Quotulatiousness

December 3, 2025

Like him or loathe him, Trump’s response to the DC shootings was “spot on”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, Richard North makes the case that US President Donald Trump is the only western political leader who can stop the migration crisis:

Like him or loathe him, question his inconsistencies and his many other flaws, but in my view Donald Trump’s response to the shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington DC by an Afghan migrant was spot on.

There was none of the pussyfooting “my thoughts are with …” etc. Without equivocation, he immediately branded the shooting “an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror”, adding: “It was a crime against our entire nation”.

Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a tweet declaring: “President Trump’s State Department has paused visa issuance for ALL individuals travelling on Afghan passports. The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people.”

Attached was an official tweet from the Department of State making it clear that the ban was of immediate effect, with the Department “taking all necessary steps to protect US national security and public safety”.

This added to the ban in June when Trump imposed restrictions on citizens from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, but that ban did not revoke visas previously issued, and holders of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) were exempt.

Now Trump has gone further. In a Thanksgiving message posted on X, he offered a salutation which, in Trumpian style, didn’t mince words. It started with: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the world, for being ‘politically correct’, and just plain STUPID, when it comes to immigration …”

That was only the start of a very long and quite extraordinary tweet which, if nothing else, can be criticised for a complete absence of paragraphs and sentences which rivalled in length those in a Dickens novel.

With his opening out of the way, Trump asserted that the official United States foreign population stands at 53million, most of whom, he averred, “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels”.

“They and their children,” Trump continued, “are supported through massive payments from patriotic American citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape or form”.

Warming to his theme, he declared: “They put up with what has happened to our country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 [£27,000] with a green card will get roughly $50,000 [£38,000] in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher.”

Pressing his point, he stated what none of Starmer’s motley crew will admit.

“This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc)”, the Donald wrote.

In a passage which might have got him arrested had he posted in the UK, with refreshing candour, the President gave the example of “hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia” who were “completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota”.

Somali gangs, he said, “are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone”.

No matter which country they end up in, Somalis tend to be bad news. There are multiple reports stretching back to 2007 of a plague of criminal gangs among the 32,000 Somalis who have settled in Minnesota.

Recently the Minnesota gangs have been associated with a series of massive welfare fraud schemes, the proceeds of which may have been funnelled to the Somalia-based terror group al-Shabab.

The largest fraud scandal involving Somalis was the “Feeding Our Future” scheme. Prosecutors racked up 56 criminal convictions in what they alleged was a plot to steal $300million (£270million) from a federally funded programme meant to feed children during the covid event.

December 2, 2025

The elites will continue pushing high immigration despite the obvious social costs it imposes

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One of the very tip-top luxury beliefs is that massive immigration is always and under all circumstances a good thing. A great thing, even. One of the things about the holders of luxury beliefs is that they are almost always completely insulated from any of the consequences of their beliefs, and this is especially true in this case. As Lorenzo Warby points out, the elites’ devotion to this cause contributes to collapsing levels of trust in the society absorbing all those immigrants and deeply undermines confidence that the leadership have anyone else’s but their own best interests at heart:

There is a straightforward, respectable view on immigration to Western countries. More people means more transactions, means more gains from trade, so immigration is a good thing. Immigration grows the economy, it increases GDP, so sensible folk support immigration.

There are extra bells and whistles, such as providing needed skills; compensating for falling fertility; willingness to do jobs locals are not. All the extra bells and whistles have responses. Why not train locals (i.e., citizens)? Won’t the immigrants’ fertility also fall? (Yes, though possibly more slowly.) The real willingness is to do jobs at lower wages and conditions than the locals would accept. For instance, potentially using US H1B visas to bring in entry-level employees who will work for less, and in worse conditions, than the locals.

Moreover, increasing total GDP is not the same as increasing per capita GDP. Even with per capita GDP, there are always questions about the distribution of those gains to GDP.

Nevertheless, the basic intuition is: immigration means more transactions, more gains from trade. Those who believe in markets — in positive-sum interactions — should support immigration.

This is not the trumping response it appears to be. Immigration does not only import workers—nor even just increase mutual-gain transactions — it imports people, so potentially affects all aspects of the receiving society. This means, of course, that there are a much wider range of possible concerns about immigration that “yes, but more gains from trade” is not an adequate response to.

Efficiency and number of transactions are not the only issues for a social order, particularly not a flourishing social order. There are also issues of social cohesion; social resilience; connections and social capital; the distribution of GDP gains; effects on relative prices; congestion costs; how well institutions are managing the influx; effects on local communities; cultural differences; social coordination issues and the ability to manage collective action problems; increased competition for positional goods — goods that cannot, or are blocked from, responding to increased demand.

These are all legitimate grounds for concern that are not answered by “yes, but more gains from trade“. How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with mass rape and sexual exploitation of young women and girls as a cost of culturally divergent immigration (and its systematic mismanagement)? How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with violent disturbance, even civil war, as a potential cost of immigration, even though we have historical examples of precisely that?

If, on one hand, the respectable people insist “yes, but more gains from trade” is an adequate response, and that other concerns are not legitimate, this will almost certainly be taken as the contemptuous dismissal it is. Not only will it not be persuasive, it will (and does) generate anger and resentment.

If people have concerns that the “reasonable”, “liberal-minded” folk will not deal with — or, worse, are dismissive of such concerns even being raised — then people will turn to unreasonable and illiberal folk, if they are the only people who will respond to their concerns. Significant gaps in political markets will be filled by political entrepreneurs.

If folk are told that “if you believe in markets, you have to support (high levels of) immigration” then many folk will respond with “OK, I reject markets“. Moreover, it is simply false that market economics entails that mass immigration is a good thing.

The idea that there is some economic phenomena such that marginal costs exceeds marginal benefits for all people over all ranges in all forms is not Economic thinking, it is magical thinking. (More precisely, it is class-signalling parading as Economics.)

It is magical thinking that falls foul of economist Thomas Sowell‘s dictum that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Immigrants may be engaging in lots of positive-sum, gains from trade transactions, yet still be imposing more costs than benefits on a society, and on resident citizens, precisely because societies are not just efficiency arenas for free-floating transactions and no one is just an economic transactor.

Update, 3 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

December 1, 2025

If they’re behind bars, they can’t easily re-offend

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In City Journal, Tal Fortgang makes the case for keeping repeat offenders in prison (which used to be the norm) rather than allowing the small minority of violent criminals to rejoin society ever more easily and more speedily:

Approaching the dock at Alcatraz on a foggy January afternoon, 1991.
Photo by Nicholas Russon

It’s fashionable to blame America’s high incarceration rates on social injustice — and law enforcement — rather than lawbreaking. If policymakers would just provide disadvantaged people with sufficient resources and economic opportunity, on this view, the crime problem could be solved. That utopian vision gained traction during the mad summer of 2020, when activists, rioters, and the mainstream press, reacting to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sought to replace law enforcement with programs that target the root causes of antisocial behavior. “As a society,” wrote activist Mariame Kaba in the New York Times, “we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm”.

The truth is otherwise. As Hyland’s case exemplified, violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders — that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, as [political scientist James Q.] Wilson argued half a century ago in his classic book Thinking About Crime, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again.

Most people are not teetering on the edge of felony, waiting to become, in the Left’s favored euphemism, a “justice-impacted individual”. The overwhelming majority of Americans never engage in serious criminal behavior, let alone commit violent felonies like murder or armed robbery. But those who do are likely to do so again, the evidence shows. Indeed, crime’s concentration is one of the most well-established findings in social science. In 1972, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang reported that just 6 percent of males in a birth cohort accounted for 52 percent of all police contacts. (Violent crime, in particular, is overwhelmingly committed by young males.) Thirty years later, a similar study in Boston found that 3 percent of males were responsible for more than half of their cohort’s arrests after age 31.

The pattern holds across time and place. In 2014, data showed that three-quarters of state prisoners — the core of America’s incarcerated population — had at least five prior arrests. Nearly 5 percent had 31 or more, a larger share than those imprisoned after just a single arrest. In 2022, the New York Times reported that “nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City … involved just 327 people,” or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been “arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times”. And in Oakland, a gun-violence-prevention group found that about 400 individuals — 0.1 percent of the city — were responsible for most of the city’s homicides. Violence is concentrated geographically as well. It occurs primarily in poor minority neighborhoods, whose members make up most of its victims.

These figures may even understate how concentrated antisocial behavior is. Wolfgang found that the offending minority committed dozens of crimes for every one that led to arrest. Fifty years later, a similar study reported that delinquent youth “self-reported over 25 delinquent offenses for every one police contact … with some youth reporting upwards of 290 delinquent offenses per police contact or arrest”. Combined with the fact that more than 60 percent of violent crimes reported each year go unsolved, the implication is clear: by the time a violent offender ends up in prison, he has likely committed multiple violent acts and many lesser offenses. Again, these patterns are most common among young men “who exhibited more psychopathic features”, the 2022 study’s authors noted, and “who displayed temperamental profiles characterized by low effortful control and high negative emotionality”. As a massive study from Sweden concludes: “The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality”.

Update, 2 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

November 29, 2025

“There comes a point where government waste stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like treason”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadians must be literally the most passive and forgiving people on Earth. It’s the only thing that can account for how we are governed by incompetents or idiots, yet keep re-electing them despite all the clear signs of failure and opportunistic crony looting of the public purse:

Image from Blendr News

There comes a point where government waste stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like treason. Canada has long passed that point. What we are witnessing now is not mere mismanagement or bureaucratic drift — it is the systemic looting of a nation by the people meant to serve it. Billions vanish with no oversight, no accountability, and no shame. The numbers have grown so grotesque that one struggles not to call this what it is: organized theft.

Take Stellantis. Ottawa handed the automaker $15 billion — the largest corporate subsidy in Canadian history — and the industry minister didn’t even read the contract before approving it. This, despite Stellantis shifting Jeep production to the U.S., delaying its employment targets at the Windsor battery plant, and refusing to appear before Parliamentary Committee hearings. Honda received a major subsidy without full Treasury Board review. Volkswagen hid its cost estimates. Northvolt was showered with subsidies and then slipped into insolvency. Each scandal blurs into the next until you realize the pattern is not incompetence but a business model.

Then there’s the LNG project in British Columbia. The main industrial partner is an American firm. The terminal will be built overseas, floated to Nisga’a land, and subsidised by Canadian taxpayers. In other words: Canadians take the risk while the profits flow abroad and the jobs go to Korea or Japan.

Or consider Telesat. They received $2.14 billion to connect rural Canadians to high-speed internet — with no obligation to connect a single home, no penalties for failure, no clawbacks if the project collapses, and no enforced timelines. Three years later, the network still does not exist. Meanwhile, Starlink already worked, already served rural communities, could have done it for half the cost, and offered immediate deployment — but was rejected because Elon Musk is “polarizing”.

ArriveCAN? $54 million spent on an app worth $80,000, much of it funnelled to GC Strategies, a boutique firm that admitted it didn’t actually build anything. Then the Sustainable Development Fund — the so-called green slush fund — where $400 million flowed into Liberal-friendly firms.

The State tells us its creed is “responsible governance”. Yet almost every act defies that claim. What we have instead is a system run by well-dressed operators who treat the public purse as their own. Canada is now a nation run by criminals, for criminals.

QotD: Are there no prisons? Are there no asylums?

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When the Trump administration proposed imprisoning homeless people who don’t voluntarily go to shelters, and the predictable howls of outrage arose, I remembered the most interesting fact I’ve ever learned about imprisonment rates.

The US is often pilloried for having a high level of imprisonment per capita relative to other countries. The US is also quite unusual in having shut down most of its insane asylums many decades ago.

My perspective on these facts changed a great deal when I learned that if you aggregate rates of imprisonment with rates of commitment to mental institutions, the US stops looking like an outlier.

The low-level mentally ill didn’t go away when we closed the asylums. Nor did they magically become more able to function in society when we pushed them out the doors. Instead, they now land in our prisons.

Another implication of all this is that it’s not “structural racism” or any other specific evil that gives the US high imprisonment rates. It’s an inevitable consequence of the social decision to make it very difficult to involuntarily commit people to asylums.

I’m not going to argue today about whether that decision should be reversed. I have an opinion about that, but this post is about facts and consequences, not value claims or what “should” be.

Let’s return to the homeless. It is now common knowledge that homeless people are almost never simply poor or down on their luck. Almost all have serious issues with mental illness or drug addiction, or both. Many refuse to go to shelters because they don’t want to — or are not capable of — complying with a homeless shelter’s behavioral restrictions.

While I don’t have firsthand knowledge or controlled studies to back me up, it seems obvious that the shelters are acting as a filter — the least damaged and most functional homeless go to them, leaving the crazies to inhabit the streets.

Thus, throwing homeless people who won’t go to shelters in prison is an exact functional equivalent of involuntary commitment to a mental asylum.

My question for people who object to imprisoning the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless is: what do you propose we do instead? Are we prepared to reopen the asylums and lower the bar for involuntary commitment?

I don’t think there’s a third alternative anymore. Donald Trump, whatever his other failings might be, has an acute sense of the zeitgeist; popular tolerance for having the streets of our cities inhabited by crazy people is collapsing. It turns out we can only tolerate so many news stories about naked screaming nut-jobs on the subway.

I’m not going to propose an answer to the question I just raised, because I’m conflicted about it myself. My goal is to start people thinking about the right question, which is a very large one.

What is the humane way to treat people who are too damaged or broken to be functional members of society, and who inflict large costs on others if they’re not separated from society?

If it’s not prisons or asylums, what are we going to do? And given how ineffective psychiatric treatment is at anything beyond management of symptoms, is “prison” vs. “asylum” even a meaningful distinction?

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-13.

November 28, 2025

QotD: Life is not a race to some arbitrary “finish line”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On a friend’s Facebook page I left the following comment about the claim of the writer Abi Wilkinson (in the Guardian!) that inheritance should be confiscated by government to fund the UK’s welfare state. What could possibly go wrong?

I wrote:

    The hostility to inheritance also comes from a mistaken sense of fairness. As Robert Nozick argued in Anarchy, State and Utopia (I quote from memory), people wrongly think life resembles an athletics race, where the racers compete to hit the finishing line. As a result, those “lucky” athletes endowed by nature/god whatever with stronger muscles etc must be handicapped by having weights in their shoes, for example. Just as a child of rich parents must be deliberately held back to give poor kids a more “fair” chance of winning. But as Nozick said, life isn’t like that. It is about people exchanging goods, services and ideas with one another. There’s no fixed end-point to which we are all racing.

    Also, the idea that there is some “prize” that humans compete for implies that someone or some entity has created that “prize” in the first place. But that’s smuggling in a sort of communitarian assumption into the actions of individuals. In an open society, the prizes on offer are varied and multiply constantly.

I should add that the second section of Nozick’s renowned book dissects and ultimately rejects forced redistribution for egalitarian or other forms of “patterned” notions of justice, and he robustly defends what he calls an “entitlement” concept of justice.

One of the approaches that the late Prof. Nozick used was the thought experiment, such as the example referenced above about a fictitious athletics race in which the entrants are hampered/favoured to make the race more “even”, and then assuming that society in general should be like this. A race, held by people who know the rules and seek to abide by them, is not like an open society. “Open” is the key word here: there is no single end to which persons are heading, such as winning the race.

And yet a lot of the metaphors one comes across around discussions around equality, including equality of opportunity as well as outcome, seem to borrow, perhaps unwittingly, from this “race competition” worldview. To give another example, I remember reading some months ago about a university professor (Warwick) who suggested that when parents read stories to their children, this is a form of privilege. This also plays to the idea that life has a fixed end-measure of success, so that anyone giving a value to someone else is giving the latter an unfair “head start” on someone else. It would require a State to exercise totalitarian control of our actions from the moment we wake up to go to sleep lest our actions unfairly advantage/hamper someone in the “race” they are considered, by this worldview, to be on. (It also, by the way, shows that today’s Higher Ed. is full of certifiable fools and worse.)

Johnathan Pearce, “The assault on inheritance and the assumptions that drive it”, Samizdata, 2025-08-21.

November 27, 2025

Carney – “Who cares?”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Melanie in Saskatchewan reacts to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s shrugging-off the economic concerns of ordinary Canadians with a casual “Who cares?”

Dear @MarkJCarney

“Who cares?”

That’s what you actually said when asked when you last bothered talking to Trump about the tariffs that are currently body-slamming Canadian jobs.

“Who cares? … It’s a detail.”

Really Mark? Let’s meet some of those “details”, Prime Minister.

The single mom juggling three gig jobs because the factory that used to pay her mortgage “paused investment” and then paused her entire livelihood: she’s just a detail.

The Windsor autoworker whose night shift got cancelled forever while you were busy perfecting your thoughtful squint for the cameras: tiny detail.

The steelworker in Hamilton burning through EI while the mill runs skeleton crews and you call the carnage a “temporary adjustment”: just a little detail.

The small-shop owner deciding which of her three employees to fire this month because 25% tariffs turned her cross-border contracts into suicide notes: who cares, right? Detail.

The rail worker staring at empty tracks where trains full of Canadian auto parts and steel used to roll: super minor detail.

The Saskatchewan electrician watching Nutrien build its next billion-dollar terminal in Washington State instead of BC because at least the Americans aren’t at war with their own economy: I guess that’s barely worth mentioning.

The welders and millwrights being told the next big plants are going up in Ohio and Texas, not Ontario or Alberta, because Canada’s too busy arguing about jurisdiction to actually fight for work: pfft, details.

The family parked on gurneys in an ER hallway at 3 a.m. because we never trained enough doctors and now the ones we have are bolting: honestly, who has time for that detail?

All those kids with degrees doing DoorDash because private-sector job growth is wheezing and every company is frozen waiting for the next Trump tweet or Trudeau shrug: whatever, details.

You flew around the world taking heroic photos, sold us “Team Canada”, bragged you were the adult who could handle Trump, and the second a reporter asks when you last actually picked up the damn phone to fight for Canadian jobs, you smirk and say “Who cares?”

Message received, loud and clear.

Those people I mentioned above? They care.

Every single one of them cares when the shift vanishes, the mortgage renews, the mill goes quiet, the doctor quits, the plant gets built south of the border, and their kids ask why Mom’s crying at the kitchen table again.

But you don’t care.

And the worst part? You didn’t even bother to lie about it.

You lied to every single Canadian to get elected, yet you don’t care.

Well Mark … we sure as hell do care.

And you WILL care.

When your greasy grifting ass is voted to the curb and we undo all the harm you’ve caused Canadians to fatten your coffers. You cant stand living in Canada and can’t wait to move back to the UK … remember?

We sure will.

Just watch us.

Sincerely,
One of the millions of Canadians tired of being your rounding error.

Melanie in Saskatchewan

Also published on her Substack.

Apparently even the most detached of politicians can occasionally be persuaded to acknowledge an unforced error:

QotD: Honor, homage, and fealty in Game of Thrones

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What the above means is that if, say, Tywin Lannister wants his army, he only gets it if House Falwell, and Ferren and Foote and Clegane choose to come out and fight for him. If Tywin wants to administer the countryside, change a law, count his subjects, impose new taxes – he can only do these things if the houses under him follow through (remember, he has functionally no administrative apparatus of his own – that’s why he outsourced the job). But, Tywin’s options to coerce this cooperation are – because of those castles – extremely limited.

To refer to a distinction introduced in Wayne Lee’s talk [here] – Tywin cannot rely on force (do it because I will kill you if you don’t), he has to use power (do it because you think you ought). Because the apparatus of the state here is very limited, that power is largely generated through personal relationships – you ought to fight for your liege because you have a personal relationship with him. You see him fairly often, you swore loyalty to him (in person!!), he (or his ancestors) have helped resolve your problems in the past and most importantly, because he has kept faith with you in the past.

Which is a way of saying that this system runs on trust and reputation, and that runs both ways. Even as Tywin watches his vassals for signs of disloyalty, his vassals are watching him. Is he true to his word? Can I trust him? Because if the answer is no – I best start hedging my bets. And that bet-hedging is going to come in ways Tywin does not want – I might refuse to come out and fight, or redirect my efforts to fortifying my own holdings, or even switch over to another liege. And in the very early seasons, key characters – most notably Tywin and Tyrion – know this and act accordingly. Tywin talks a good game about lions and sheep, but when it comes down to it, he knows his reputation matters – what the sheep say about the lion matters a great deal, it turns out. Robb Stark’s failure to handle the Karstarks, Tullys and Freys is his eventual undoing. Tyrion berates Cersei on returning to King’s Landing for her actions which might call the Lannister reputation into question (“that bit of theatre will haunt our family for a generation”.)

What is unusual here is how frequently key characters deviate from the norms these societies need to function – Westerosi nobles are stunningly treacherous for people who rely on systems based in trust for survival. In a system which runs on trust and reputation, elites tend to value trust and reputation. They produce literature extolling it (as, indeed, do most “mirrors for princes” – guidebooks on how to be a good ruler – from the Middle Ages do; see, for instance, Book 3 of Dhouda’s Liber Manualis (9th cent.), which goes on and on about trustworthiness) and refine its practice. The sort of eye-popping treachery so common in Game of Thrones was far rarer in the actual historical Middle Ages for exactly the reason Game of Thrones would lead you to believe: it is almost always self-defeating.

The problem here comes in the later seasons and how they re-contextualize all of this concern. That problem has a name, and it is Cersei. Cersei breaks all of these rules. Even early on, she has her soldiers (who recall – are not paid mercenaries, but likely vassals of her house who can very much take their skills elsewhere if they don’t like their current employer) demonstrate her own capricious untrustworthiness on Lord Baelish (she has also, I will note, mistaken violence for power). She humiliates Barriston Selmy in court, a spectacle her own future vassals might have remembered. She incinerated her own family – by blood and marriage – along with her erstwhile allies. Cersei is endlessly treacherous, often foolishly and obviously so, and yet …

And yet it doesn’t matter. The Lannister bannermen in the penultimate episode mount the walls to fight a doomed battle for her anyway. Not only is that behavior inexplicable, it hardly seems possible. Who, after all, is raising and leading these men? Who is coordinating supplies and grain shipments to the capital? Remember, the reason for this distributed system of political leadership is that the central state does not have the administrative apparatus to raise armies or feed cities on its own – it has to outsource that to vassals. Vassals that Cersei has murdered or alienated, almost to a man. Cersei is defeated because dragons are unstoppable monsters, but she should have been defeated because she would have simply been incapable of raising an army at all.

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.

November 26, 2025

The RCAF needs either F-35s or Gripens … not both

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Although the Trump provocations are a unique situation for the Royal Canadian Air Force to find itself dealing with, the long-delayed decision on what the replacement for our current CF-18 fleet can’t be realistically put off for much longer. The government has committed to paying for the first 16 aircraft of an 88-plane order, but many pundits are crying out for the government to cancel the remaining portion of the order and instead purchase different aircraft … the leading contender being the Swedish Gripen. This might be the worst of all worlds for the RCAF, in needing to support two different airframes with zero parts compatibility. This two-fleet “solution” would make life much more difficult for RCAF training and logistics, but it’d be a performative eLbOwS uP to Trump, so there’s a strong chance it’ll happen despite military and economic reality. Bryan Moir makes the argument for the Gripen on his Substack:

Mark Carney loves the big phrases. “Build Canada strong.” “Rewire the economy.” “Generational investments.”

It’s good branding. But slogans don’t build nations — decisions do. And right now, one decision matters more than the rest:

Will Canada assemble the Saab Gripen fighter on Canadian soil — or will we lock ourselves into permanent military dependence through the F-35?

Let’s start with the truth no one in Ottawa wants to say out loud.

The F-35 is a 56% aircraft in a 100% environment.

The F-35 fleet’s mission-capable rate sits at 55–56%. That means a country buying 16 aircraft can expect maybe eight airborne on a good day. Eight jets to defend the Northwest Passage, the Arctic archipelago, and a coastline longer than Russia’s.

This isn’t speculation; it’s physics, logistics, and accounting.

Meanwhile, the United States fields 54 F-35s at Eielson AFB in Alaska — backed by billions in supporting infrastructure: software hubs, spares depots, rapid part cycling, and multiple layers of maintenance and training.

They can sustain the F-35 in the Arctic.

Canada cannot.

And pretending that we can — or worse, pretending that it doesn’t matter — is not national defence. It’s denial.

Gripen was designed for the world Canada actually lives in.

Gripen’s core design features are the ones Canada pretends the F-35 also has:

  • Cold-weather resilience
  • Short runway and road-base operations
  • Minimal crew requirements
  • Quick turnarounds
  • Low maintenance footprint
  • Sovereign sustainment

Gripen isn’t just compatible with Canada.

It was built for countries whose geography forces them to be independent.

The importance of “a bicycle shop in Bermuda” to Mark Carney’s financial affairs

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s no secret that Prime Minister Mark Carney is a rich man. When he entered politics, he put his financial holdings into a blind trust to satisfy the federal government’s ethical and conflict of interest rules. But through this arrangement, he still owns significant positions in companies whose fortunes can (and are) affected by the actions of his government. On Monday, this was discussed at some length by a Parliamentary committee in Ottawa, as reported on his Substack by Dan Knight:

On November 24, in a basement room of West Block, MPs spent two hours asking a very simple question that everyone in Ottawa is suddenly pretending is complicated:

If Mark Carney gets richer when Brookfield does better, and Brookfield is running big climate and infrastructure funds out of what one MP described as a bicycle shop in Bermuda, how on earth is that not a problem for the Prime Minister of Canada?

The man in the hot seat was Justin Beber, Chief Operating Officer of Brookfield Corporation. His job was to calm everyone down. Instead, under oath, he calmly confirmed just about everything the government would rather you didn’t think about too hard.

He started with the corporate biography. Brookfield, he reminded the committee, is a massive global investor headquartered in Toronto. It has more than 600 direct employees in Canada, more than 15,000 workers in its operating businesses, and it paid over $750 million in federal tax last year, not counting provincial and local taxes. All of that is true. None of it changes the basic conflict: the sitting Prime Minister still has long-term compensation that rises when Brookfield, and certain Brookfield funds, succeed.

Conservative MP Michael Barrett went straight there. He asked Beber whether, when Brookfield’s value increases, the value of stock options and deferred share units also increases. Beber said yes. Then Barrett asked whether that changes if those options and units are placed in a blind trust. Beber said no. It does not. The economic reality is exactly the same: if Brookfield’s share price goes up, those instruments are worth more, whether they are in Mark Carney’s brokerage account or parked with a trustee behind frosted glass.

[…]

Cooper spelled out why it matters. Carney, he said, knows what kind of public policy could improve the success of the fund. The fund’s success determines his future bonus pay. Without knowing who the investors are or all of the fund’s positions, Canadians have no way to see where those incentives may line up — or collide — with the national interest. These are not theoretical conflicts. They are simply invisible ones.

Eventually, after some confusion over terminology, Beber did confirm that Transition Fund I has invested in 20 companies and that their names are listed in the ethics annex. Only one of those firms, Entropy, is in Canada. The rest of the portfolio, and the roster of big-money investors behind it, sits offshore, beyond any serious public scrutiny, while the Prime Minister’s upside rides on how well those bets pay off.

The tax side of the story is just as revealing. Bloc MP Luc Thériault put it bluntly: tax avoidance is not a conspiracy theory, it is a business model so widespread that the OECD and G20 built an entire 15 percent global minimum tax regime to deal with it. He cited Canada Revenue Agency estimates of tens of billions of dollars in lost federal revenue each year, including billions attributable specifically to tax avoidance. He asked Beber whether Brookfield engages in tax avoidance. Beber refused to use the term. “We practice tax planning”, he said, like “any other company”. He repeated that Brookfield pays all taxes that are “due and payable” in the jurisdictions where it operates.

That phrase sounds reassuring until you remember who writes the rules that decide what is “due and payable”, and who benefits when the system can be routed through Bermuda via something that, on paper, looks like a bicycle shop.

[…]

At some point, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. The Prime Minister of Canada left a giant global investor with standard executive incentives, kept his vested long-term instruments, retained a carried interest in a $15 billion Bermuda-run climate fund that will operate into the 2030s, and knows exactly which sectors that firm is betting on. His government is now pouring public money and regulatory support into many of those same sectors. The firm uses structures justified as “tax transparent” that just happen to run through low-tax jurisdictions, including one address a Conservative MP described as a bicycle shop in Bermuda. The man running the firm’s operations will not say the Prime Minister’s potential upside is small. He will not say the global minimum tax is being met in practice. He will not disclose who the fund’s other investors are.

You do not need to be an expert in securities law to see the conflict. You do not need to be an expert in global taxation to see why a bicycle-shop registration in Bermuda is not about cycling. You just need to watch what they are desperate not to talk about directly: the hard link between public power in Ottawa and private profit offshore, wrapped in legal jargon, buried in annexes, and shielded from sunlight by a blind trust and a lot of very careful answers.

November 25, 2025

Canada’s “post-national” project was foisted on us by the elites, not ordinary Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Fortissax responds to a recent article published in the National Post, where Geoff Russ describes Liberal nationalism as “a cringey failure” and calls for young members of the “new right” to work toward a new idea of Canada:

Geoff Russ’ specific claim that “millions of old stock Canadians cheered for it” is wrong. He takes a decades-long elite project, driven over the heads of the public, and pins it on the very people it was done to.

There was never a clear democratic moment when ethnic Canadians calmly voted to abolish old Canada and embrace a postnational, multicultural order. What happened was a long campaign run from the top.

After 1945, cabinet ministers, mandarins and policy people rebuilt Canadian identity around liberal internationalism and continental integration. The older understanding of Canada as a British and French country with its own civilisation was treated as something shameful to be buried. Schools, television, churches, courts, universities and the federal bureaucracy repeated the same script: “progress” meant loosening ties to the founding peoples and aligning with UN norms and North American liberal opinion.

This was not some anonymous drift. C.D. Howe and the postwar planners normalised a centralised, technocratic state tied to American capital. Mackenzie King and Louis St Laurent locked in continental and institutional commitments that weakened any independent British and French national idea. Jack Pickersgill used immigration as a tool of social engineering and admitted that public opinion was hostile, so policy had to move quietly from above.

Lester Pearson chaired the Biculturalism Commission while preparing the shift from “two founding races” to a vague multicultural formula, and his government set up the flag change that deliberately severed visual continuity with the old country.

Pierre Trudeau went further, announcing in 1971 that Canada would have no official culture and that no ethnic group would take precedence, which was a polite way of saying the historic British and French peoples would be stripped of formal primacy in their own state.

The public did not demand this. It had to be dragged and managed. Gallup and other polling in the postwar decades consistently showed majorities hostile to high immigration levels. The 1974 Green Paper and the extensive public hearings that followed produced sharp criticism of mass intake and of the cultural and economic disruption it would bring.

Ottawa thanked everyone for their input and then moved ahead with the 1976 Immigration Act, which entrenched a liberal, permanent immigration framework anyway. When Canadians were finally asked, they said no. Their answer was ignored.

At the same time, ordinary people lost any real leverage over core questions. Immigration policy was transformed without a referendum. Official multiculturalism was declared from above. The Charter and rights culture shifted effective authority from Parliament and local communities into the hands of courts and legal elites.

The flag changed, and symbols and curricula that reflected old Canada were rewritten or stripped away. Any attempt to defend the historic nation was smeared as crankish or hateful. To take this history and summarise it as “millions of old stock Canadians cheered for it” is like blaming a tenant for “choosing” demolition because he did not throw himself under the bulldozer.

The message is that old stock Canadians must now live with this order forever; that their own elites may have driven the revolution, but the public did not resist hard enough, so dispossession is deserved; and that any attempt by the founding peoples to assert a legitimate claim to continuity in their own country is some kind of moral offence.

You might as well watch Guru Nanak Jahaz, since you’ve already paid for it

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, India, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian government loves handing out money — they hand out a lot of money — so it shouldn’t be surprising to find out that Canadian taxpayers funded the creation of a movie about a Sikh terrorist who assassinated a Canadian official … or that the assassin is the hero of the movie. After all, isn’t that the heart and soul of multiculturalism? Celebrating other cultures and traditions as being superior to those of ordinary Canadians? The feds seem to believe it.

If you can find a way to watch the recently released Khalistani propaganda film Guru Nanak Jahaz, you might as well watch it. You paid for it, after all.

The film, which depicts the assassination of a Canadian civil servant by a Sikh terrorist as a heroic act of justice, has a “Funded by the Government of Canada” credit at the end. It was also supported by the B.C. government and gives special thanks to Conservative MP Tim Uppal and Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal. While the Liberals didn’t return a request for comment, a spokesperson for Uppal told me that he was not involved in the film and that the filmmakers did not communicate with him about the credit at any point.

Set in 1914, the plot follows the assassin, who you likely never heard about, and the voyage of the more familiar Komagata Maru, a ship which carried nearly 400 Indian passengers from Hong Kong to Vancouver, only to be denied entry to Canada. It was screened in some Cineplex theatres earlier this year.

The official narrative that you’ll find on government websites explains that this was purely a matter of baseless Canadian racism, and it’s been wholeheartedly adopted by politicians today: as prime minister, Justin Trudeau apologized for the incident in 2016, and the Conservative party releases annual statements commemorating the event, praising the bravery of the passengers and their craving for freedom.

That’s the whitewashed version, however. It leaves out that the Komagata Maru voyage was organized by the Indian Ghadar movement — the word literally means “revolution” — which advocated for violent resistance against the British Empire. (India was a British possession at that time and would continue to be until 1947). Its members were primarily Sikhs who lived in North America. And while they did experience racism, and while changes to Canada’s immigration laws in 1908 indirectly restricted Indian immigration, there were also reasons for the Canadian government to be apprehensive.

Ghadar members dreamed of a return to India, but wanted to rid that land of the British first. They remembered the Indian Mutiny of 1857 with regret — that bloody event saw many British-Indian regiments unsuccessfully take up arms against the Empire; Sikh Punjabis were among the exceptions, largely siding with the British. Decades later, the mostly Sikh Punjabi Ghadarites proposed another 1857-like uprising while applauding anti-British terrorism.

When rumblings of war with Germany began to brew in 1914, the Ghadarites grew excited — now was the time to strike. In August 1914, after the war broke out, the movement’s newspaper advocated, “Go to India and incite the native troops. Preach mutiny openly. Take arms from the troops of the native states and wherever you see the British, kill them. … There is hope that Germany will help you.” Expats in the Orient organized ships to return home and revolt.

The Komagata Maru was part of this movement. Organized by Ghadarites before the breakout of the First World War, it attempted to bring more movement adherents into Vancouver to settle. Canada was right not to let it dock because the entire envoy was a security threat.

The S.S. Komagata Maru was at the centre of an attempt to bring 400 Sikh revolutionaries into Canada to agitate for the destruction of British rule in India in 1914.

November 24, 2025

Fairy tales for Canadian boomers – “we have the best healthcare system in the world”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Older Canadians, especially the Baby Boom generation, have a huge blind spot when it comes to any discussion about healthcare … because they believe what they were told as children about Canada’s healthcare system being the “envy of the world” and other such comforting notions. (It’s not just Canada, as British belief in the quality of their National Health Service is very much at odds with the evidence.) This rose-coloured nostalgic faith makes it very difficult to address some of the very real problems that beset Canada’s hospitals and doctors. The media are understandably reluctant to publish anything that goes against this, as Peter Menzies explains:

Grok image from The Rewrite

About the same time as William Watson’s outstanding book Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life was being published in the late 1990s, the newspaper I worked for was sending a journalist to Europe to research a series of articles on how health care systems work in some of those countries.

I mention Bill’s book, which was runner-up for a public policy Donner Prize, because it exquisitely details many of the things Canadians believe about themselves that simply aren’t true. Which was the same reason why the Calgary Herald sent its health reporter (yes, there used to be such a thing), Robert Walker, to Europe — to expose its readers to the fact that there are more than two health care systems: our “defining” one and America’s, both of which are extremes. To the best of my knowledge, that remains the only time a Canadian news organization has taken on that task.

In every country examined in Walker’s reports, as is the case with almost every country in the world, public and private health care and insurance systems maintained a peaceful coexistence and the public’s needs were being met. Almost 30 years later, that remains the case. Also almost 30 years later, neither Bill’s book nor the Herald‘s reporting has had the slightest impact on the prevailing media narrative in Canada. It remains determined to perpetuate the fear that any move to increase the role of private health providers or even allow doctors to work in both systems (as was proposed this week by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith) is the first step on the slippery slope to “American-style” health care. This line has been successfully used for decades — often hyperbolically and occasionally hysterically — by public monopoly advocates for Canada’s increasingly expensive and difficult to access systems. We have known for 40 years that once Baby Boomers like your faithful servant turned bald and grey that the system would be unsustainable. But that single, terrifying “American-style” slur has halted reform at every turn.

The Tyee responded with a “Danielle Smith’s secret plan to Destroy Public Health Care” column while the Globe and Mail‘s Gary Mason, a Boomer, challenged my thesis here by suggesting it was time for open minds because “the reality is, the health care system in Canada is a mess”.

It is. And at least some of the blame — a lot, in my view — belongs at the door of Canadian news organizations that for decades have failed to fully inform readers by making them aware that there are a great many alternatives to just “ours” and “US-style”.

I was reminded of this in a recent Postmedia story concerning the perils of private health care provision. Referencing a study on MRIs, the story, right on cue, quotes the part of a study that states “It’s a quiet but rapid march toward U.S.-style health care”.

One would not want to suggest that those clinging to that parochial view should be denied a platform. But at the same time, readers have every right to demand that journalists push back and ask advocates for state monopolies simple questions such as “Why do you say that? Could it not be the first step towards UK-, German-, Dutch-, French-, Portugese- or Swedish-style health care?” and open the debate.

November 23, 2025

Do older Canadians really hate their children and grandchildren? The fiscal evidence says “yes”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I posted a few days back, the real political divide in Canada is no longer the left versus the right: it’s the old financially parasitizing the younger generations. At The Line, Ben Woodfinden discusses how the smug, comfortable boomers are being confronted by, for lack of a better term, a “new right” of far less comfortable younger voters:

eLbOwS uP!

The specific complaints from people like d’Entremont and other grumbling voices are less about ideology and more the tone and style of Pierre Poilievre (though perhaps the two are connected). Poilievre’s temperament and style rubs certain people, including some Conservatives, the wrong way. Now, full disclosure, I worked for Poilievre for a few years, and I can confirm he’s a demanding boss. But so is the prime minister, reportedly. And Poilievre is also in my experience the hardest working person I’ve ever met.

The tone battle is not a revival of Red vs. Blue. It’s not clear those terms are even relevant today. “Red Tory” is often used pejoratively to describe a “Liberal Lite” voter who identifies as a conservative but is indistinguishable from a Liberal — those who fit the “social progressive, fiscal conservative” moniker. This is not what Red Toryism historically meant; it’s actually the opposite of this. Red Toryism is a distinctly Canadian tradition of conservatism that was focused on the preservation of Canada contra a liberal United States, and emphasized the role of the state in this. It blended conservatism and elements of socialism in a distinctly anti-liberal synthesis that rejected radical individualism — that’s what the “red” part actually means, not liberalism but socialism. This kind of Toryism — “conservatism with a conscience” — is committed to public institutions and is pro-market but not entirely libertarian.

But Red Toryism is no longer a dominant force in Canadian conservatism; today it’s a remnant, largely in Atlantic Canada. What we’re really looking at here is a generational fault line that cuts right through the heart of Canadian conservatism.

Many older Canadians are conservative, and these older Tories are (in general) fairly well off. They are retired, or well advanced into their careers. They own homes that are paid off, or will be in the near future, and worth a lot more than what they paid for them. Many of them have been able to help their children get started in their own careers, or with down payments on homes of their own. They value stability — it is essential if they are to continue enjoying their prosperous lives. These people have long enough memories to remember the political battles that led to the creation of the modern Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 — some of them were no doubt even participants, and may still identify with one faction or the other.

Now contrast this with many of the leading voices on the other side of the debate. They call themselves “the new right”. In the absence of a better term, I’ll use that. Canada’s new right tends to be younger, and this matters not just because the old PC/Reform divide means very little to them, it matters because they are much angrier with our general state of affairs, and for good reason.

The emerging flagship publication for this collection of young conservatives is the Substack Without Diminishment. In some ways, the emerging conservative opposition in Ontario to Premier Doug Ford centred around an organization called Project Ontario (discussed in last week’s On The Line podcast here) is also a good representation of it.

The voices and figures involved in this movement are younger, often very online, and eager to pick fights with this older generation of conservatives. For some of the writers at Without Diminishment, the archnemesis of their conservatism is Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne. He represents, for them, an outdated kind of “Boomer conservatism” that does not speak to them or the issues they care about. New conservatives have also recently written, after Ford ran ads featuring Ronald Reagan in America, that it’s time for “the gatekeepers of the Canadian right … to move on from 1984” — namely Reagan-era conservatism.

Twenty years ago, I’d often quote Andrew Coyne’s columns, but at some point he had a significant change of heart and one of the first Without Diminishment articles I linked to was what I characterized as “The Anti-Coynist Manifesto“.

November 22, 2025

Democrats may come to regret their “refuse illegal orders” messaging

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Many current and former military folks ridiculed the Democrats for their sudden discovery of the right (and obligation) to refuse illegal orders … which has been part of western military doctrine since the end of World War Two. I poked some fun at them as well, but J.D. Tuccille points out that it’s a weird stance for the party that is always fully in favour of government agents’ maximizing their powers:

I favor government employees defying orders and sabotaging the instruments of the state as much as the next libertarian (well, maybe a little more). But I suspect the Democratic lawmakers urging members of the military and the intelligence community to “refuse illegal orders” haven’t entirely thought through their positions. While their advice is commendable so far as it goes, as officials of a political party known for its expansive view of the role of government their words are likely to come back and bite them on their collective asses. It’s hard to imagine them being so enthusiastic about a reboot of this message directed at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and IRS agents under a Democratic administration.

Lawmakers Say: Refuse Illegal Orders

In a video message released this week, Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Reps. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, and Jason Crow of Colorado, introduce themselves with emphasis on their past roles in the military and intelligence agencies.

“We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community,” they say. “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military, but that trust is at risk. This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. And right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.”

That’s a nice lead-in. Then we get to the heart of the message: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

Stirring stuff. And accurate. Referencing a Vietnam War-era atrocity, retired General Philip M. Breedlove, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told NewsNation regarding the video, “Since My Lai, the way we have interpreted this is, as a combatant, as a military officer, you are not obligated, not obligated, to carry out an illegal or an immoral order. You simply refuse the order.”

[…]

Take Advice to Refuse Illegal Orders Seriously, and Apply It Universally

So, if we’re to take seriously — and I believe we are well-advised to do so — the six Democratic lawmakers’ advice that “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution,” there are interesting implications for our political culture. That’s because much of what the federal government does on a daily basis flouts constitutional protections and offends human decency.

So, how would Slotkin and Kelly, and Deluzio, Goodlander, Houlahan, and Crow, respond to campaign a few years from now under the next Democratic administration urging ATF and IRS agents, federal regulators, and general workers to refuse orders? How would they treat an attempt to recruit more whistleblowers like Manning and Edward Snowden?

Don’t get me wrong, I think the advice the lawmakers offer is praiseworthy. But I look forward to seeing it applied universally and becoming a permanent feature of our dealings with government. I suspect that likelihood hasn’t occurred to those six legislators, but thanks to them for showing the way.

In counterpoint to my original take on the issue, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Cynical Publius expresses his belief that the Democrats are actually encouraging disobedience to legal orders that they happen to dislike:

I’m not sure I’ve ever been angrier at Democrats than I am right now.

As a career Army officer, I take this latest nefarious chicanery from these filthy Congressional Democrat veterans quite personally,

It is loathsome and disgusting. You know, I know, they know and even their brainwashed acolytes know that what they are REALLY doing is encouraging active duty service members to refuse to follow lawful orders under the guise of pretending the orders are “unlawful”.

What these Democrat filth are doing is encouraging a form of military coup where service members get to decide not to do things they disagree with politically by pretending those otherwise lawful things are “unlawful”.

This is the greatest threat to US internal stability since the last time Democrats started a civil war. A military ruled by politics is no military at all. Instead, it is a group of armed thugs akin to the South American military juntas of the 1970s.

I cannot overstate what an extreme threat this situation is to our nation.

This is a precursor to civil war, initiated and deliberately created by traitorous elected officials hiding behind the honor of the uniform they once wore but now disgraced.

I have never been angrier.🤬

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