When I was a lad, I was told that Machiavelli’s The Prince is a satire. I don’t believe it, personally — I know a few things about Renaissance Italy, and I think he meant every word — but I learned something important from the people who insist it’s a satire: They’re wishcasting.
Let me back up. The occasion where I first heard the “it’s a satire” thesis was an “advanced placement” History class back in high school. They probably don’t have those anymore as part of the regular curriculum — dat be rayciss — so in case you’ve never endured one, it’s a bunch of mega-nerds who only care about pleasing Teacher trying to do History. For our unit on “The Renaissance”, we had to read both The Prince and More’s Utopia, and do our term paper on one or the other.
Naturally I picked The Prince, and since you all know the kind of kids who were in that kind of class, naturally everyone else picked Utopia. I might’ve been the only kid who ever did his paper on Machiavelli; certainly the teacher acted like she’d never seen one before. We didn’t have the phrase “trigger warning” back then, but that’s what it amounted to — Teacher hastened to inform everyone in the class that The Prince was really a satire, and so of course I was just kidding too, ha ha, because otherwise we were in the presence of very, very, very bad thought …
“Yes, kidding, ha ha ha,” I muttered, because while I obviously wasn’t the quickest on the uptake back then — I should’ve just done the stupid paper on goddamn Utopia like the rest of the sheep — even I could figure out that I was gonna get sent to the school counselor if I didn’t get with the program …
… and that’s when I learned the aforementioned lesson. Kidding? You think Machiavelli’s kidding? Didn’t we just do this whole unit on the Renaissance? Your main man Thomas More was burning people at the stake, for fuck’s sake! And as for the Italians, they were straight whacking people out in church, with the active connivance of the fucking Pope himself. Satire, fuhgetaboudit, that’s Godfather shit, Machiavelli’s as serious as cancer. You just don’t want to believe that people are actually the way they so obviously are, so you’ll tell yourselves he’s kidding … and Teacher will back you up on it, because she doesn’t want to believe it either.
(Meanwhile, I’ll get an A for my excellent “satire”, in exchange for which I will never ever bring it up again or I’ll fail the rest of the semester).
Severian, “End States and Inverted Incentives”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-22.
June 19, 2026
QotD: The Prince is a … satire?
June 18, 2026
Rules for you young plebs, but not rules for us
The generation that defined itself as “the youth generation”, “the hippies”, etc., are now nailing down every possible way to have fun so that youngsters can’t do what they loudly and proudly did at the same age:
Part of the crowd on the first day of the Woodstock Festival, 15 August, 1969.
Photo by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell via Wikimedia Commons.
We’re banning raves, because we don’t want you having fun where we can’t watch you. By the way let me tell you about Woodstock.
We’re cracking down on underage drinking. It’s bad for you. Yeah of course we hit up the pubs at your age it was great.
We’re banning smoking, but just for you — the smoking age will go up one year every year. Oh yes of course, we used to be able to smoke inside everywhere, it was great really.
We’re banning flavored vapes. We don’t have any evidence they’re bad for you, you just like them too much.
We’re banning dodgeball during recess, someone might get hurt. Yeah we really enjoyed dodgeball too.
We’re banning flirting, because it might make the girls uncomfortable.
We’re locking you in your room for the next two years. Yes we know you’re in no danger from the virus, but we’re worried that you’ll get us sick. By the way you have to take this needle if you want to leave your room again. Yes, twice. Well there will be boosters too. No, we aren’t worried about side effects, that doesn’t effect us at all.
We’re closing the frat houses, because we don’t want you having fun without our permission. Please join these officially sanctioned university clubs instead.
We’re bringing in labor from the third world to work the service jobs, so you can’t have a summer job.
You need to go to university to get a good job. By the way we’re raising the price of tuition. Oh look we’re raising it again. Don’t worry there are loans. At interest.
Actually we’re giving the good jobs to the foreigners we just imported, to make up for our racist past. We are very good people. No of course we aren’t sacrificing anything. You just have to take one for the team.
Also, we’re giving the foreigners the houses. We needed to increase real estate prices. For our pensions, you see. Sadly no, you’ll probably never be able to afford one yourself. By the way don’t forget to pay your taxes. Need to support those pensions somehow! Eh? No, we’re giving ourselves tax breaks of course. Seniors discount you know.
Oh by the way, that one thing you still have, now that we’ve banned joy and kicked every ladder out from under you? That social media stuff you kids like? You guessed it! We’re banning that too! Just for you though, we’re still going to watch AI videos on Facebook. It’s for your safety, you see. We’ve noticed that you’re all getting rather irate, and we think it would be better for your mental health if you shut up for a while. Why don’t you just go outside?
Eh? No of course we aren’t going to stop Ahmed and his twelve illiterate cousins from raping your sister, that would be culturally insensitive, which would make us feel very bad, and we can’t have that.
Update: Added missing URL.
June 14, 2026
The “Dissolution of the Universities” draws ever closer
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Steve McGuire reacts to more news about the conscious dumbing-down of modern university programs:
A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35.
Another “said the earliest version of the … course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts”.
“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught”, the first one said.
To which John Carter responds:
The academic death spiral is something to behold.
Demographics are steadily reducing the size of the student body, squeezing finances and driving bankruptcies.
At the same time, standards collapse is destroying the quality of the students the universities admit.
We’re already at the point where it’s common knowledge that a degree signals essentially nothing about intellectual ability. AI is exacerbating this, since cheating is so easy now.
Kids are already starting to forgo university, since they don’t think the cost of the credential is justified. That cuts even more deeply into the number of students universities can attract.
Universities respond by reducing standards even further (thereby accelerating brand destruction), by reducing tuition (which cuts even more deeply into budgets), and by firing professors in low-enrollment majors (reducing program variety, especially in the small seminars that are generally the most rewarding experiences for students).
[…]
“How can this be reversed?”
It can’t. There are pathways for individual institutions to revive themselves, even to prosper, but the sector as a whole is cooked. The death spiral is driven by prestige collapse as well as the demographic cliff, and intellectual prestige is inversely correlated to the size of the student body. More students means lower standards. That is especially true with a demographic cliff.
The only way to survive this crisis is ruthless elitism. Stop trying to edutain the fat middle of the bell curve, and refocus on the right tail. Become a place where the smartest people gather, and from which anyone who isn’t a 2-sigma outlier is excluded. This makes the school an arena in which intellectual iron can sharpen against iron. Elitism restored, prestige follows.
Next, eliminate the 500 person intro lectures. Admin loves these, since the high student:teacher ratio makes them cash cows. But they’re functionally no better than watching YouTube videos. Refocus on small seminars. This offers value that the Internet can’t.
Schools that take this path will restore or build reputations that will enable them to survive. However, they won’t be large. There is no future in which huge institutions keep tens of thousands of professors and administrators on payroll.
Update, 15 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
June 13, 2026
QotD: Ecce BCG
Of course BCG stands for “Basic College Girl”, and thus she can be found at any institution of “higher” “learning”, but the most Basic ones of all go to colleges you’ve never heard of. Jonah Goldberg is a good example, and while I know he’s technically male, his act is classic BCG. He famously — or infamously — went to Goucher College, which is the kind of school that likes to pretend it’s a mini-Ivy, when in fact it’s the kind of school bright-enough but directionless young nouveau riche kids go to when they just can’t kick that drug habit.
[…]
Achieving shockingly high rank right out of the gate is another tell, and I know what you’re thinking, because of course I thought it too: Mark Meadows is 63 years old, and in the world we grew up in, there’s only one way for a straight-out-of-college girl to become a “close confidante” of a 63 year old man. In my experience, though, BCGs aren’t socially savvy enough to figure that out.
Yeah yeah, I know, but y’all, as primal as that is, these BCGs are just weird. They have no social skills whatsoever. Two data points. First, from Hutchinson’s wiki page:
Identified as a “White House legislative aide”, Hutchinson was the subject of a nationally-syndicated AP photograph in which she was shown dancing to the song “Y.M.C.A.” alongside White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the end of Trump’s September 21, 2020, campaign rally in Swanton, Ohio.
That is not grownup behavior. No woman who ever hoped to be taken seriously in politics would be caught dead doing that, as recently as 15 years ago. They have absolutely zero idea how they come off to other people.
Second data point: I once taught a night class in one of my Flyover State tours. I had this girl there who was just dying to get to Capitol Hill. She was involved in every possible Poli Sci club, the pre-law club, the Young Legislators (or whatever FNG shit it was), and so on. She emailed me once to say she’d be coming to class late, because she was representing Student Senate (or whatever) in some big to-do the college was hosting for the Governor.
When she shows up to my class, she’s wearing this tight red cocktail dress that would’ve looked trashy on a Vegas waitress. It was slit at the sides and back. and at the midriff. It had sequins, I shit you not. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing. You went to a reception. With the Governor. Wearing that.
They have no savvy at all, y’all. None whatsoever. The invitation she got read “formal attire”, so she wore what she wore to the sorority formal. You could practically still see Chad Thundercock’s handprints on her ass.
And that’s the fourth and most diagnostic criterion: utter, complete, hilarious fucking cluelessness. About everything.
Severian, “Alt Thread: Diagnosing the BCG”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.
June 9, 2026
QotD: The temptations of totalitarianism
One might have thought — I certainly thought — that with the downfall of the Soviet Union, the totalitarian temptation had been exorcised once and for all. This, of course, was a very superficial view. Instead of disappearing, the temptation balkanised, so to speak, and was also repatriated. Totalitarianism had been shown almost as conclusively as anything in the sphere of human affairs to be inherently absurd, intellectually nugatory, and catastrophic in practice. This fact was not sufficient, however, to destroy its attractions — at least for those who desire a complete solution to all of life’s little problems such as how to live and what to live for. A solution in the mind is worth a thousand disasters in the world.
Naturally, it takes a certain level of education to feel the temptations of totalitarianism: they do not occur to the illiterate, for example, but only to the intelligentsia. The latter has increased in size almost exponentially with the expansion of tertiary education, or at least with attendance at institutions of tertiary instruction. In retrospect, it is not surprising that totalitarianism should continue to exert its siren-song in previously liberal societies, particularly when the young, always tempted by radical ideas, face genuine if intractable problems, seemingly worse than those of the previous generation.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Temptations of Power”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-06.
June 7, 2026
Those “decorations” or “doodles” on medieval manuscripts
In this week’s Substack Post of links they included this gem from weird medieval guys providing lots of illuminated explanations of the visual additions to pages of handwritten text generated in monasteries all over Europe during the Middle Ages:
After perhaps my 9,000th time seeing someone describe medieval marginalia as “doodles” or the product of “boredom”, I thought it might be nice to put together a brief guide to some of the themes and ideas that recur in the margins of manuscripts, hopefully helping to showcase the fact that these drawings were usually anything but “random”! In fact, far more interestingly, these little characters and scenes were part of a complex and visually dense world rooted in religion, pop culture, humour, and folklore. This is just a whistle-stop tour, but I’d love to add a second part soon.
Context matters
Illuminated manuscripts were essentially always written first and illustrated second in the late Middle Ages. The scribes would add their writing to unbound, empty pages, working carefully around blank fields where painted miniatures and initials would later be added by a separate artist or artists. We do not know exactly what sort of education these artists would have obtained. However, they almost certainly would have had a degree of literacy in their native tongue and a familiarity with the scriptures they were illustrating, even if this did not extend to a firm grasp of written Latin.
Understanding this is crucial for pushing back on the idea of medieval marginalia as “random”, since it opens up the possibility of considering marginal drawings in relation to the rest of the page and manuscript as a whole — crucial context that is often neglected when we encounter marginalia as isolated snippets online. Artists were not simply filling in blank voids but adding adornment to a canvas already rich with meaning imparted by the scribe. Thus, the first step to understanding a piece of marginalia should always be to trace it back to its source, if possible. Have a look through the entire work and see what themes and images recur.
Works like the 13th century English prayerbook known as the Rutland Psalter show extensive evidence of the marginal artists playing on specific words and lines from the scriptures featured on the same page. I highly recommend Betsy Chunko Dominguez’ fantastic paper “Playing on Timbrels: The Margins of the Rutland Psalter” for a more complete exposition, but I will go over a couple examples here.
In the lower margin of folio 11r of the Psalter, two men seem to be engaged in a fierce struggle, with one of them apparently trying to rip off the other’s ear. Moving their eyes back up to the start of the opposite page, a reader would have been greeted by the following line from Psalm 5:
Verba mea auribus percipe Domine intellege clamorem meum.
Give ear, O Lord, to my words, understand my cry.
Thus, our marginal brawl becomes a clever pun on the notion of “giving ear” — perhaps a way of making the text more engaging and memorable for its reader.
On folio 87v, the artist has extended the letter p from the word conspectu in Psalm 86 (85 in the Vulgate) into an arrow fired from the bow of one monster into the rear end of another.
Conspectu means “to behold” or “to consider”, and the famous medieval scholar Michael Camille connected the arrow’s placement to the notion of gaze as a type of visual penetration. One might also consider the entire verse from the Psalm, which reads:
Deus, iniqui insurrexerunt super me, et synagoga potentium quaesierunt animam meam: et non proposuerunt te in conspectu suo.
Arrogant men are rising up against me, O God; a violent mob seeks my life; they do not keep you before their eyes.
In redirecting the word for “gaze” into the supine creature’s rear end, the artist has perhaps emphasised the evils of turning one’s eyes away from God, connecting the two monsters with the violent mob evoked in the text above.
For those who lack an education in Latin, this type of wordplay can be tricky to identify. What may be easier to find are visual parallels between different drawings in a manuscript: the margins could function as a sort of antithesis to the “orthodox” miniatures and initials in the centre of the page. In one 14th century French book of hours, the martyrdom of St Paul in an initial D is reenacted directly to the left by a soldier about to club a rabbit — a humorous elevation of lapine suffering that perhaps emphasises Paul’s innocence.
Other manuscripts show narratives playing out in the margins across multiple pages in a comic-book fashion. The 14th century Smithfield Decretals contains more than a dozen multi-page stories, including those of several saints, naughty priests, henpecked husbands, and a group of rabbits who capture, try, convict, and execute a hunter for his crimes against their kind.
British Library, Royal MS 10 E IV
QotD: Undergrad writing
I would always tell students who genuinely wanted to improve that nobody is ever going to fail your term paper for style. Unless you really want to be a novelist — and you don’t; we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you did — pretty much all the writing you’re ever going to do is about efficient communication. Fuck literature, fuck all the tropes of rhetoric. Just lay it out there. Who cares if it’s not a page-turner?
But the few things students are taught about writing in grade school are not just useless, they’re counterproductive, because they focus – for some unfathomable reason — on style. So you end up with crap like this:
This article was very thought provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.
Duuuuuuude … far out!!! It’s not quite as “cosmic” as some of the intro sentences I’ve gotten over the years (one kid said something like “Throughout history, there have been many historic events”), but it’s just filler, very obvious filler, and that’s the very first thing your reader sees. Give me Militarese any day: “At 0500 hours, patrolling near Checkpoint Bravo, 1st platoon encountered an enemy force of approximately platoon strength …” But back in sophomore English, Teacher said that all papers must have a Thesis Statement, and since xzhey never bothered to define “Thesis Statement” I keep getting stuff like this.
Same way with the other crap they teach. There’s the one about never using the same word twice, so I’d get papers with half the thesaurus cut-and-pasted. There’s stuff about alliteration and parallelism and metaphors and passive voice, oh God, the passive voice. I swear, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Passive voice on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Botched alliteration glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain, after I’ve had enough beers to endure grading another batch of midterms …
Yeah, you see what I did there. It’s all so, so unnecessary. The point of writing is communication, and in this instance what you are trying to communicate, above all else, is that you have read and understood the assignment. Every sentence I have to read about how deeply thought provoking you found the article is another moment of my life gone, like tears in the rain. The funny thing is, except for the far-out intro, this girl mostly doesn’t have the “style” problem. Her sentences are short and to the point, and most of them are in that nice subject-verb-object pattern that makes me suspect AI, especially coming from a Current Year undergrad.
In my experience, the Kids These Days either give you tweets — often literal bullet points, to the point where some colleagues actually had to specify complete sentences in their essay prompts — or these long, byzantine things that look like really bad parodies of Alexander Pope. If she really does write like that, good! I can work with that. Outline your response next time, making sure that each paragraph contains at least one direct citation from the assignment, and you’ll be fine.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2025-12-05.
May 26, 2026
“She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism”
Millennial Woes on having sympathy for the Midwit:
In August 2022 I stumbled upon this video of a young female teacher in Utah. She is what we would once have called an SJW. She describes how she has equipped her fourth-grade classroom in a way that she expects will annoy the parents of her (aged 9-10) pupils: all of the materials have been vetted by her to ensure that they include no images whatsoever of White people — “not a single White face there”.
Even though she knows the school is majority White (over 85%), she has designed her classroom, in her own words, “for non-white students”. To be fair, this could be simply because she is bringing materials from her previous school, which was much more diverse. But even then, you would think the sensible thing would be to buy materials more fitting for her new school. She does not.
So the woke attitude goes far beyond merely accommodating non-white people, and beyond even the absurdity of giving them equal prominence in our ancestral society, but actually to giving them precedence over us there.
What I found striking about this video, apart from the mindboggling fact that this is someone presumably vocated to help people yet doing something that will clearly harm her pupils, is how she delights in the fact that what she has done will annoy parents. To be precise, it will annoy parents who, whether conscious of it or not, are “racist”. After all, if they really “don’t see race”, then how can they possibly care about this? Thus, they cannot argue that their kids should see representations of their racial kin without outing themselves as “racist”, which in turn will make them very vulnerable. So this younger teacher feels not just morally sound, but bulletproof against reprisals, and very clever.
There is also a social class element to this. She specifies that these will be “posh White parents”. Despite appearing to be all of 23 and only having taught in very diverse schools, she alludes to experience in dealing with such upper-class White parents before. She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism.
She also clearly assumes that, if any parents do complain, she will be safe. The institution — not just her school but the entire education sector, including all of the academics and every university department that sustains them — will be on her side. If and when the parents complain (having navigated their way through the minefield of realising they are “racist” and painstakingly forming some lame argument to hopefully avoid that accusation) they will find that she is protected not just by her employer but by an entire segment of society. They, the parents, might get some small local newspaper to back them, or more likely to report the story impartially, but in all likelihood they will find themselves shamed by some much bigger newspaper. That is what she was clearly expecting when she made this video.
[…]
What I find troubling about this story is that it illuminates both the viciousness and the vulnerability of the midwit. It wouldn’t be worth fretting over, except that there are many millions of these people about. Every one of them is bright enough to grasp the drivel at teacher training college, but not bright enough to realise that it is drivel. Every one of them is vicious enough to harm children and take pleasure in disturbing the parents and sadistically putting them in an impossible position … but every one of them is literally just doing what they have been told to do, and is spreading the ideas they have been trained to believe are good, healthy, and crucially needed.
May 25, 2026
“When I was in high school, I was taught that every single Canadian adored Pierre Elliott Trudeau”
My family arrived in Canada in October 1967, just as the last of the Centennial events were shutting down. Pierre Trudeau became Liberal leader and Prime Minister not long afterwards. I think the “Trudeaumania” of 1968 was nearly 100% media generated, but it was new to Canadian voters who liked the idea of Canada being led by a sophisticated international playboy rather than the stolid, rather unfashionable men who preceded Trudeau. The media continued to “love him long time”, which definitely helped keep him in power and then back into power after the brief Joe Clark experiment. Since he left office, his reputation has been cherished and burnished by progressives in the educational system, as Harrison Lowman relates:
A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.
“When I was in high school, I was taught that every single Canadian adored Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I learned that when the rose-pinned prime minister winked and pirouetted, the whole nation swooned.
It wasn’t until first-year university that I was first exposed to the fierce Western backlash to his National Energy Program.
It wasn’t until I graduated that I learned about any opposition to his Charter of Rights and Freedoms, his policy of national bilingualism, and official multiculturalism.
It was my Ontario high school civics teacher’s fault. While she was a great educator in other ways, the politics lessons she taught us were clearly slanted in the Liberal direction; a direction she supported.
My experience as a young person 20 years ago demonstrates the immense power teachers hold in moulding young minds. It’s a power that concerns me when I imagine dropping off my eight-month-old son at school in three years. Today, that teaching slant has become even steeper, with too many educators unwilling or unable to provide political or ideological balance in their classes.
This week, I interviewed Stephen Reich, a PhD student at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) who researches the proliferation of critical theory in kindergarten to Grade 12 policymaking.
Reich told me I should be concerned—that the educational leaders in this country have all but abandoned what should be the true purpose of education: imparting civilizational knowledge to the next generation. Instead, they’ve replaced it with seeking multiple “truths” and a narcissistic obsession with oppression narratives. Never mind that 92 percent of Canadians polled say they don’t want their children separated by race: taught to see themselves as “privileged” vs. “oppressed”. Reich says certain teachers are far less interested in producing independent thinkers and far more interested in producing activists.
“I have a feeling that success [for them] is ideological conformity,” he explained. That they aim to help foment some sort of “liberation.”
May 21, 2026
Explaining why more men are “opting out”
On Substack, Bettina Arndt shows some of the reasons why men are less and less willing to commit — not just to relationships, but to huge swathes of what we used to call “adult life”:
The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic — inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture, and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible, and less than a real man.
Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame, and the yoke comes off.
Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.
The trend is not confined to America. Australian men’s workforce participation has fallen from around 79% in 1978 to approximately 71% today (see below), while similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK and Canada.
[…]
If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.
The modern woman: a prospectus.
- They are the most miserable, anxious, and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
- Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
- Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
- They’ve gone full throttle left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
- They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
- Yet their hypergamy (desire to marry up) is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
- The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
- They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.
What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?
QotD: “Theory” in film interpretation
[Camille Paglia] What has been called “theory” since the arrival of deconstruction in elite U.S. universities in the 1970s is in my view one of the most pointless and pretentious movements in modern cultural history. The catastrophic results should be obvious by now: the humanities are in ruin and have lost public respect and even internal support in academe, where budget reduction has come to the fore. I would refer those seeking greater specifics to my long attack on poststructuralism, Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, published by Arion in 1991. Seven years ago, I did a follow-up assessment of current “theory” when the Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to review three new academic books by women about the bondage and domination trend. My unhappy response was “Scholars in Bondage”, which laments the damage done to promising young professors by a tyrannical academic establishment still chained to the bleached-out corpse of “theory”.
My approach to art is grounded in the sensory. Art is not philosophy. Art by definition refracts meaning through some medium of the material world. Hence my interpretation of art is grounded in the five senses. Perhaps the only theorist who fully grasped this issue was Gaston Bachelard in his 1957 book, The Poetics of Space, animated by a phenomenology that partly aligns with my own practice. It is no coincidence that I have spent most of my teaching career at art schools, where the body remains front and center in most art forms. Digital genres are certainly spreading and flourishing, but dance, music, and theater remain grounded in physicality — which is partly why art schools are finding it so difficult to adapt to the harsh, distancing realities of the virus crisis.
May 17, 2026
French contributions to the development of wokeness
Brivael Le Pogam offers an apology to the west for France being so significant in the philosophical and political effluvia of 1968 for setting the conditions in which wokeness was born:
Protesters gathered in the Place du Capitole in Toulouse, 11 or 12 June, 1968.
Photo by André Cros (1926-2021) via Wikimedia Commons.
I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).
We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.
We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality — everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.
Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.
For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.
Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.
That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.
It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.
What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them — that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.
So, forgive us. And back to work.
Auto-translated by the social media site formerly known as Twitter from the original French post.
May 16, 2026
QotD: History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes
Let me just quote a couple of passages that might be written with very slight alterations today:
My object is to relate all the follies of the day to their common origin. The committers of folly, the authors of the rubbish which I commit to my symbolical flames, have not, in all probability, the wit to understand any general principles of puerility. It needs reason to understand that the source of the trouble is a general flight from reason and from the legacy of civilised opinion in which past reason has been embodied. The world increasingly substitutes fisticuffs for argument, flags and symbols for facts and realities, belief in the omnipotence of the sub-conscious for faith in self-determination of the will by reason guided … it teaches its children that impulse is divine. Consequently it has no standards.
Brown asked a question nearly a century ago now that has surely occurred to many of us:
Why should all acquired knowledge, all human experience, all civilisation be cast aside? It needs sifting, that is acknowledged; but why scrap it? The passion for such root-and-branch abolition invades the arts as well as the schools.
Later, he provides the sketch of an explanation for the radical iconoclasm that he sees in his own time:
It is a commonplace that the person most easy to deceive is the recipient of a higher education that has failed to be high enough. The schooling system of Europe and America had just reached the stage at which it was creating the pseudo-intellectual in very considerable numbers.
This seems more than ever applicable now: the contemporary pullers-down of statues are educated enough to formulate simplistic generalisations, but not educated enough to appreciate the complexities and ironies of existence.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Sufficiently Educated to Embrace the Simplistic”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-24.
May 15, 2026
Sweden – “We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible”
Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of us were enthusiastic about schools adopting digital technology, as it seemed to be the way of the future for kids to be fully immersed in the online world as part of their education. Reality has harshed the mellow for a lot of us misguided techno-fossils, as there seems to be a very strong correlation between childrens’ (computer) screen use and lower educational achievements. Sweden is trying to reverse this pattern:
“student_ipad_school – 038” by flickingerbrad is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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According to primary school teachers, many children shamble through the doors today zombified and crying out for their iPads.
Their parents, lined at the school gates, barely say goodbye, what with the hypnotic drivel spewing from their iPhones.
The kids greet their teachers with the YouTube vernacular: “Hi, guys!” When handed a book, they swipe and tear at the unfamiliar paper. They greet each other with: “Welcome to my channel!”
Finally, when they leave, they don’t say goodbye. They say: “Remember to like and subscribe!”
I’m not taking the piss. A friend of mine, tasked with civilising these screen-addled sprogs, confirms what one reads in the newspapers. These chirpy little addicts ransack classrooms crying out for more iPad with the fanatical calculation of tweaking crackheads.
Wherever you may sit on the political spectrum, I hope you agree that a functioning democracy might one day need citizens who can read and write, and who can concentrate beyond a ten-second video clip.
At least one functioning democracy agrees. Recently, Swedish politicians reversed their digital-first obsession by announcing a return to paper and pen. The sensible Swedes have gone analogue. Why? Literacy rates in the cosy Nordic social democracy have collapsed.
“We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible,” said the Liberal party’s Joar Forsell.
Since 2025, pre-schools are no longer obliged to employ digital ‘tools’ and teachers no longer dole out tablets to kids under two. According to Mr Forsell, reading real books on paper does what schools have for decades avoided: it teaches kids to think. Tablets for toddlers is now från skärm till pärm (from screen to paper.)
High school students now drag their textbooks and notepads to classrooms stripped of screens.
The evidence piles up. Researchers found that hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.
But it’s not just the Swedes.
Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing — at least if learning something is your thing. Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.
How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words — the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little. It’s like paying someone else to have sex for you.
Researchers claim that writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.
When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it, much like ChatGPT doesn’t know that flipping a glass spills water. It merely knows that the words “flip” and “glass of water” are statistically related to the word “spill”.
And yet, British schools continue marching to the drumbeat of post-literate doom.
May 8, 2026
National Indigenous History Month in Ontario schools
Igor Stravinsky outlines what Ontario schools will be focusing on this June instead of in addition to the normal provincial school curriculum:
Image from the Senate of Canada via Woke Watch Canada
50+ years ago, public schools in Ontario started the day with Bible readings and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Critical Theory, the philosophical and pedagogical approach in force these days in schools is the new religion. It is based on the (unproven) premise that society is rife with power structures, inequalities, and oppression, and asserts that education is inherently political rather than neutral. “Marginalized” students (non-Whites, especially males, plus Whites who are not heterosexual or able-bodied) are to be “centered”. This supposedly promotes “Social Justice”, which is basically the absurd and asinine idea that every aspect of society should be represented by all conceivable identity groups in proportion to their numbers in the general population. It is equality of outcome, not opportunity.
As Indigenous people rank high on the pyramid of oppression, every day is a day of Indigenous recognition in most public schools in Ontario. Students are asked to stand quietly every morning to hear the Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, which is the same text day after day, just like the Lord’s Prayer used to be. But June is special. It is National Indigenous History Month.
During June, students can expect to get hit with an extra large dose of affirmation of their original social justice sin. If you can’t trace your ancestry back to a person who lived here before first contact between Europeans and Indigenous people, then you are a “settler colonist”. This technically means anyone, but of course the main targets of the social justice warriors are European descended people. Just immigrated from Poland last week? Start groveling. You’re White, and that’s that.
The themes of the month are really the same as the ones presented to students all year, just more intensively: Prior to contact with Europeans, Indigenous people lived in peace and harmony with each other and lived sustainably and in sync with nature. Settler ways are depicted as based on greed and a reckless plundering of the lands, along with utter disregard for the wise ways of living of the Indigenous people, who were to be forcibly assimilated into Western ways.
Of course, students in our schools should be learning about the history of Indigenous people, just as they should be learning about the conditions in which so many Indigenous people struggle and suffer today. But that is not the objective of Indigenous History Month or any of the other long list of Annual Indigenous Days of Significance. This year, National Indigenous Peoples day, June 21st, falls on Fathers Day. Luckily, it is a Sunday, so schools won’t be able to erase that. Social Justice warriors hate Fathers Day even more than Mothers Day. If there is one thing they can’t stand, it’s the nuclear family.
Also this year, the fifth anniversary of the false claim by the Kamloops Indian Band that the remains of 215 murdered residential school children had been confirmed in the apple orchard outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (May 27) will have just passed. Even the band itself now admits, on their website, that all that was discovered was soil “anomalies”. The technician who performed the ground penetrating radar survey told them there were 200 targets of interest and only excavations could confirm burials (she initially identified 215 but reduced that to 200 when she discovered, after the fact, the part of her survey area had already been excavated and no one had found any bodies there). Of course, even if you found burials, you would need forensic work to determine the identity of the bodies and the cause of death. The band has been paid over 12 million dollars to do that work but they haven’t done anything.
