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See the full story · 1 sourcesIn 2026, trade wars are also fought with memes. Cole Burston/AFP via Getty Images
An AI-made Canadian trade-war music video with bears, beavers, and bagpipes is going viral.
It comes as Canada and the US trade fresh tariffs and increasingly meme-heavy political jabs.
A social-media consultant says AI can turn political tension into shareable cultural moments.
The latest front in the US-Canada trade war isn't tariffs, it's an army of Mountie bears playing bagpipes.
A new AI-made music video, "Canadian Resistance Army — Trade War," has become the latest online expression of Canadian defiance toward US tariffs — and an unlikely patriotic anthem.
The video, posted Tuesday by the YouTuber demonflyingfox, depicts a furry Canadian uprising against US tariffs. Animated beavers turn a border crossing into a 10-meter-deep lake, porcupines pop tires, grizzlies inspect trucks, and, at one point, farmers pour rivers of maple syrup across the road.
Its synthetic-sounding singer laments duties "signed by an orange hand" before the chorus arrives: "Beavers and moose won't take it anymore."
The YouTube video had drawn more than 76,000 views and 5,000 likes as of Thursday morning.
It has traveled much further across social media: A post sharing it on X had been viewed 1.3 million times, while a Facebook post had logged 1.6 million views. It's also available on Spotify.
"I stand firmly with this beaver army!" commented one YouTube user. "I think I'm Canadian now," wrote another.
The video plays the White House at its own meme-laden social media game. On Wednesday, the official White House X account shared a post — viewed 7.1 million times — captioned "President Trump Is Finally Ending Canada's Free Ride," alongside an image of a bald eagle pinning down a Canada goose.
The furry fightback comes as trade tensions between the two countries have flared again. US-Canada trade talks broke down last week, and fresh 50% US tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian imports took effect on Saturday. Canada has said it will retaliate dollar-for-dollar starting September 8, including targeted tariffs on 700 US products.
How a trade war got its own AI anthem
The 3-minute, 6-second song appears to have been made entirely with AI.
The video's YouTube page labels it "made with AI." Demonflyingfox, who has 490,000 YouTube subscribers, says in the description that it used Kling AI for video generation, ElevenLabs for voice, Suno for music, and InVideo for editing.
Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and author of Geekout, a social media newsletter, said the video's success shows AI can help individual creators turn a live political moment into a polished, shareable cultural hit.
"AI is turning the bedroom creator into a miniature media studio," he told Business Insider. In the time it can take an institution to draft a statement, an individual can turn a news event into a song, parody, or marching-bear spectacle, he said.
He also said one reason the AI video cut through is because humor gives people "a really low-friction way into politics."
"You can get the joke, recognize the sentiment, and share it almost instantly," Navarra said. "The best political memes don't explain the story. They kind of compress the mood."
Felix Simon, a research fellow in AI, information, and news at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said the video taps into a subject "that is on people's minds anyway" and reframes a serious conflict in a more digestible form.
"Humor as well as playing on national stereotypes or tropes are very effective in this context," Simon told Business Insider.
Simon added that AI lowers the cost of making authoritative-looking content quickly, but does not guarantee a hit: less polished material can sometimes cut through because it does not feel slick.
AI's growing role in political moments
It's not the first time AI-generated content has turned a political moment into a viral image or video.
In 2024, an AI-generated image of tents spelling out "All Eyes on Rafah" became a global show of support for Palestinians after an Israeli strike on a displacement camp.
The same tools have regularly been used by the Trump administration. Trump's official accounts last year shared an AI-made video imagining Gaza as a luxury resort , complete with a giant gold statue of the president.
And in Argentina's 2023 election, Javier Milei shared an AI-generated image portraying his rival Sergio Massa as a communist military figure.
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