ArcaMax

PARIS — The American president has been behaving toward allies like the guy who walked away from the relationship but still wants to keep tabs on their dating life.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, in particular, overtly announced the need for the rest of America’s allies to move on to building other trade relationships — and, proving Carney’s point, President Donald Trump has reverted to talking about Canada as the “51st state” and calling its prime minister a “governor.” He now routinely threatens to fiscally punch Americans in the face with tariffs for daring to purchase Canadian products. Looks like this is set to continue unless or until the U.S. Supreme Court puts an end to Trump’s abusive co‑optation of Congress’ exclusive powers to tax, assuming lawmakers would even get around to that between culture‑war skirmishes.

Seemingly caught between wanting to keep calling the shots for the Western world on one hand, and having allied countries run for the hills on the other, administration officials have resorted to echoing Trump’s threats like understudies who haven’t quite figured out the lines. And the threat against Canada in particular has also recently become a point of focus for Trump‑aligned influencers, who appear to have picked up the memo.

Suddenly, support for a group in the Western Canadian province of Alberta working to splinter Canada is being promoted by everyone from Trump’s own treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to some of the same MAGA mouthpieces previously linked to online data‑driven influence operations backed by rich donors with corporate and investment interests hiding behind dark money slush funds.

“I think we should let them come down into the US, and Alberta is a natural partner for the US,” said Trump official Bessent, who has also served as a top lieutenant and fund manager for meddling billionaire George Soros. “They have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people.” One imagines that this independence stops just short of actually remaining independent.

Around the same time, the Alberta independence movement was suddenly being platformed by the likes of former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, who sat on the board of Cambridge Analytica— the controversial data‑driven voter targeting system backed by wealthy donors like the family of hedge fund billionaire and Trump campaign donor, Robert Mercer. Nothing says organic grassroots legitimacy like billionaires dabbling in psychographic modeling.

Conveniently, this kind of political influence in the U.S. is now largely being laundered through dark money vehicles like DonorsTrust, which allow for donors to ideological causes to funnel their cash to recipients without the inconvenience of sunlight or pesky questions.

But sometimes the dots are so glaring that it’s impossible not to connect them. There’s a giant ecosystem that takes its cues from the Trump administration, particularly when those interests seem to align with its shady sponsors, moving in loose but unmistakable formation.

The Financial Times has since reported that Trump officials have met with Alberta separatist leaders three times since last April.

Because it’s normal to meet with civil society groups, they’ve said. Well yeah, but that sort of thing can also be the hallmark of foreign regime change, as has been the case time and again around the world, usually with a straight face and plausible deniability.

Logically speaking, it all makes little sense. If Quebec’s French‑Canadian separatist movement and various referenda were ultimately quelled by Canada recognizing that culturally and linguistically unique province as a nation within Canada, then Alberta is headed for a similar result, at best. It may have the oil, but it doesn’t own the pipelines. Canada does. So leaving Canada would be like a teenager running away from home and then realizing that he has no money or car. Besides, there’s no viable constitutional pathway to separation.

American officials have since tried to distance themselves from the movement, denying any interest in funding it, contrary to separatist assertions. But that doesn’t mean much when it was U.S. dark money interests and wealthy individual donors who were already found to have funded another movement a few years ago targeting Alberta — only this time, it was to prevent the development of Canadian pipelines that could have competed with energy investments in their own portfolios. An Alberta public inquiry found that the cash to support pipeline opposition flowed to Canadian environmental activist groups through American charities, obscuring the identity of the donors.

Look, it's not like the CIA is going to start messing around inside Canada, particularly when they share intelligence as part of the Five Eyes Anglo‑intelligence network. But this engine of support gearing up in the U.S. in favor of Alberta independence confirms that there are other ways to co‑opt useful idiots to do the bidding of the wealthy, whose interests and manipulation of the masses can be even less obvious than those of spies and even more deniable. Certainly less accountable.

The result of their efforts so far is a presentation of reality subjected to all the distortion of a funhouse mirror. To wit, the circus last year around the death of influencer Charlie Kirk, sponsored by the rich donors of the socially conservative right hiding behind the pro‑Trump fundraising vehicle otherwise known as Turning Point USA, who seized the opportunity for their agenda to take national center stage, complete with outrage, fundraising appeals and wall‑to‑wall media oxygen.

Trump’s frustration with Canada has set the tone, and self‑serving special interests have magnified his clarion call. This isn’t democracy. It’s corruption. Private wealth wielding power unchecked across borders, pushing narratives through their paid operatives under the pretext of ideological alignment — all while U.S. officials feign ignorance with a straight face.