#13 Who Owns America's Farmland — and How Much China Has Near Military Bases
A slush fund Congress used for decades to silence women with your tax dollars. Six names just came out. Three Republicans. Three Democrats.
Forty-five million acres of American farmland in foreign hands. Twenty-five percent of the Chinese ownership sits next to American military bases.
And a Canadian province that just collected three hundred thousand signatures to leave Canada. The vote is October 19.
Three stories nobody is covering right.
The story broke last week. It got bigger this week.
Representative Nancy Mace from South Carolina has been pushing on something most members of Congress wanted to keep buried. There is an office in the federal government called the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights. Used to be called the Office of Compliance. They run a fund. The fund pays settlements when employees of Congress file complaints against their bosses. Sexual harassment. Discrimination. Hostile work environment.
The fund pays the money. The Victim signs the NDAs. The taxpayer pays the bill.
The numbers we have. Between January 1996 and December 2018, the office approved three hundred and forty-nine awards or settlements. The total payout from that fund was roughly eighteen million dollars. Of your money. Used to silence employees who complained about their bosses. Bosses being members of Congress.
Then there is the part nobody is talking about loud enough. Twenty-three case files of those settlements were destroyed. The Office of Congressional Workplace Rights confirms it in writing. Their general counsel, John Ohlweiler, sent a letter to House Oversight Chair James Comer explaining that the office implemented what they call a Record Retention Policy in 2013. Under that policy, twenty-three settlement files got shredded.
Twenty-three settlements gone. Names, amounts, victims, accusations. All gone.
The 2013 timing is what should bother you. The Obama administration had been in office for four years. Congress had paid hundreds of taxpayer-funded settlements going back at least to the Clinton years. And in 2013, somebody at OCWR decided it was time to start destroying records.
That decision was not a coincidence. Records that get destroyed cannot be subpoenaed.
Mace's subpoena landed last week. The Office of Congressional Workplace Rights had to comply with what was left. They produced one thousand pages of documents. From those documents, six former lawmakers came out by name. Nine separate payments. The total: three hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred and sixty-one dollars.
The bipartisan split is exactly even.
Three Republicans. Three Democrats.
Rodney Alexander of Louisiana. Fifteen thousand dollars. 2007.
Carolyn McCarthy's office of New York. Eight thousand dollars. 2009.
Eric Massa of New York. Three separate settlements. One hundred and fifteen thousand dollars total. 2010.
John Conyers of Michigan. Two settlements. Seventy-seven thousand one hundred and eleven dollars total. 2010 and 2014.
Blake Farenthold of Texas. Eighty-four thousand dollars. 2014.
Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania. Thirty-nine thousand two hundred and fifty dollars. 2017.
Total payout from these six men. Three hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred and sixty-one dollars. Of your money. Used to silence women.
And here is the receipt that buries the entire defense. The Office of Congressional Workplace Rights confirmed in writing that thirty of the settlements they approved involved members who either committed the misconduct themselves or knew about it.
Thirty members. Knew. Either harassed someone, or knew someone on their staff was harassing someone, and let it happen.
Now let me tell you what these settlements were actually for.
Eric Massa was a Democratic congressman from upstate New York. He resigned in 2010 amid an Ethics Committee investigation into sexual harassment of his own male staffers. The previously known settlement against him was eighty-five thousand dollars. The new documents reveal an additional thirty thousand dollar settlement that was never disclosed. One hundred and fifteen thousand dollars of taxpayer money. Three different complaints. From his own staff.
John Conyers was a Democratic giant. House Judiciary Committee chairman. Fifty-three years in Congress. Civil rights icon. The previously known payment was twenty-seven thousand dollars in severance. The new documents reveal a separate fifty thousand dollar settlement from 2010 that was never disclosed. Total: seventy-seven thousand of your dollars. Conyers resigned in late 2017 after the floodgates opened. He died in 2019.
Blake Farenthold was a Republican from Texas. Former staffer Lauren Greene sued him in 2014 for sexual harassment. The case was settled for eighty-four thousand dollars of taxpayer money. Farenthold publicly denied any wrongdoing but apologized for using inappropriate language and creating a hostile workplace. He vowed to repay the taxpayers. He never did. He left office in 2018 and died in 2024.
Patrick Meehan was a Republican from Pennsylvania. He used office funds to settle a claim from a younger staffer he had pursued romantically. Thirty-nine thousand of your dollars. He resigned in 2018.
Three Republicans. Three Democrats. Twelve victims that we know about. Three hundred and thirty-eight thousand of your dollars.
And those are just the ones from after 2004. The ones from before 2004 are gone forever. Twenty-three case files destroyed.
After the Me Too movement broke open in 2017 and 2018, Congress passed reforms. The new rules ended taxpayer-funded settlements going forward. Members who harass now have to pay out of pocket. The fund that paid these six is no longer in operation for that purpose.
Good. As far as it goes.
But the records before 2004 are still gone. The records between 2004 and 2018 are still mostly hidden. And the votes to keep it that way tell you everything.
In March of this year, Mace introduced a resolution that would have required disclosure of all such records back to 1995. The resolution was simple. Make the records public. Let voters know who paid victims with their tax dollars.
Three hundred and fifty-seven members of Congress voted to bury it. Sixty-five voted to expose it.
Three hundred and fifty-seven votes against transparency. From both parties.
That is the cartel. The cover-up was not partisan. It was institutional. Both parties had skin in the game. Both parties voted to keep it covered.
Now there is a bill on the table to lock it down going forward. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona introduced it last month. Co-sponsors include Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Tim Burchett, Buddy Carter, Randy Fine, and Anna Paulina Luna.
The full name is the SWALWELL Act. Stopping Wasteful Allowances for Lawmaker Wrongdoing and Ensuring Legal Liability Act. Named after Eric Swalwell because the most recent scandal involved him.
What would the bill do? Six things.
One. Ban taxpayer dollars from being used to settle misconduct claims by members of Congress. Period. If a member harasses someone, the member pays. Not the country.
Two. Members who do settle must pay out of pocket. No reimbursements. No campaign funds. No pass-throughs through other accounts.
Three. Create a public, searchable database of every lawmaker and staffer who has settled. Names. Amounts. Nature of misconduct. Victim identity protected.
Four. Disclose all taxpayer-funded settlements going back to 1995.
Five. Criminal cases referred directly to the Department of Justice. No NDAs allowed to bury them.
Six. Double damages and mandatory ethics investigations for anyone trying to circumvent the law.
It is the right bill. It does what needs to be done. It will probably die on the House floor.
A similar bill that Anna Paulina Luna introduced in February overwhelmingly failed. Same pattern. Same vote count we expect from the SWALWELL Act if it gets a floor vote. Same three hundred and fifty-seven members would probably vote no. Both parties.
Why? Because both parties have members in the records. Both parties paid out. Both parties protect each other.
The slush fund is not a bug. It is a feature. The deal between Republicans and Democrats in Washington is mutual protection. You do not expose my predator and I will not expose yours. The taxpayer pays the bill. The victim signs the NDA. The records get destroyed. The story dies.
Until somebody like Mace decides to push.
Six names came out. Three from each party. Three hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars. Twelve victims. Twenty-three case files destroyed in 2013 under a record retention policy that conveniently shredded the oldest evidence right before the Me Too movement started.
Here is what I want you to take away from this. It is not about Republicans being better than Democrats or Democrats being better than Republicans. They are equally guilty. Three names from each side. Thirty members admitted to misconduct or coverup. The same vote count to bury it. The same incentive to keep the cover up running.
This is what happens when the people in power write the rules for themselves. They write the rules to protect themselves. They write the rules to use your money to fix their own mistakes. And then they vote together to keep the rules in place.
The voters do not matter to them. The taxpayers do not matter to them. The victims definitely do not matter to them.
The only thing that matters is the brotherhood of incumbency. You leave my predators alone, I will leave yours alone. The fund pays. The records get destroyed. Everyone moves on.
Until a member of Congress with the right amount of stubbornness, like Mace, decides she is not going to play that game.
Six names out. The pre-2004 records gone forever. The SWALWELL Act will face the same three hundred and fifty-seven votes against it that every other transparency bill faces.
But the names are out. The cartel got broken open. Just a little.
The next thing to watch is whether the SWALWELL Act gets a floor vote. If it does, watch how many Republicans vote against transparency. Watch how many Democrats vote against it. The math will tell you who is still in the cartel.
So that is Congress protecting itself with your money. Coming up next we shift from who is silencing victims to who is buying our land. And what your representatives are, and are not, doing about it.
Here is a number that should bother you. Forty-five point eight five million acres of American agricultural land are owned or leased by foreign entities. That is bigger than the entire state of Wisconsin. Owned by people who are not American citizens.
Most Americans have no idea this is the case. They assume the farms they drive past in Iowa, Texas, Nebraska, Kentucky are owned by American families. A lot of them are. Some of them are not.
The biggest foreign owners by acreage are Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany. Allies. Most of that ownership is not what we are concerned about today. The friendly countries owning farmland is normal commerce. They are buying because American farmland is a stable investment in a country that respects property rights.
What we are concerned about today is hostile foreign ownership. Specifically, China.
Chinese ownership of US farmland in 2010 was thirteen thousand seven hundred and twenty acres. By 2022 it was three hundred and forty-nine thousand acres. Today it is approximately two hundred and forty-eight thousand acres after some divestments.
The trend line. Seventeen hundred percent growth between 2010 and 2022. Then some pullback as state laws started forcing divestments. But the strategic decision was clear. Somebody in Beijing decided in the early 2010s to start buying American farmland. They have not stopped looking for places to buy.
Twenty-five percent of Chinese-owned American farmland is located near United States military bases.
One in four. Not by accident.
Let me tell you about two specific cases that should make you understand exactly what is happening.
Case one. Smithfield Foods.
Smithfield was founded in Smithfield, Virginia in 1936. Ninety years of American family business and industrial pork production. The biggest pork producer in the United States. Today Smithfield controls more than twenty-five percent of all American pig production. One in four pork chops, one in four bacon strips, one in four ham sandwiches in this country comes from Smithfield.
Smithfield was sold to a Chinese company called WH Group in May 2013 for four point seven billion dollars. WH Group is headquartered in Hong Kong. Their executive operations sit in Luohe, in Henan province in mainland China. The Smithfield purchase was the largest Chinese acquisition of an American company ever made up to that point.
With the company came one hundred and forty-six thousand acres of American farmland. Overnight, WH Group became one of the largest foreign owners of US farmland.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, called CFIUS, reviewed the deal in 2013 and approved it. They said it would not endanger national security. Twelve years later, with what we know now about the Chinese Communist Party using commercial enterprises for intelligence gathering, that decision looks worse and worse.
In January 2025, Smithfield went public again on the Nasdaq exchange. The IPO was supposed to demonstrate transparency and reduce concerns about Chinese government control. But after the IPO, WH Group still owns approximately ninety-three percent of Smithfield's shares. The new American shareholders own about seven percent.
Smithfield has divested some farmland under state pressure. They are down from one hundred and forty-six thousand acres at peak to about eighty-five thousand today. They restructured operations. Their Murphy Brown subsidiary used to account for ninety-six percent of all Chinese-owned farmland in North Carolina. In 2024, Smithfield reestablished it as Murphy Family Ventures, an ostensibly independent producer.
But the parent company is still WH Group. The control is still in Hong Kong, with operations in Henan. The pork production capacity is still in Chinese hands.
Case two. Fufeng Group, North Dakota.
Fufeng is a Chinese agribusiness based in Shandong, China. In November 2021, Fufeng announced it was buying three hundred and seventy acres of farmland near Grand Forks, North Dakota. They planned a seven hundred million dollar wet corn milling plant.
The plant location was twelve miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base.
Grand Forks Air Force Base houses the 319th Air Base Wing. The base is responsible for some of the most sensitive surveillance drone operations in the United States military. It also oversees a significant portion of the satellite communications backbone for global US military operations.
Twelve miles away. Chinese-owned. Convenient location for what they claim is corn milling.
In April 2022, an Air Force major named Jeremy Fox circulated a memo about the Fufeng project. He laid out exactly what was at stake. He explained that passive receiving equipment placed on the Chinese-owned land could intercept sensitive drone and space-based communications going to and from the base. He said the data collection capability would represent a costly national security risk causing grave damage to United States strategic advantages.
The Fufeng case went to CFIUS, the same committee that approved Smithfield in 2013. In December 2022, CFIUS announced they did not have jurisdiction over the Fufeng deal.
Their reasoning. Fufeng was buying undeveloped land. Greenfield investment. CFIUS jurisdiction covers acquisitions of existing US businesses. Empty farmland is not a business. The committee did not have legal authority to block the purchase.
That is the gap. Buy a US company, CFIUS reviews. Buy undeveloped American farmland next to a military base, CFIUS has nothing to say.
The Air Force kept pushing. The North Dakota senators, John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer, kept pushing. Local citizens in Grand Forks collected thousands of signatures opposing the project. On February 6, 2023, the Grand Forks City Council rejected Fufeng's development plan. The plant did not get built.
The system worked, barely. But it took an Air Force major risking his career, two senators raising hell, and citizens collecting signatures. The federal foreign investment review system itself had nothing useful to say.
And it was just one case. In Val Verde County, Texas, a Chinese billionaire named Sun Guangxin bought one hundred and forty thousand acres for a wind energy farm. Right next to Laughlin Air Force Base. That deal went through years before anyone outside the Air Force was paying attention. The land is still in Chinese hands.
Now, what is Congress doing about all of this?
Talking. Mostly.
Between 2011 and 2024, there were two hundred and eighty-plus state and federal bills introduced to restrict foreign farmland ownership. Eighty-two more are being considered in 2026 alone. There is broad bipartisan agreement that something needs to happen.
There is much less agreement on what.
Most of the bills currently moving through Congress have one common feature. They prohibit future purchases by hostile-nation buyers. China. Russia. Iran. North Korea. Going forward, no more sales.
They do not require existing owners to sell what they already have.
That includes Senate Bill 618, the Protecting America's Agricultural Land from Foreign Harm Act. It includes the LAND Act introduced by Brandon Gill of Texas. It includes the Farm Bill amendment passed in the House this year, sponsored by Greg Steube of Florida.
All of these stop new sales. None of them force divestment of existing holdings.
That means Smithfield Foods stays Chinese-owned. Two hundred and forty-eight thousand acres stay in Chinese hands. The land near Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas stays Chinese. The legislation only matters going forward.
There is one bill that goes further. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced Senate Bill 2258 in July 2025. The Protecting Our Farms and Homes from China Act.
Hawley's bill bans new purchases. And it requires existing covered foreign entities to divest from American farmland within one year of enactment.
It is the strongest federal bill currently on the table. And it is also the bill that has the hardest path to passage. Because it forces actual divestment, the Chinese-tied entities and their American business partners are lobbying against it the hardest.
Smithfield Foods has been lobbying state legislatures for years. The pattern is consistent. Get the broad China-buying-farmland ban passed. Then quietly add a carve-out exempting Smithfield specifically. Oklahoma did exactly this. They passed a hostile-country ban in 2023. Then they exempted Smithfield.
Smithfield is the biggest player. Smithfield gets the carve-out. The smaller actors get nothing.
That is how it works in Washington. The system protects the biggest predator while making smaller actors look like the problem.
State actions have been more aggressive than federal. Arkansas and Utah have actually forced Chinese corporations to divest existing land holdings. They did not wait for Congress. They did it themselves.
Other states are moving in that direction. Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Indiana, all have laws that go beyond what is currently moving in Washington. The momentum is at the state level, not the federal level.
In May 2023, the Treasury Department's Office of Investment Security proposed expanding CFIUS authority to require federal approval for foreign land purchases within one hundred miles of eight specific bases. North Dakota, California, Texas, South Dakota, Iowa, and Arizona installations. That rule would have closed the gap that allowed Fufeng to buy land next to Grand Forks Air Force Base. The proposal sat at Treasury for years.
In July 2025, the Trump administration launched the National Farm Security Action Plan. The plan coordinates with states to identify and end direct or indirect Chinese ownership of American farmland. The federal action backstops what states are already doing.
So here is the picture.
Forty-five million acres of American farmland in foreign hands. Most of it from allies. A growing percentage from China. Twenty-five percent of the Chinese ownership near military bases. Smithfield still Chinese-controlled. One hundred and forty thousand acres in Texas still Chinese-owned. Multiple court fights ongoing.
Multiple bills moving in Congress. Most of them only ban future purchases. Existing owners keep what they have. One bill, Hawley's, would force divestment. It is fighting an uphill battle against lobbying.
State governments doing more than the federal government. Arkansas and Utah forcing actual divestment. Trump's federal plan supporting them.
Here is my position on this, and you can disagree if you want.
Banning future purchases is not enough. The damage from existing hostile-nation ownership is already done. Smithfield is already Chinese. Two hundred and forty-eight thousand acres are already Chinese. Forty-six thousand acres of that are already next to American military bases.
Future-only bans say to the Chinese Communist Party, you got what you got. Keep it. Just do not get more.
That is not a position. That is a surrender.
The right policy is what Hawley is proposing. Force divestment. Existing hostile-nation owners have a defined window to sell their American farmland. If they do not sell voluntarily, the federal government seizes it under eminent domain. The land returns to American ownership.
Combined with a hard cap on total foreign ownership going forward. Five percent of any state's farmland. Maybe less. Pick a number and enforce it.
Americans should own American land. Not because of nationalism. Not because of xenophobia. Because of national security. Land near military bases should be in American hands. Pork production at scale should be in American hands. Food security and military security are too important to leave to lobbyists and shell companies.
If China wants to buy American farmland, they should also let Americans buy Chinese farmland. The Chinese Communist Party has prohibited foreign agricultural purchases for decades. The reciprocity argument is the cleanest argument. We should match what they do.
Coming up next, we go across the border. This is the story I really want you to hear.
On May 4, 2026, an organization called Stay Free Alberta announced it had collected three hundred and one thousand, six hundred and twenty signatures. The signatures are for an independence petition. The petition triggers a referendum under Alberta's Citizen Initiative law.
Three hundred and one thousand signatures.
The legal threshold to trigger a vote was around one hundred and seventy-seven thousand.
They nearly doubled the requirement.
The referendum is now legally scheduled for October 19, 2026. The question on the ballot is straight. Should Alberta become an independent country.
Now, before I go further, you need to understand how that signature threshold got so achievable. Because this story has a very specific political backstory.
Until the spring of 2025, Alberta required about five hundred and eighty-eight thousand signatures to trigger a constitutional referendum. Twenty percent of all eligible voters. That number is hard to hit. Quebec separatists never had to clear a similar bar at the federal level.
In May 2025, just one day after Mark Carney's Liberal party won the Canadian federal election, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith introduced Bill 54. The Election Statutes Amendment Act. The bill drastically reduced the signature threshold. From five hundred and eighty-eight thousand down to one hundred and seventy-seven thousand. From twenty percent of eligible voters down to ten percent of votes cast in the previous election. Roughly six percent of the actual population.
Bill 54 became law on May 15, 2025. Smith framed it as democratic renewal. Her opponents called it exactly what it was. A political maneuver to make a separatist referendum almost certain to qualify for the ballot.
Smith herself says she supports a united Canada with more sovereign powers for Alberta. She also passed Bill 54 the day after Carney won. And she has never been the politician you take at her surface words.
Smith has been moving in this direction for years. In 2022 she introduced the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act. The act allows Alberta's legislature to declare federal Canadian laws unenforceable in Alberta if they infringe on provincial jurisdiction. She has been pursuing the creation of an Alberta provincial police force to replace the Royal Canadian Mounted Police presence. She has been working to withdraw Alberta from the Canada Pension Plan and create a provincial pension plan instead.
Each of these moves has the same direction. More provincial sovereignty. Less federal Canadian authority over Alberta. The independence referendum is the logical end point of a multi-year strategy.
The strategy itself comes from a document called the Free Alberta Strategy. Written by Smith's chief of staff, Rob Anderson. The strategy lays out exactly what Smith has been doing. Pass the Sovereignty Act. Create a provincial police force. Withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan. Opt out of every federal program where the province can claim provincial jurisdiction. And eventually, hold a referendum on independence.
Smith has been following the strategy step by step.
Now let me give you a piece of honesty most American conservative media will not give you. Most Albertans do not actually want independence.
Polling from the Angus Reid Institute in February 2026 found that twenty-nine percent of Albertans would vote to leave Canada today. Sixty-five percent would vote to stay. Eight percent definitely vote leave. Twenty-one percent leaning leave. Fifty-seven percent definitely vote stay.
The October 19 referendum is much more likely to fail than to succeed.
But here is where it gets interesting. Among Smith's own United Conservative Party voters, support for independence is much higher. Sixteen percent definitely leave. Forty-one percent lean leave. Fifty-seven percent of UCP voters tilt toward independence.
Smith's political base wants out. The general population does not. She has to manage both at once.
Now let me get into why Albertans are even thinking about this. The why.
Alberta is the energy heart of Canada. Oil sands. Natural gas. Pipelines. Refineries. The province produces roughly four million barrels of oil per day. It contains the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world. Behind only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
Alberta's economy is built on energy. Their political identity is built on energy. And Canada's federal government has been hostile to that energy industry for years.
Federal carbon taxes raise costs for every barrel produced. Federal pipeline approvals get blocked or delayed indefinitely. Energy East was canceled. Northern Gateway was killed. The Trans Mountain expansion was nationalized after years of fighting. Bill C-69, passed under Trudeau, made new pipeline approvals nearly impossible.
Alberta watches this and asks why. Their answer is simple. The federal government in Ottawa is run by people who do not care about Alberta. The voters who elect those people are concentrated in Quebec and Ontario. The energy economy of the West is a piggy bank for the political priorities of the East.
And then there is the equalization payment system.
Equalization is a Canadian federal program. The federal government takes money from richer provinces. The federal government redistributes it to poorer provinces. The stated goal is to ensure all Canadians have access to similar government services regardless of where they live.
In practice, Alberta is the biggest net donor. They send roughly twenty billion dollars per year to the federal government that does not come back to them. That money goes primarily to Quebec, which is the biggest net recipient. And to the Maritime provinces.
Alberta sends twenty billion dollars to provinces that vote against everything Alberta cares about. Year after year.
Now let me get into what would actually happen if they leave.
First, what Alberta produces beyond oil. Most Americans assume Alberta is just oil and gas. It is not.
Alberta is the largest beef-producing province in Canada. Roughly five million head of cattle. Major exporter of beef to the United States, Asia, Europe. The cattle industry alone is multiple billions of dollars per year.
Alberta produces wheat, canola, barley, oats. Major agricultural exporter.
Alberta has significant forestry. Pulp, paper, lumber.
Alberta has Banff and Jasper National Parks. Tourism is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Calgary is the financial capital of Canada's energy sector. Banking, investment, insurance all concentrated there.
Alberta's GDP is roughly two hundred and ninety-five billion US dollars. They are eleven percent of Canada's population but seventeen percent of Canada's economy.
Per capita, Alberta is wealthier than the rest of Canada. They are wealthier per capita than most American states.
If Alberta became an independent country today, they would have a population around the size of Kentucky. Roughly four point eight million people. They would have a GDP larger than New Zealand. They would have a per capita GDP higher than Italy or France.
That is not a poor little province. That is a wealthy small country. About to keep its own twenty billion dollar equalization payment.
What would they lose? Federal healthcare funding. Canada's universal healthcare is administered at the provincial level but funded partly through federal transfers. Alberta would need to replace that funding from its own resources. With twenty billion dollars in equalization staying home, plus oil and gas revenue staying home, the math actually works.
Federal military protection. This is where things get interesting.
Canada's military has roughly seventy thousand active personnel. They have not met NATO's two percent of GDP defense spending target in years. Canada is heavily dependent on the United States for actual continental defense through NORAD.
So when people ask, what about Alberta's military, the answer is a question. What military? Canada barely has one. The United States is already the de facto defender of North America.
An independent Alberta would essentially have the same defense reality they have now. The US covers them by geography. They would just have a different relationship to that protection.
Which brings us to the wild card. The Trump-Alberta connection.
President Trump has openly discussed Canada becoming the fifty-first state. People dismissed it as a joke. People always dismiss what Trump says as a joke right up until he does it.
An independent Alberta sharing a long border with Montana, Idaho, and the rest of the American Northwest. An economy aligned with American oil and gas markets. A culture more politically aligned with the American conservative movement than with the Canadian Liberal party. A population that feels its current government does not represent its values.
Sound familiar? It should. That is roughly the story of every American Western state.
If Alberta votes for independence in October, the second question becomes immediate. What is their plan? Become a sovereign country. Join the United States. Some hybrid arrangement. Free trade and open border without formal incorporation.
All of these are possibilities. None of them are official policy. But the conversation is going to happen. And the United States political system has openings for it. The Constitution requires Congress to formally admit any new state. Republican-controlled Congress would be open to a wealthy, conservative, energy-producing addition to the union.
Now the obstacles. There are several.
Mark Carney is the Prime Minister of Canada. He is a Liberal. He is not going to let a wealthy province walk out the door without a fight.
Canada has played this game before. Quebec held independence referendums in 1980 and 1995. The 1980 vote went against independence sixty to forty. The 1995 vote was almost too close to call. Forty-nine point four percent voted yes. Fifty point six percent voted no.
Quebec is still part of Canada thirty years later. The federal government's playbook works.
That playbook has several pieces.
The Clarity Act. Passed by the Canadian federal government in 2000 specifically in response to the close Quebec vote. It requires that any independence vote use a clear question and produce a clear majority. The federal government decides what those words mean.
Constitutional challenges through the Supreme Court of Canada. Multi-year delays. The federal government can drag negotiations out indefinitely.
Indigenous treaty rights. Treaty 6, Treaty 7, and Treaty 8 cover most of Alberta. Those treaties were signed with the Crown of Canada, not with Alberta. Indigenous nations have already filed four separate court challenges against the independence petition. The Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations issued a statement calling the referendum reckless and a direct violation of treaties. The Blackfoot Confederacy is in court. The Mikisew Cree First Nation is in court. The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation is in court.
If those court challenges succeed, the referendum gets stopped before October 19. Alberta law cannot override treaties signed with the Crown of Canada.
Federal stalling. Refuse to negotiate. Run out the clock. Wait for political momentum to fade. Carney has the option of simply slow-walking everything for years.
Economic pressure. Banking, currency, regulatory leverage. Make life hard during the transition.
Carney also has a softer tool. He has already used it. In November 2025, Carney signed a memorandum of understanding with Smith for a new privately owned bitumen oil pipeline from Alberta to the British Columbia coast. The deal exempted the pipeline project from federal climate legislation. In exchange, Alberta agreed to invest in carbon capture for the oil sands.
The pipeline deal was Carney buying off Alberta. Give Smith a win her base wants. Get her to dial back the separation rhetoric. The threat of independence is what made the pipeline deal possible. The threat is the leverage.
So even if Alberta votes yes in October, independence is not automatic. It triggers a multi-year negotiation. The federal government drags it out. The Supreme Court of Canada gets involved. First Nations court challenges complicate everything. Political momentum fades. Alberta probably stays in Canada.
But here is what I want you to understand. Even a failed independence vote changes the leverage.
Quebec voted no in 1980 and again in 1995. They never became independent. But they got more autonomy. They got language rights protected. They got economic concessions. They got cultural recognition. Quebec uses the threat of independence as a permanent negotiation tool.
Alberta is going to do the same thing.
Even if independence does not happen, the threat itself buys Alberta concessions. The Carney pipeline deal already proved it. Pipeline approvals. Carbon tax exemptions. Better equalization terms. Provincial control over more policy areas.
The threat is the win, regardless of the actual vote.
And that is why this story matters for Americans. Not because Alberta is going to become the fifty-first state next year. They probably are not. Not because Canada is going to fall apart. It probably is not.
But because we are watching real conservative populist energy in motion. A wealthy, conservative, resource-producing region tired of being told what to do by a federal government dominated by people in different cities with different priorities.
Sound like any region of America you know?
This is the same energy that drives Texas independence movements. The same energy that drives California secession movements. The same energy that drives the South versus the federal government, the West versus the East, the rural versus the urban.
Alberta is just the first place where the energy got organized enough to actually trigger a binding vote.
Watch October 19. Whatever happens in that vote will tell you a lot about where conservative populism is going across North America in the next decade.
Because three hundred thousand Albertans just told their government, we are tired of this.
And the rest of us should be paying attention.
And that's it.
Three stories. The slush fund Congress used to silence women. The forty-five million acres of American farmland in foreign hands. And a Canadian province that just voted to walk away.
That is everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I am Brian Bullock of starborn studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknws1. If this hits you share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com
Because everyone knows. Your silence is your consent