensation program — $55 million set aside for the injured — burned roughly three-quarters of itself on administration. Eighty per cent of Canadians took at least one dose. Do that arithmetic and see how it feels.

What you can do

Apply to testify. Whether you’re speaking for yourself, for a family member, or for someone who didn’t survive it — get it on the record. Panel testimony or a recorded story, both matter. allisoninquiry.com · covidtestimony.com

Press your MP to be in the room. There will be pushback. That’s fine — it draws more attention.

Support the litigation. Grey’s office is running two class actions: Burke, on behalf of the unvaccinated, claiming public vilification by their own government and restriction of Charter mobility rights; and Taylor, on behalf of the vaccine injured, with Alberta’s Drew Taylor as representative plaintiff. Both need help. gwsllp.ca

These cases are moving against real resistance. The Ontario Court of Appeal held in Hartman that the Government of Canada owed no duty of care to a young man who died after a single dose. That is the law in this country right now, and it is a damaging precedent for everything that comes after.

Watch the full episode. And share it — we have to wake more Canadians up to what’s going on.

I’ll be in Ottawa in September, documenting the inquiry for you. Coming up next: Michelle Worton, one of the witnesses.

God bless. — Bruce

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Coming up: Capitalism and Morality, Calgary 2026 — September 11–12 at the Croatian Cultural Centre, VIP dinner Friday night. Code UTN10 for 10% off. Capitalism & Morality

Another beautiful day poolside at the club. Friends, strangers, the usual mid-afternoon mix, water throwing light back up into the trees.

Then the new arrivals. Bags down, chairs claimed, and out comes the can. Held at arm’s length, thumb on the nozzle, and the ritual begins. Maybe a fifth of it lands where it’s aimed. The rest hangs in the air a moment and then goes where the breeze takes it — into my lungs, into the lungs of the woman on the next chair, into the lungs of the kid standing waist-deep six feet downwind. Nobody says anything. We have all quietly agreed that this is normal.

And I sit there and think: how did we become a species so afraid of the thing that gives us life?

Not cautious of. Cautious is a hat, a shirt, and the sense to come inside at one o’clock. Cautious is what my grandfather did on a section of dryland wheat for fifty years. His parents came from Britain and cleared that land by hand, with the skin for Yorkshire and a homestead at fifty-one north, and not one of them ever ran from the sun. They wore hats. What I’m watching is not caution. It is fear — of morning light on bare arms, of a walk to the mailbox in June, of a Saturday afternoon at an outdoor pool in a city where the outdoor pool season runs about eleven weeks.

And the strangest part isn’t the sunscreen. It’s the can.

In July of 2021, Health Canada advised the public to stop using every lot of several aerosol-format Neutrogena sunscreens — the Beach Defense and Ultra Sheer lines, adult and children’s both — after testing turned up elevated levels of benzene. Benzene is a known human carcinogen. Health Canada’s own advisory noted that exposure can occur by inhalation as well as through the skin.

Nobody found that because a regulator went looking. An independent lab in Connecticut went looking, on its own initiative, and tested nearly three hundred batches of sun-care products from sixty-nine companies. A quarter of them carried detectable benzene. Some exceeded the allowable limit by three times. Johnson & Johnson pulled five aerosol lines. And when Banana Boat later traced its own contamination, the benzene turned out not to be in the sunscreen at all. It was in the propellant. The thing that turns the lotion into a cloud.

The cloud I have been breathing every pool day for ten summers.

Now hold that against where we are standing.

Calgary sits at fifty-one degrees north. At noon on the summer solstice the sun climbs sixty-two degrees above the horizon. At noon on the winter solstice it manages sixteen. Light arriving at that angle has to cross more than three times as much atmosphere to reach us, and ozone absorbs the short wavelengths first — so from late October to late February, the UVB that lets human skin manufacture vitamin D does not reach the ground in this city at all. The long wavelengths still come through. A January afternoon here still looks like a sunny day, still glares white off the snow, still ages your face. It simply doesn’t do the one thing.

So the sun is not a surplus we are defending ourselves against. At this latitude it is a ration. The window is about eight months wide, concentrated in the middle hours of the day, narrower still if you work indoors — which is to say the window is that afternoon at the pool. And that is precisely the hour we have trained ourselves to spend under a chemical film, breathing each other’s propellant.

Something happened here. It is worth asking what.

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Guest: Dr. Judith Curry, climatologist | Runtime: ~54 min

In 2005, Dr. Judith Curry co-authored a paper in Science on rising hurricane intensity — published two weeks after Katrina hit New Orleans. Overnight she became the face of the extreme-weather-equals-global-warming argument, and, in her words, was treated like a rock star by environmental advocacy groups.

Then Climategate broke in 2009. Curry spoke up and said climate scientists needed to be honest about uncertainty, make their data and methods public, and stop sabotaging the careers of people who disagreed with them. That made her, as she puts it, public enemy number one. A Michael Mann op-ed labelling her a “serial climate disinformer” circulated through Georgia Tech’s own daily news digest to faculty, students, administrators, alumni and donors. She was asked to step down as chair, stripped of teaching and committee assignments, and marginalized until she left the university in 2017.

In this conversation she covers what the data actually supports, what it doesn’t, why she says the extreme weather link has been broken, what the carbon tax and net zero deadlines have really cost, and what she thinks the real agenda behind climate governance is.

She also speaks directly to Alberta — oil and gas, “keep it in the ground,” carbon capture, and why she doesn’t think this province is a good bet for solar.

Chapters

Time Topic 00:00 Cold open / welcome 01:26 Sponsors — NuggetStacker & Snoot Spray 02:53 Introducing Dr. Judith Curry 04:23 How she got pulled into the climate debate — Hurricane Katrina, 2005 07:13 Climategate 2009 and the four things she demanded 08:15 “Public enemy number one” 09:50 Michael Mann, the Huffington Post op-ed, and the end of her Georgia Tech career 12:38 Leaving academia — building CFAN in the private sector 14:19 Pulling the plug on the Climate Etc. blog after 15 years 16:05 The book: Climate Uncertainty and Risk 21:03 Why only senior scientists can afford to dissent 22:20 Clip: John Stossel interview 27:09 Natural variability vs. human-caused warming — “we don’t know” 28:20 The data problem: hurricane records, ice cores, 300-year resolution 30:23 The “carbon dioxide control knob” fairy tale 32:00 A lost generation of climate dynamicists 34:32 Canada’s carbon tax — does it do anything? 35:29 The UN, the WEF, and the globalist agenda 36:25 Trump, Paris, and the DOE Climate Working Group 37:42 Breaking the extreme weather link — and the pivot to tipping points 43:08 Alberta, oil and gas, and “keep it in the ground” 45:07 Net zero deadlines, the wind and solar mistake, micro-nuclear 48:19 Energy abundance, AI and data centres 49:45 Where to get the book 52:09 Closing message: the generation raised on propaganda

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“We need to be more honest about uncertainty and be more realistic about the confidence we can place in our assessments.”

“I then became public enemy number one.”

“There’s no way that we can dial down the warming by reducing emissions. That’s just sort of a fairy tale.”

“It’s not about taxing. It’s about non-governmental world control.”

“Here we are in 2026 and everything’s going along pretty well, thank you.”

“We should be truth seeking, truth maxing. Debate used to be the spice of academic life, and now it’s cause for getting censored.”

“I think the biggest tragedy is this generation of young people who were exposed to this very awful propaganda.”

Guest bio

Dr. Judith Curry is Professor Emerita at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she chaired the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences for 13 years before retiring in 2017. She holds a PhD in geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago (1982) and a BS from Northern Illinois University (1974), with prior faculty appointments at Purdue, Wisconsin–Madison, Penn State, and Colorado–Boulder.

She is president and co-founder of Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), founded in 2006, which provides extreme weather forecasting and climate risk assessment to clients in the energy and insurance sectors and to government agencies. She founded the blog Climate Etc. in 2010 and closed it in 2026; the archive remains online. In 2025 she was one of five scientists appointed by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright to the DOE Climate Working Group, which produced a critique of federal climate assessment reports.

Her book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response, was published by Anthem Press in 2023.

Links

• Book — Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response (Anthem Press, 2023). Note: Dr. Curry says the Kindle edition is by far the most affordable version.

• Blog archive — judithcurry.com

• CFAN — cfanclimate.net

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Jim McMurtry taught for decades before one statement ended his career: he told his class the children at the Kamloops residential school died of disease, not murder. Within days he was walked out; the BC teacher regulation branch moved to strip his certificate for life — at a time when his wife couldn’t work due to cancer — without a hearing. Five years and four revised allegations later, he’s still barred from teaching and heading to court.

In this return visit, Jim brings the research he’s been publishing on X: the compensation packages of First Nations chiefs, the money attached to the Kamloops story, and what he argues is a narrative that harms the very people it claims to protect.

What we cover

• Chief compensation. Fort McKay First Nation’s Jim Boucher: $4.77M in reported 2019 compensation for a band of 901 members — and why Jim says salary is only one of eight to ten revenue streams flowing through a chief’s hands (pipeline benefit agreements, land rents, resource emoluments, consent payments).

• The transparency blackout. Harper’s First Nations Financial Transparency Act brought these numbers into the open; Trudeau’s government stopped enforcing it. Jim’s estimate of total annual spending directed at Indigenous Canadians: $60–100B — roughly triple national defence.

• Kamloops. $12.1M for an excavation that hasn’t happened, $12.4M for a healing centre, and the quiet language shift from “215 graves confirmed” to “anomalies” and “possible” graves. Jim walks through his review of the TRC’s Kamloops death records.

• Jim’s case. The shifting allegations — from what he said, to (years later) his “tone” — the regulatory pressure to surrender his certificate, and the court fight ahead.

• Who are the real racists? Bruce and Jim on victimhood politics, meritocracy, and why treating people as a group instead of individuals — the opposite of what the Charter promises — sets Canadians against each other.

• Stewart Phillip. 28 years atop the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, a multi-million-dollar untaxed income last publicly visible in 2014, and a seat at Premier Eby’s table — unelected — while his wife Joan Phillip sits as an NDP MLA.

• Land claims closing in. Richmond, Vancouver, Burnaby, Delta: overlapping claims from the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsawwassen, and BC parks closed to non-Indigenous visitors.

• One-person nations and water advisories. The New Westminster band founded by a single person in 1997; a 16-member reserve still under a water advisory after $3.5M for treatment and wells.

• The human cost. Jim on losing his 19-year-old nephew to fentanyl sourced on a reserve — and why he says the status quo, not its critics, is failing Indigenous kids.

• Jim’s closing message. “They picked on the wrong teacher.” Unbending, five years in, mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

Timestamps

• 00:00 — Opening anthem

• 03:38 — Welcome; sponsors: Snoot Spray & Byrna

• 07:20 — Introducing Jim McMurtry

• 08:30 — Chief salaries: Fort McKay’s $4.77M

• 15:50 — Transparency repealed; the real spending total

• 19:30 — Kamloops: the 215, the money, the shifting words

• 24:40 — Walked out for the truth: Jim’s firing

• 33:15 — “You’re the villain, Jim” — how they rewrite the man

• 35:00 — The regulatory body’s lifetime ban attempt

• 38:35 — Victimhood, meritocracy, and the real racism

• 44:40 — Pitting Canadians against each other

• 45:55 — Stewart Phillip and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs

• 48:20 — Parks, land, and “all Canadians are being played”

• 51:11 — Fentanyl on reserves: Jim’s nephew

• 53:17 — One-person First Nations; water advisory money

• 57:00 — “Who is Indigenous?” — ancestry and identity

• 63:38 — Jim’s message: unbending

• 65:30 — Sign-off: let’s stay sane together

Guest links

• Book: The Scarlet Lesson — jimmcmurtry.com ($24.95, direct from the site)

• Jim McMurtry’s Substack — writings and videos

• Jim on X

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Episode description

Bruce sits down with Mark Bishofsky, a Minnesota respiratory therapist with 25 years in critical care who walked away from his hospital career in October 2021 rather than comply with the COVID vaccine mandate. After seeing Mark’s June appearance on the Jimmy Dore Show, Bruce brings him on to tell the full story: what he witnessed inside the ICU during COVID, why he believes early intubation protocols cost tens of thousands of lives, and how one Post-it note turned a self-described “shy dad” into the organizer of some of the largest rallies and marches in Minnesota history.

In this episode

• (03:27) Welcome from Calgary — “the greatest province of Alberta, soon to be nation of Alberta”

• (05:35) Sponsor: Nuggetstacker.com — gold and silver, 1-866-644-2121, QR-code discount, free shipping over $600 anywhere in Canada

• (06:55) Clip from Mark’s Jimmy Dore appearance — questioning myocarditis risk and getting walked out by security

• (08:12) Guest intro: 25 years in respiratory therapy, founder of Stop the Mandate Minnesota, writer of The Truth Expedition on Substack

• (08:53) From flying under the radar to activism — “COVID happened and got me off the couch”

• (12:38) Inside the ICU: a lead therapist starts questioning the protocols

• (17:30) Why Mark argues early intubation was deadly — sedation and paralytics, ventilator-associated pneumonia, positive-pressure lung damage, and the cascade of interventions that follows

• (19:57) “Pretty much nationwide” — the same protocol across US hospitals, with outliers like Dr. Pierre Kory’s team refusing it

• (21:59) Colleagues who went along with it, and the doctor who later admitted “that was probably the wrong idea”

• (26:11) August 2021: the mandate email arrives — Mark hands out Post-it notes with his phone number and has 1,000 people at a rally within four days

• (31:40) 7,000 at the Minnesota State Capitol with Del Bigtree, a 5,000-person march to the governor’s mansion — and zero media coverage

• (27:45) His last day: confronting the medical director, then being escorted out by security

• (34:39) Life now: per diem hospital work plus the Leading Edge Clinic with Dr. Pierre Kory

• (36:42) Patient isolation during COVID and why advocacy at the bedside matters

• (38:05) Flock cameras, social credit, digital currency, carbon tax — the wider control grid

• (40:15) Mind control and indoctrination; Jason Christoff’s work

• (42:11) Wrapping up: a future episode with Mark and co-host Gunnar on the Middle East, and Bruce’s note on Alberta’s path to sovereignty

Guest links

• The Truth Expedition — Substack, YouTube, Rumble, BitChute

• Leading Edge Clinic — DrPierreKory.com

• Stop the Mandate Minnesota

Support the show

• Share the episode and get more eyeballs on this information

• UnscrewtheNews.com

• Nuggetstacker.com — 1-866-644-2121

• https://www.snootspray.com/UTN Use this link for 30% off!

• resistancecoffee.com

Let’s stay sane together. Keep your head on a swivel.

The censors went home. But you’re still censoring — because now you do it for them.

You know the reflex. You draft the post. You read it twice. You think about your employer, your college, your clients, your sister-in-law who hasn’t spoken to you since 2021. And you delete it. Nobody ordered you to. Nobody had to. That’s the whole point.

This is an essay about the most efficient censorship system ever built in Canada — the one that requires no censor at all.

They Never Needed to Punish Everyone

Between 2020 and 2022, this country ran a live demonstration of what happens to people who step out of line. It didn’t need to reach everyone. It only needed to be visible.

A Calgary pastor, Artur Pawlowski, became the first Canadian clergyman ticketed for alleged COVID violations — then racked up more than forty tickets, house arrest, and jail time, including 51 days behind bars after speaking at Coutts. His brother in faith near Edmonton, James Coates, sat in jail for holding church services. A café owner in Mirror, Chris Scott, was padlocked and convicted of contempt. Hundreds of healthcare workers in BC’s Lower Mainland were fired outright — even as the province bled nearly 28,000 unfilled nursing shifts in a single week. Nurses were dragged before regulators over social media posts. Doctors accumulated open-ended investigations that ran for months, sometimes years, with no verdict in sight. And when ordinary people donated to a protest, they learned their bank accounts could be frozen without a court order.

Here in Calgary, Jesse Johnson refused to check papers at the door of Without Papers Pizza. Undercover inspectors bought a slice, sat down, and built the case. His license was stripped. Police cleared him and his staff out at night. The business — a restaurant grossing $2 million a year — died in October 2021 and never came back.

And the ledger doesn’t stop at the business. I know Jesse. I’ve talked with him about what the stand actually cost, and the price ran through the middle of his home: his wife and his boys are out of his life because of it. The state took his restaurant; the fallout took his family. When people tally what dissent costs in this country, they count the fines and the licenses. They never count that.

Every one of these stories was broadcast, amplified, and editorialized. Not as cautionary tales about government overreach — as morality plays about what happens to the noncompliant. The fired nurse. The frozen account. The padlocked door. You watched. That was the lesson. You learned it.

And Some of It Was Engineered — By Their Own Admission

If you think the conditioning was an accident — an emergent side effect of panic — the military’s own paperwork says otherwise.

In April 2020, the Canadian Joint Operations Command put in place an information operations campaign aimed at the Canadian public. The federal government never asked for it. Cabinet never authorized it. The internal investigation by retired Major-General Daniel Gosselin concluded that military leaders saw the pandemic as a “unique opportunity” to test propaganda techniques on an unsuspecting public — techniques modeled on the ones Canada used in the Afghanistan war, with the stated purpose of heading off civil disobedience and bolstering government messaging. Read that mission statement again. Not defeating the virus. Heading off your disobedience.

It goes further. The Forces spent more than $1 million training public affairs officers in behaviour modification techniques — methods compared in the reporting to those of the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica. Military intelligence mined ordinary Canadians’ social media. And when the defence chief ordered the campaign shut down in spring 2020, portions of it kept running for another six months anyway — including scouring social media in Ontario and, in one surreal episode, a fake wolf scare in Nova Scotia.

None of this is speculation, and none of it comes from “conspiracy” channels. It comes from the military’s own internal reviews, pried loose by access-to-information requests, and from a directive signed June 9, 2021 by acting defence chief Wayne Eyre and deputy minister Jody Thomas conceding that the military deployed propaganda techniques in Canada without approval and gathered information about Canadians’ online activities without authorization — conduct that, in their own words, eroded public confidence in the institution.

The department insists none of this constituted “psychological operations” — those, it says, are only for adversaries abroad. Hold on to that defence, because it’s the most revealing sentence in the whole affair: the techniques were designed for enemy populations, a million dollars was spent adapting them, and the target was you. Call it whatever makes the lawyers comfortable. The behaviour they wanted modified was Canadian behaviour — and the behaviour they got was silence.

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The Process Is the Punishment

Here’s what the system’s defenders don’t want you to notice: most of these people won.

Jesse Johnson’s charges were dropped in a hearing that lasted about ten minutes — two years after his restaurant was destroyed. The vaccine passport bylaw he defied lasted five months. The health orders behind it were later ruled ultra vires — never lawful in the first place. He was right. It’s on the record. His restaurant is still gone.

Saskatchewan nurse Leah McInnes was fully exonerated; her own regulator’s discipline committee concluded the case should never have gone to a hearing at all. She won — after years as the accused. An arbitrator ruled that nine Ontario nurses fired over mandates were terminated “unreasonably” and should be reinstated — three years after the firings. Tamara Lich faced six charges and was convicted of exactly one: mischief. She was acquitted on the rest — after 49 days of pre-trial jail, bail conditions that banned her from social media, the longest mischief trial in Canadian history, and a Crown that asked for seven years in prison. Seven years. For mischief. The court gave her house arrest, and her own sentencing judge acknowledged she’d come to Ottawa with noble intent and had already paid — with her job, with hate mail, with threats. Chris Barber spent over $40,000 just travelling to his own prosecution.

Acquittal cannot resurrect a restaurant. Reinstatement cannot refund three years. “Charges dropped” cannot un-live 49 days in a cell.

This is the mechanism, and it has a name: the process is the punishment. You don’t need to convict a dissenter. You need to make dissent cost two years of hearings, lawyers, headlines, and frozen income before any verdict exists. Do that visibly, a few dozen times, and every other Canadian does the math on their own. The verdict becomes irrelevant. The rational move becomes silence.

Which is exactly what happened.

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