Real Time History
Published 6 Feb 2026On March 28, 1982 almost the entire Argentinian navy, carrying 900 troops, invaded the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). The ruling junta was confident Britain wouldn’t oppose the Argentinian fait accompli. But Britain’s political will and military ability to carry out a successful campaign at the end of an 12,500 km supply line surprise many.
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June 16, 2026
Why Argentina Lost the Falklands War
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June 15, 2026
The British by-election in Makerfield and the split on the right
Normally, single seat contests are not all that newsworthy in countries using the Westminster-style of Parliamentary democracy, but the Makerfield by-election in the Manchester region of England seems to be rather more significant. The Labour Party candidate is widely seen as the successor-in-waiting to Sir Keir Starmer (by everyone but Starmer, apparently). The main opposition was expected to be Nigel Farage’s Reform party’s candidate, but the vote on the right is also being contested by Rupert Lowe’s breakaway Restore Britain party. Splitting the vote between Reform and Restore might let an unpopular Labour party win the by-election and start the process of ousting Starmer from Number 10 Downing Street. This might keep Labour in power for another year or so, which is plenty of time to bring in a few hundred thousand “refugees” or enact stricter censorship rules, or any of a number of other hugely unpopular things.
Sean Gabb explains the situation from a libertarian point of view:
The coming by-election at Makerfield has provoked a familiar argument on the patriotic right. On one side are those who denounce the intervention of Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain movement. Labour is vulnerable. Reform has a realistic chance of victory. Any division of the anti-Labour vote therefore appears self-indulgent and destructive. Rupert Lowe, they say, may have legitimate grievances against Nigel Farage. He was certainly treated badly by Reform UK. But personal grievances ought to be put aside when the national interest is at stake. If Labour can be defeated, then Labour should be defeated.
On the other side are those who see Nigel Farage as the problem rather than the solution. They argue that Reform UK is little more than a vehicle for containing public anger. Every time popular discontent threatens to escape the boundaries of acceptable politics, Farage appears, gathers up the protest vote, makes a series of compromises, and then leaves the underlying structure untouched. In this view, Rupert Lowe is valuable because he threatens Farage’s position. The sooner Farage is challenged and replaced by a man of greater integrity, the better for the country.
Both positions have a certain logic. Both also rest on assumptions that do not survive contact with political reality.
The first assumption is that Britain stands on the verge of some great political rupture. If only the correct party can gather enough votes, or if only the correct leader can emerge, the existing order will be swept away and replaced with something fundamentally different. Of course, there are examples of such transformations. Russia in 1917 saw the destruction of one ruling class and its replacement by another. Iran in 1979 witnessed the collapse of a monarchy and the rise of a revolutionary theocracy. Similar examples can be found elsewhere. Yet these events were exceptional. They occurred when the existing state apparatus had ceased to function effectively. The old order was no longer capable of commanding obedience. Administrative structures had broken down. The loyalty of key institutions could no longer be relied upon. Under those conditions, revolution became possible.
Britain is not presently in that condition. The country may be badly governed. Its political class may be incompetent. Its institutions may be corrupt and increasingly detached from the interests of the population. None of this amounts to state collapse. Modern Britain remains one of the most centralised and administratively sophisticated states in the world. It possesses powers of surveillance, regulation and information management that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. The police state is often clumsy. It is frequently absurd. It is not, however, weak.
This matters because fantasies of imminent revolution are often based on a misunderstanding of where Britain actually stands. People look at social decay, demographic change, collapsing public services, and widespread public dissatisfaction, and assume that these conditions must shortly produce some decisive confrontation. They forget that highly organised states can survive astonishing levels of dysfunction. The late Soviet Union endured decades of stagnation. The Ottoman Empire acquired the nickname “the sick man of Europe” long before it finally disappeared, and that needed the Great War. It was the same with the Hapsburg Empire. Decay and collapse are not the same thing.
If revolution is improbable, perhaps the answer lies in electoral victory. This is the second assumption behind much of the argument over Makerfield. Perhaps Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe will eventually enter government through the ballot box. Once there, they will make the necessary reforms. Immigration will be reversed. The bureaucracies will be cut back. The censorship apparatus will be dismantled. Industry will be restored. The country will begin moving in a healthier direction. This belief is less implausible than dreams of barricades and insurrection. But less implausible is not the same as plausible.
The great theorists of elite rule explained the truth of democracy more than a century ago. Gaetano Mosca observed that every society is governed by an organised minority. Vilfredo Pareto described the circulation of elites, whereby personnel change while underlying structures remain. Robert Michels formulated his famous Iron Law of Oligarchy, according to which every large organisation develops a permanent leadership class that becomes increasingly independent of its nominal supporters. These men disagreed about many things. On one point they were united. Democracy changes faces more readily than it changes systems.
The reason is obvious enough. Every viable state possesses a permanent administrative core. Civil servants, judges, regulators, military officers, police officials, academics, media managers and corporate functionaries form an interconnected network of expertise and influence. Governments come and go. This network remains. It possesses continuity, institutional memory, technical knowledge and the immense advantage of permanence. The elected politician arrives promising radical change. The permanent apparatus replies with delay, obstruction, reinterpretation, consultation, procedural complexity, judicial review, regulatory resistance and media hostility. The shock is absorbed. The energy dissipates. The machine grinds on.
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June 14, 2026
QotD: Some of H.G. Wells’ more awkward views
When I was researching my biography of H.G. Wells in the early 1990s what shocked me, apart from his habitual and extreme selfishness, was the man’s life-long support for social engineering and eugenics. Put simply, his socialism embraced the idea that for the bulk of humanity to be free, prosperous, and happy a sizeable minority had to simply disappear. For Wells this included the disabled, the “perverse”, and even perhaps many who were non-white. What became apparent very quickly was that such an approach wasn’t confined to the author of The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man, but was extraordinarily common on the intellectual left. Many in the Fabian Society and Labour Party shared these ideas, as did mainstream socialist thinkers in Europe and North America.
This was, of course, before the genocidal policies of the Nazis were implemented, and while many of these grand men and women of the left had died before the camps were liberated and the horrors known, others certainly lived on. Some were contrite, others not. Either way, it hardly forgives them their ideology and influence – naiveté and ignorance simply isn’t a viable defence in such circumstances.
Michael Coren, “Eugenics and the intellectual left”, The Critic, 2020-09-16.
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
The intellectual dangers of “nostalgia economics”
Mani Basharzad explains that although resurgent socialist beliefs are a bad sign, there’s actually a worse danger to modern economies that isn’t a coherent ideology but all the more potent because of it:
Custom image by FEE
If someone asked me what the most dangerous economic ideology is, many would expect an Austrian to give a typical answer: Marxism, socialism, or Modern Monetary Theory. Yet I believe there is another way of thinking that is even more pervasive. It is not a coherent body of ideas like those ideologies. Rather, it is a sentiment so widespread and socially accepted that it threatens not merely economic freedom, but our very understanding of progress itself. I call it “nostalgia economics”.
Recently, the singer Sting suggested that the rise of toxic masculinity is partly the result of the “loss of manual jobs”, claiming that because many men no longer use their hands and physical strength in their daily work, unhealthy masculine traits are on the rise. Like many commentators on the political left, he also blamed Margaret Thatcher for Britain’s economic transformation. “Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards”, Sting said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”
This is nostalgia economics in action. A global celebrity whose music can be streamed instantly on another continent, who earns income through digital platforms, and whose career depends on modern communications and services, criticizes the very service economy that makes his success possible.
A person in thrall to nostalgia economics will take the blessings of progress for granted while romanticizing a past that never truly existed. Imagine living in the world of Charles Dickens: you would not have had access to a typewriter for much of your life, if at all, since it was only commercialized in the late 19th century. More importantly, you would not have had access to electricity. The conveniences we now consider basic would have been unimaginable luxuries.
The economic historian Norman Stone illustrated the extraordinary pace of modern progress through the experience of the novelist Henry James:
In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a cinematograph. Within very few years, he could have had a Freudian analysis, travelled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even of space-travel.
Had Sting been alive in 1890, a world tour would have looked very different. A journey from London to New York would have taken more than a week rather than a few hours. International audiences, instant communication, and global entertainment markets would have been beyond imagination.
The glorification of manual labor is one of the most overrated ideas in modern political discourse. This tendency is not confined to the left. Ambitions to revive manufacturing employment through government policy often draw on the same nostalgic impulse. But what exactly are we trying to return to?
Perhaps literature offers a more honest answer than politics. Oscar Wilde observed that “all unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour” involved unpleasant conditions. He went even further, commenting that “there is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading”.
The reality of industrial labor was far harsher than many modern observers imagine. In Britain, workplace fatalities have fallen dramatically over the last century: fatal injuries to employees dropped from around 4,400 a year early in the 20th century to around 200 a year by the end of the century. Coal mining, one of the occupations most frequently romanticized today and the first industry Sting evoked, exposed workers to constant danger and disease. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (“black lung”) claimed well over a thousand lives annually. What would a laborer enduring dangerous conditions, long hours, and chronic health risks have given for an air-conditioned office job?
One thing Sting did identify is that men generally do need more physical activity in their lives both for general physical health but also for mental health.
June 12, 2026
Protests and riots send different messages to the PTB
While this is specifically related to the situation in Belfast, it applies to protests and riots generally:
The message of a protest is “we don’t like this”.
The message of a riot is “we don’t like this, and we’re able to do something about it”.
People who unconditionally call for peace and calm, regardless of the provocation, don’t fundamentally understand how politics works in the real world.
They do understand that the purpose of politics is to provide an alternative to violence, but that’s as far as their understanding goes. They don’t think through the implications, usually because they are quite comfortable with things as they are.
If politics is an alternative to violence, then politics is a proxy for violence.
And that means you have to dole out power in proportion to capacity for violence. Or someone’s going to figure out they can do better by flipping the table.
Monarchy wasn’t replaced by democracy because of fine-sounding philosophical ideals and eloquent documents declaring this or that.
Democracy happened because if you added rifling to the flintlock firearm, suddenly a individual farmer with a tube was the pinnacle of military technology, and now you had to keep all the farmers with tubes happy by giving them political power.
(Ancient Greek democracy had a similar relationship with the hoplite warrior.)
When political systems work well, for a while, the violence they represent becomes further and further from people’s minds, and those who can’t effectively commit or direct violence worm their way into power, and begin to take it away from those who can.
And they’ll defend their position by saying that violence is unthinkable, barbaric, always bad, must be disavowed at all costs, etc.
This isn’t some sort of high-minded principle on their part. It simply means one of two things. Either “the status quo works for me, so I don’t want you to upset it”, or “I suck at violence, and I don’t want to have to fight”.
They want young men demoralized, so that their artificial meritocracy of spreadsheets, or their non-meritocracy of patronage networks, can be protected from the natural meritocracy of conflict.
This means that riots aren’t actually for achieving any specific material aim. They are for reminding the comfortable that judges and bureaucrats and policemen have home addresses and families. And that violence is always on the table.
A protest would only send the message that the Irish don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. But the bureaucrats and judges and lawyers already know that. They just don’t care.
A riot reminds them that they have to care, because the Irish have a long tradition of doing something about it.
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How one German soldier survived WW1
The Great War
Published 12 Dec 2025Order Alexander’s Diary in The Other Trench in English and Der andere Graben in German: https://www.theothertrench.com
More than 13 million men served in the German army during the First World War. Most wrote letters home, some kept diaries, and some wrote memoirs if they survived. But over a century later, it’s rare to have a window into the everyday thoughts and feelings of one man, a time capsule of the experience of one of those 13 million.
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QotD: George Bernard Shaw
On the other hand, he was one of the few playwrights in English whose plays can still be performed for the pleasure of an audience a century later. One or two of them might even, without absurdity, be called great. He was undoubtedly very witty, and if he was unbearably opinionated, his prose was always vigorous and quite often elegant. I learned to write from him. Many of his bons mots are still nearly as funny as those of Oscar Wilde.
It was as a playwright — one whose fame stretched around the world — not as a thinker or guide to policy that he is commemorated in the name of the theatre [at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]. His plays have been in print ever since they were written. His achievements in the theatre can hardly be denied. He is virtually the founder of the modern drama in English. I can extract at least 20 of his plays from the vaults of my mind.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Man and Underman at RADA”, City Journal, 2020-09-17.
June 11, 2026
“Thoughts and prayers” in a Two-Tier Keir accent
Sir Keir Starmer posted to X in response to the attempted beheading of a Belfast man a few days ago:
It drew some angry responses like this:
And a longer response from Jim Chimirie:
.@Keir_Starmer, your statement says you have absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets.
With respect, tolerance is not the issue. Nobody tolerates a near beheading on a residential street in Belfast. The question your statement carefully avoids is prevention. And prevention requires honesty about a pattern your government has consistently refused to name.
A man in his thirties, a Somali national, pinned a man to the ground on a residential street and stabbed him repeatedly in the face and neck. Members of the public intervened with a hurling stick. A woman required hospital treatment for the stress of witnessing it. This happened in Northern Ireland, a place that has known more than its share of violence, and even there residents said they had never seen anything like it.
Your government has presided over record small boat crossings. It has failed to proscribe the IRGC despite repeated promises. It has blocked the grooming gang inquiry for a year before being forced to concede it. It has spent £10 billion on asylum accommodation contracts. It has actively resisted measures that would have reduced the number of unvetted individuals entering and remaining in this country.
The victims of these attacks are not statistics. They are British people, going about their lives on their own streets, who were failed before the attack happened. Failed at the border. Failed by a system that prioritises the rights of those who arrive illegally over the safety of those who were already here.
Your thoughts are with the victim. So are ours. The difference is that thoughts are not policy. Thoughts do not secure borders. Thoughts do not remove individuals with no right to be here. Thoughts do not protect the next victim, whose name we do not yet know, on a street we cannot yet identify, from an attack that has not yet happened.
How many more before the thoughts become action?
The family of the victim talked to the media and it in no way seems to have been pre-scripted by the government and was clearly uncoerced and of their free will and is in no way any kind of hostage statement:
Northern Ireland has seen a lot over the last few decades, but I doubt anybody expected to see the two opposing sides of “The Troubles” joining forces:
Between them, the Ulster Protestant paramilitaries and the IRA operatives have a lot of hard-won skills at avoiding the authorities and committing direct violence. At The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian notes that he predicted this earlier:
In June of last year I penned an essay titled “Popular Misconceptions” in which I opined that if the “good men and true” of an area get “fed up with lawlessness” they tend to take matters into their own hands.
We are now seeing this play out in real time in Northern Ireland.
For those of you not paying attention to the news, a refugee from the Sudan attempted to saw off the head of an Irish man in Belfast on Monday, 08 JUN 26. He was on a public street when he did so, and several locals rushed to stop his assault. His victim has lost an eye from the attack, and is in critical care at a local hospital.
If you read my previous essay, I postulated that when the vigilance committees show up, a lot of collateral damage come with them — so nobody should be shocked to understand that a whole bunch of immigrant homes and businesses are currently on fire in Northern Ireland.
I will now expound upon that previous essay. I will even go so far as to issue a warning that the people who should heed said warning are going to ignore:
If the “good men and true” get the perception that the government and officialdom are not only facilitating what has them all riled up, but just might be a source of what has them all riled up … well, history has shown that the “good men and true” have very little problem with expanding the “extra-judicial punishments” to include Minions of the Law and Government.
And for those folks who pish-tosh any sort of threat from the British “subjects” — this is Northern-bloody-Ireland. The time and area where the locals refined the “Vehicle-Borne Improved Explosive Device” to the point a popular cocktail was named after the practice.
This is the area where there are more SLRs, Sterlings, and Browning Hi-Powers buried around that little island than any three countries in Africa.
Hell, the Irish made the AR-18 famous.
I speak to the government and officials of Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom: Listen to me — you won’t, but listen to me … You’d better — at the very least — pay some sort of lip service towards a credible perception that you give a tinker’s damn about what has the people all lathered up, and make the people believe that you’re doing something about it.
If you don’t — and you won’t — don’t come whinging to me when your dance card abruptly becomes filled with such exhilarating numbers as: the Hemp Fandango, the Beatdown Boogie, and the Arson Waltz.
You have failed the people. You have failed them utterly, completely, and totally. They’re about to rectify that situation. You might want to get ahead of that power curve before you find yourself watching folks get loaded onto cattle cars alongside you.
John Ringo on X:
One more post on the subject of the Irish getting their dander up.
The Irish Troubles (a continuous low level insurgency) lasted from the 1960s to 1998. But they were the continuation of “Troubles” stretching back to the 1800s.
1998, that’s a bit over 25 years ago.
Both sides in the Troubles, the Catholics and the Protestants, are one generation away from a civil war that lasted for TWO GENERATIONS.
The Gen Z men of today were raised on the stories of the heroism and patriotism of their fathers and grandfathers and THEY HAVE HAD NO SIMILAR OUTLET.
The IRA did not invent the vehicle borne IED. The Vietnamese used it before them.
They just invented a cocktail from their name as well as a drinking song.
“Former” IRA weapons dealers are still some of the top illegal weapons dealers in the world.
1/10th of “British” SAS come from Ulster. A significant fraction of the British infantry as well.
Many of them served in GWOT so they have a recent master’s class in insurgency.
And now Keir Bloody Starmer and the Irish Government have given BOTH SIDES a reason to start again, but this time UNITED.
We may be about to get a glimpse of what a civil war in the US looks like up against a massive surveillance state.
Take notes.
Update, 12 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 9, 2026
Road to Rangoon, Ep. 1 – Slim’s Hammer and Anvil
HardThrasher
Published 8 Jun 2026The Road to Rangoon Ep1: Hammer & A Hard Place — The Battle for Burma Begins By the start of the monsoon rains in 1944, British and Indian forces of General Sir William “Bill” Slim’s XIVth Army had been pegged back inside India. Five months later, after the battles of Imphal and Kohima, the Fourteenth Army had not only retaken the ground it had lost, but inflicted catastrophic losses on the Imperial Japanese Army.
The question was: what now? There would be no more forces coming from Europe, no additional fire power or support, and apparently no belief in the men by the Imperial General Staff in London or the US Army high command in Washington. Could the DUKE forces push into Burma through monsoon rains, jungle, mountains, disease, impossible supply lines and against an enemy willing to die for each yard of ground? Could Slim, Mountbatten, Oliver Leese, the US-led Northern Combat Area Command — NCAC — turn victory in India into the reconquest of Burma?
In this opening episode of “The Road to Rangoon”, we begin the story of the epic advance that would throw the Imperial Japanese Army out of Burma (modern day Myanmar) and become familiar with some of the places, names and concepts that will shape our story.
We look at the geography of Burma and eastern India, the aftermath of Imphal and Kohima, the state of the Japanese Burma Area Army under General Kimura Heitarō, the role of XIVth Army, XV Corps and NCAC, and the Allied plans that became Operation ROMULUS, Operation CAPITAL, Operation DRACULA and EXTENDED CAPITAL. This is the story of how the Burma Campaign moved from defence to attack — and how Slim planned one of the most ambitious offensives of the Second World War.
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June 6, 2026
D-Day landings on Sword, Gold, and Juno Beaches
Imperial War Museums
Published 5 Jun 2020On 6 June 1944, Sergeant Ian Grant was among the thousands of men landing on Sword Beach in Normandy on D Day, armed only with a revolver and a cine camera. He was part of the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) and captured this incredible mute footage of the landings. Fewer than a dozen men filmed the D Day landings and this extraordinary record is now held exclusively by the Imperial War Museum. Film curator Michelle Kirby introduces us to this film.
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June 5, 2026
The First Ever British SLR: Serial Number One L1A1 Explained
Royal Armouries
Published Jan 14, 2026The L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle is one of the most iconic service rifles in British military history and on this week’s episode we have the very first one ever produced.
Next week: an original Royal Small Arms Factory archive film found by our archive team showing how the L1A1 was made.
0:00 Intro
0:46 Serial Number One Explained (UE57 Alpha 1)
1:40 Factory Plaque, Proof Marks & Enfield Details
4:26 Condition, Finish & Standard Configuration
5:17 Distinctive British L1A1 Features
7:08 Controls, Ergonomics & Fire Selector Choices
10:35 Why the L1A1 Won & Closing ThoughtsThis week’s object’s collections online page: https://royalarmouries.org/collection…
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June 4, 2026
The murder of Henry Nowak and the failure of British policing
Andrew Doyle notes that the very first mention of Henry Nowak’s murder in Spain’s El País (approximately Spain’s equivalent of the Toronto Star, The Guardian, or the New York Times) frames the story as “evil extremely extreme extreme-right-wing Führers pounce”:
While the country is still reeling from the horrific murder of eighteen-year-old student Henry Nowak, an astonishing article has appeared in El País, Spain’s largest national newspaper. Rather than focus on the failures of the police officers, or the institutional bias within the force, the headline steers its readers away from the case and towards the outlet’s own obsessions. The headline translates as “Farage’s far right stirs up hatred in the UK after a young man is stabbed to death by a Sikh man”.
As Alejo Schapire (an Argentine journalist based in France) has pointed out, this is the first and only article produced by El País on the subject of the Nowak killing. Instead of an image of the victim, the newspaper has opted for a photograph of Nigel Farage. The Guardian was similarly histrionic and detached from reality in its coverage: “As ethnonationalist far right drives racist agenda, Reform UK leader felt need to weigh in on murder of Henry Nowak”.
It is one thing to take issue with those who seek to weaponise human tragedies for their own political gain, and quite another to dismiss legitimate criticism of a failed system. Reform UK is by no means a “far right” party, but of course the term has been so promiscuously misused in the press that at this point it might be best to dispense with it altogether. But of course, this is not really about Farage or his response to the murder at all. It is a cynical means of deflecting from the fate of Nowak and what it reveals about the state of policing in the UK.
So what exactly did Farage say to have the Guardian fulminate about his “racist agenda” and for El País to make him the focus of the story rather than the victim? During a live broadcast, Farage praised the Nowak family for their “extraordinarily dignified” response following the conviction of their son’s killer, and went on to say: “I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage”.
And why not indeed? Let’s not forget the shocking details of what happened in this case. Nowak was stabbed multiple times by Vickrum Digwa using a Sikh ceremonial dagger. His mother hid the murder weapon, and his brother called 999 claiming that Nowak had been racially abusive. When police arrived, Digwa repeated this lie. And when Nowak repeatedly told the officers he had been stabbed, one replied “I don’t think you have, mate” and handcuffed him as he lay dying.
At Always the Horizon, Copernican shares his thoughts on the political response to the murder:
Riots have been growing over the last few years in the UK when incidents like this occur. Nigel Farage addressed the incident in a youtube video here. Referring it as a “moment to take a long hard look at ourselves and the country that we’ve become”. He proceeds to say, “All the values and standards of living in a free country, where everyone is judged equally before the law, have been trashed and thrown away”. Nigel Farage demands that “the police complaints operation, the IOPC, needs to get to the bottom of this and produce a report very very quickly.” He also states that the sentencing is unacceptable, as the sentencing of the Sikh was less severe than the minimum recommended for a sustained, aggressive, murderous assault.
Nigel knows how to fix this: file some more reports. Maybe even reprimand a judge for being too lenient. That will surely bring back the murdered man, make whole his family, and un-rape and un-murder the children that have been attacked over the years by numerous violent psychos imported from the third world by domestic traitors. What a British solution: file another report about it.
Keir Starmer took another position. He condemned Nigel Farage for “Whipping up” division against the wishes of Nowak’s family. He believes “Nigel Farage’s Reaction” is the “wrong reaction”. We wouldn’t want division at a time like this. What we really need to do is respect the wishes of the cucked cowards whose son was killed and who took no flesh or blood from the offending Sikh as recompense. Who were cowed by government processes and report filing. Those are the people whose feelings we should be worried about. We would hate for the Sikh community to feel threatened.
To be honest, I agree with Keir Starmer. Nigel Farage’s reaction is the wrong reaction
Rupert Lowe, an MP of the “far-right” British Reform party [correction: Lowe is the leader of the Restore Britain party], is getting closer to the correct reaction when it comes to this murderous Sikh, his community, and the managerial bureaucracy that brought them here and protected them.
That said, I think Rupert Lowe is also heavily couching his language for fear of public backlash, or getting arrested for “inflaming racial tensions”.
Update, 5 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 3, 2026
Brits and Americans mispronounce foreign words differently, film at 11
ESR explains why American mispronunciations of Spanish or Italian words tend to be less offensive to those cultures than equivalent British linguistic manglings:
Ah, yet another round of the great pasta-pronunciation debate.
My credentials to speak on this: I am American. I have lived in Great Britain. I have lived in Italy. I pay attention to descriptive phonology. And I was at one time bilingual in English and Spanish.
These facts make me an expert witness on this issue.
Yes, Brits do in fact systematically mispronounce words like “pasta” and “taco” in a way Americans find amusing. But the interesting part of this story is the reason *why* Americans pronounce these words in a way much closer to the Italian and Spanish originals.
It isn’t superior virtue or worldly sophistication or anything like that. It’s the result of an important feature of the American linguistic environment that it doesn’t share with the British one, and which Americans themselves seldom even notice.
Many Americans have heavy exposure to the phonology of Spanish. Brits do not. The result is even that even those of us who are completely monolingual (which is most of us) tend to have models for two phonological systems in our heads rather than one; the second one being Spanish.
There’s a video about this somewhere on YouTube by a linguist, an English one as it happens, who explains that Americans attempting to reproduce the vowel sounds of a foreign language often bend it to try and fit it into the five-vowel system of Spanish. And this is true even when they don’t actually speak Spanish themselves.
One consequence is that even Americans who don’t know Spanish pronounce it tolerably well. Intelligibly, at least. Same goes for Italian, the phonology is slightly different but similar enough.
We crash-land on languages that have vowel systems quite unlike either English or Spanish. There are good reasons that when an American says “pasta” or “taco” his pronunciation is quite unlikely to make a native wince or laugh, but there is no such guarantee about French. Or German. Or Russian. Or just about anything else.
We’re just as lost as the Brits are trying to pronounce those languages. The difference is that, unlike a Brit, we may not mispronounce the local language in a way that makes it sound like a mangled version of English. Americans are likely to make it sound like a mangled version of Spanish instead.
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June 2, 2026
Low IQ, mens rea, and actus reus
For those like me whose legal Latin isn’t great, “mens rea” is “the mental state of a defendant who is accused of committing a crime”, while actus reus is a “guilty act” (from Wikipedia). On his Substack, William M. Briggs discusses how legal systems decide when an accused person’s IQ is so low that they lack the ability to understand that their action is illegal:
A gang of gypsies in England gang raped a young girl (and another previously) at knifepoint while filming the deeds, laughing all the while and even posted one of the rapes on social media. At their trial, Judge Nicholas Rowland excused their crimes because he said the criminals were “‘very young’, had low intelligence, a ‘limited understanding of consent’ and were susceptible to ‘peer pressure'”.
[Rowland] said that the second boy fell into the bottom one per cent in IQ for his age, and he had been diagnosed with ADHD, while the third boy had ‘low intellectual capacity’ and he had a ‘limited understanding of consent’.
Iryna Zarutska, 23, was riding a train in Charlotte, when Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr rose up, slit her throat, and as he was exiting the train gleefully declared he “got” his white woman. Brown had been arrested some 14 times before he murdered Zarutska, for crimes including armed robbery. He was freed each time. For the murder, he was found by Experts to be “incompetent to stand trial”.
Brown and the gypsies were not alone. Recently, there were these cases:
Many states have humane destruction laws that apply when animals (usually dogs) have attacked or killed humans. Florida, for instance, confiscates vicious dogs and puts them down. When any animal kills and eats a man it is usually put down, and most think it wise and prudent to do so. But some curiously argue the animals cannot help themselves, that it is their nature to attack and kill and even eat people, and who are we to judge?
In any case, it is clear that dogs, nor any animal, are not as intelligent as man. Just as it is clear obvious truth that some men are not as intelligent as others. Yet this fact does meet resistance from Equalitarians and Universalists, both forgiving every sin except the sin of claiming sin exists.
[…]
The Eighth Amendment reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted“.
Since 2002, executing a dumb criminal is “cruel”, yet executing an intelligent criminal is not cruel nor unusual. This is odd because, as any dog owner can attest, even dogs can know right from wrong, and even stupid men know murder is wrong.
Scalia wrote in his dissent that an Expert (a psychologist) on one of the appeals testified Smith had “an IQ of 59”. Smith also, and in this case, really had “16 prior felony convictions for robbery, attempted robbery, abduction, use of a firearm, and maiming”. He noted previous courts ruled only the profoundly retarded, those “idiots” who “had an IQ of 25 or below”, had a “‘deficiency in will’ rendering them unable to tell right from wrong”.
On the general topic of IQ, but not directly related to violent crime, ESR discusses the relationship between IQ and the caste system of India:
The caste system as a layered varna system with five classes and numerous integrated jati communities.
Razib Khan
That feeling when your knowledge about how average IQ varies with caste rank in India stops being peculiar arcana and suddenly becomes deeply relevant to US domestic politics …
Anybody who has studied the matter knows that castes in India have been maintaining almost perfect endogamy for thousands of years. About the only significant category of exceptions is that if you have an exceptionally beautiful daughter you *might* succeed in getting her taken as a concubine by a higher-caste man, so their offspring might jump a rank.
With no significant gene flow between jatis, divergences in important traits like IQ and time preference not only don’t smooth out, but actually amplify due to genetic drift and differing selective pressures.
Highest-caste Indians have an IQ distribution a lot like Europeans. Low-caste Indians … don’t. They’re not quite as genetically handicapped as the dimmest populations in sub-Saharan Africa, thankfully, but the spread is wide.
This doesn’t mean all low-caste Indians are stupid; Gaussian distributions don’t work that way. It does mean that importing 10,000 low-caste Indians has very different implications for the host society then importing 10,000 Brahmins.
Segue to the recent news stories about American families getting killed by illiterate Indian truck drivers doing crazy stupid things on the roadways. Those truck drivers are not Brahmins.
This is a recent phenomenon because, until one of our political parties decided to import the entire Third World for vote-farming purposes, we were cream-skimming India. Now we’re not, and this makes a serious difference.
Update: Fixed broken link to ESR’s X post.
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May 31, 2026
The Battle Of Jutland: How Britain Should Have “ANNIHILATED” Germany’s Fleet & Won EASILY
History Undone with James Hanson
Published 13 Dec 2024James Hanson is joined by Rear Admiral Dr Chris Parry and the YouTuber and naval historian @Drachinifel to discuss the Battle of Jutland. It was the largest naval battle of the First World War and the only time the British and German fleets went head to head.
So just how significant was it and should it have ended differently? This is History Undone.
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