That concern is amplified by rightwing billionaires and their pet seditionists like Ginny Thomas funding and assisting people aligned with neo-Nazi groups in the US, along with a widespread takeover of American media by foreign rightwingers and corporations putting profits ahead of the nation's interests.
As Thomas Juneau told the CBC:
"There are growing transnational ties between right-wing extremists here and in the U.S., the movement of funds, the movement of people, the movement of ideas, the encouragement, the support by media, such as Fox News and other conservative media."
Tucker Carlson called Justin Trudeau a "Stalinist dictator" and claimed the progressive Prime Minister had "suspended democracy and declared Canada a dictatorship."
Canadians take that sort of thing seriously: when America's top cable host tells such vicious lies about their nation and its elected leaders, they worry about what may come next.
Carlson, after all, has promoted the White Replacement Theory that led to the recent murders in Buffalo, New York; how many killings might similar rhetoric spark in Canada if they were directed against residents of that nation?
The trucker convoy, first seen as a simple protest against a vaccine requirement to cross the US border, shocked Canadians when they discovered it had been infiltrated, armed, and funded by hard-right and often pro-Putin sources in the US.
The cache of illegal weapons they took from the truckers stunned Canadians; four of the truckers are now under indictment for conspiracy to murder.
"We potentially dodged a bullet there," Rigby told the CBC. "We really did. And we're hoping that the government and ... other levels of government have learned lessons."
Canadians have watched the evolution of the Putin/Orba'n-aligned hard-right here in America with alarm.
First, the US Supreme Court legalized political bribery, beginning with their Buckley and Bellotti decisions in 1976/1978, which let rightwing causes and multinational corporations pour a river of cash into the Reagan campaign in 1980.
Five Republicans on the Court followed up in 2010 with Citizens United, blowing off the doors to good government laws (striking down hundreds of them) and handing our politicians over to the corporate and the morbidly rich.
That opened the door for the NRA to buy off the entire GOP and then flood our nation with weapons of war, while rightwing billionaires spread a poisonous ideology proclaiming that government is a fundamental evil and that only charity by the rich can solve America's social problems.
Their efforts to fund "movements" like the Tea Party further radicalized Republicans against government while cranking up white supremacists who were flipped out by America's first Black president. Billionaire Trump poured gasoline on that fire with an eight-year "Birther" campaign to denigrate Obama.
And now bought-off Republican stooges in Congress and state legislatures - along with their allies on the Supreme Court - are openly trying to bring our country down, to destroy a 240-year-old democracy and replace it with rule by the rich, aka oligarchic neofascism, just like in Hungary and Russia.
Canadians have good reason to worry. As do we.
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