Excuses versus reasons

The excuses stated in press conferences and the executive orders are there only to satisfy a comms strategy and a legal requirement. These excuses are a sales job that finds loopholes in the law. As many others have pointed out, it is a classic maneuver used by dictators where strict reading or loopholes in the law and Constitution are used to destroy the very same law and constitution that stands in the way of authoritarianism.

The obvious problem with this is that people become confused about how to respond. "Does he mean it?" Well, yes, but it depends on which "it" you are talking about.

If folks have not read Heritage Foundation (including Project 2025) documents, it is going to be very difficult to understand what is going on right now in the USA. And, if we do not understand what is going on, we cannot prepare responses and this will embolden the program.

The lack of facts is part of the program. The removal of information on the government websites, the censoring of published research papers, the cancelling of grants to organizations that do the work on education, and the filling the airwaves with disinformation and misinformation is all standard fare now. This is not just an attack on people Trump does not like, it is so there is a giant black hole where truth can be found.

One of the most important responses to this is to push information out through official channels.

In Canada, public money needs to go to bolstering our own information defenses to counter-act this missing information, misinformation, and disinformation program.

That means:

• Increasing funding to Canadian media.
• Expanding the remit of CBC to provide comment, data, and (dare I say) analysis in all forms.
• Expanding the funding and remit of Statistics Canada information gathering.
• Expanding health, regulatory, Public Service Announcements, Canadian history, American history, analysis of data, data science presentations, clear language explanations of what is happening on government websites.
• More comment by government agencies and ministries about what is going on. It does not matter if this information is undirected.
• Reducing American-based news and information ingestion requires expanding other information.
• Establishing emergency data sharing committees with public broadcasters and statistics agencies in other countries.
• Publicly finance websites that will host archived American information pulled by the Trump Administration. This includes medical and scientific research established and supported by the American government ministries and institutes like the NIH.
• Rejecting enforcement of copyright over that information.

The public around the world need to be armed with responses to what is happening and be asked for input of ideas about how to respond to achieve desired outcomes.

The world has relied on USA data and information for many things because it has had an open information sharing mandate. This mandate was to support global liberal capitalism operate.

Relying on this open information is not going to work any more, so while we are bolstering our defences we must also rapidly expand the availability of information to the public through official channels.

In a time of war, the propaganda fight is essential to expand through flooding the system with correct analysis, data, and open debate. This is something that was learned (and then quickly forgotten) in the pandemic.