I’ve been so immersed in American news these days, it’s a conscious effort to check out what shenanigans Ford is pulling in Ontario. Of course, it’s just more of the same bullshit: Trump-lite. Destroy the useful buildings, like the Science Center, and rebuild some garbage spa or ballroom or a tunnel, whatever you can dream up, likely all as a means to pocket money through subcontracting scams, like they did way back in the Iraq invasion, where there was one contractor for every 1.4 U.S. soldiers.  

Digital Warrior on Bluesky explains the cause of the connection succinctly:

“If you’ve been wondering why Canada’s right wing sometimes sounds like the US right wing, a lot of it is imported infrastructure, not organic debate. Same story beats, same villains, same panic triggers tuned for repetition and amplification. Start here [Tyee article]. This piece names Canadian media nodes tied to AtlasNetwork partners and maps the full pipeline in plain terms. Think of it less as a news story and more as a supply chain diagram for political narratives. Atlas Network is the backbone. It connects, funds, trains, and promotes hundreds of think tanks globally so local groups can push the same deregulation agenda with local accents. It scales ideology through partnerships, not elections. The mechanism: money funds research, research manufactures credentialed experts, and experts become recurring guests or hosts. That is how advocacy gets laundered into news. Viewers get repetition, not transparency, and it starts to feel like consensus. 

Immigration is the most portable script in the playbook. The facts may differ country to country, but the structure stays identical: blame newcomers for housing, wages, and safety, then sell hardline policy as common sense realism. Watch how online harms panic gets used as a deregulatory weapon. Child safety becomes the hook, then the real target becomes any guardrail on harassment or hate speech. Free speech ends up protecting platforms and operators, not citizens. Climate messaging follows the same pattern. Not denial, just delay and inversion: net zero is a scam, regulation is tyranny, oil is the victim, NGOs are the threat. It protects extraction while sounding like neutral common sense.The tell is asset reuse. When the same tight set of organizations and spokespeople cycle through immigration, healthcare, climate, and free speech, that is not pluralism. That is a coordinated influence network running message discipline.This is not a censorship argument. It is a provenance argument. If a broadcast segment is driven by a funded advocacy pipeline, audiences deserve to know: affiliations, donors, conflicts. Label advocacy as advocacy. Stop laundering it as journalism. Atlas Network is the backbone: it connects and resources hundreds of partner think tanks, trains messengers, and turns donor-funded agendas into “common sense” via research, spokespeople, and media amplification [Intercept article].”

The Tyee article (Feb. 2026) calls the Atlas Network a “U.S. dark-money coalition of billionaire libertarian ideologues,” and lists some of the Canadian groups that are directly linked: the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Second Street, the Montreal Economic Institute, and the Fraser Institute. They’re heavily influenced by oil and gas lobbies, or they are oil and gas lobbies. The Intercept article (Aug. 2017) outlines how the Atlas Network built up institutions across Latin America. It explains the path from Hayek to Reagan to now, and how to convince the public to agree:

“Think tanks are traditionally associated with independent institutes formed to develop unconventional solutions. But the Atlas model focuses less on developing genuinely new policy proposals, and more on establishing political organizations that carry the credibility of academic institutions, making them an effective organ for winning hearts and minds.
Free-market ideas — such as slashing taxes on the wealthy; whittling down the public sector and placing it under the control of private operators; and liberalized trade rules and restrictions on labor unions — have always struggled with a perception problem. Proponents of this vision have found that voters tend to view such ideas as a vehicle for serving society’s upper crust. Rebranding economic libertarianism as a public interest ideology has required elaborate strategies for mass persuasion.
But the Atlas model now spreading rapidly through Latin America is based on a method perfected by decades of struggle in the U.S. and the U.K., as libertarians worked to stem the tide of the surging post-war welfare state.”

I wrote about the Atlas Network back in December 2023, after reading this De Smog article, then again later that month quoting George Monbiot. Monbiot called the group “this overarching meta junk tank set up by Antony Fisher … whose purpose is to coordinate the activities of these dark money neoliberal networks.” Environmental groups have been aware of this cabal for a while. Now we need everyone to recognize what’s happening to have any hope for democracy’s survival.