Tiberius Gracchus’ proposal to fix this problem [the perceived loss of free farmers from whom the Roman army was raised] was the lex Sempronia Agraria. The law proposed to enforce a legal but long ignored limit on the holding of ager publicus,1 restricting individuals to holding just 500 iugera (c. 311 acres), with the state revoking the leases on the remainder and using the reclaimed land to then provide small plots for free to the Roman poor, with a rider that these plots could not be sold (to avoid them being reconsolidated into elite estates).
And here it is worth noting that kind of government the Romans had to understand the response. The Roman Republic had written laws but no written constitution – instead, the rules for office holding, for conducting the business of the Senate, for running the assemblies and so on were all customary: the Romans governed themselves in accordance with what they called the mos maiorum, “the custom of the ancestors”. In a sense then, certain practices, if practiced long enough, became a sort of law-of-tradition to themselves and of course one of those customs – practiced at this point for, at minimum around 150 years – was the continual leasing of large amounts of ager publicus to the point that the leases were treated as a form of ownership: people used that land as security for loans, they built houses on it, they buried their parents on it and so on. Because the leases were presumptively renewable and had been for decades if not centuries, under the mos maiorum, the holders of ager publicus had long considered the land theirs. And of course the upset parties are rich and powerful, so their opposition was significant and meaningful, politically.
In brief, the way this plays out is that while Tiberius Gracchus does have significant popular support for his motion (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 9.1), much of the elite are opposed. He draws up a quite conciliatory version of the law, which proposes to compensate the holders of large amounts of ager publicus for their lost leasing rights and to then give them the remainder of their leased land (so they needn’t fear a second lex agraria and a third and a fourth and so on), but according to Plutarch in the face of continued elite opposition, shifts back to a less conciliatory version of the law (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 10.3). The resistance to his law centers on another tribune, Marcus Octavius, himself a large holder of public lands, who plans to veto the law and uses his own powers as a tribune to disrupt the process (along with some fairly clear shenanigans by some of the wealthy, like trying to hide the voting urns to prevent a vote on the law and so on).
Now there are a few things to note at this juncture in the story. First, there being ten tribunes, it must never have been very hard to find a tribute willing to gum up the passage of a given law, but that, traditionally, this was a tactic of delay, rather than a hard-stop the way Octavius is using it. At the same time, with real public momentum to make this law happen, one could easily imagine simply waiting Octavius out – he only has one year in office. Except. Except that, remember, Tiberius Gracchus needs a big victory in his tribunate to get his political career [back] on track, a consideration that was clearly significant (thus the reason we’re informed of his quaestorship; we usually don’t know much about even very significant figures’ time in junior offices!). That consideration, I think, serves as important context for Tiberius’ decision to escalate every time he encounters resistance: he cannot afford to simply be the prelude to someone else passing this law: he needs to pass it himself.
The normal method for “deconflicting” two magistrates with opposing vetoes like this was to go to the Senate, which Tiberius Gracchus, hoping his influential supporters would carry the day, did. Instead, according to Plutarch (Ti. Gracch. 11.2) the Senate was merely no help, whereas Appian (BCiv 1.12) describes the Senate as openly upbraiding Tiberius, a strong negative response. Now under the mos maiorum, that would be the end of it: the authority of the Senate (the auctoritas senatus) ought to be so intense that when the Senate speaks in one voice and says, “not right now” then you desist. Remember that in the Roman conception, the Republic is a partnership of sorts between the Senate and the People (the S and the P in SPQR), rather than a situation in which the Senate is purely subordinate to the popular will: if the Senate is strongly opposed, that is supposed to be a veto point that is respected.
But remember: Tiberius Gracchus cannot, politically, desist. He must push through because his political career requires a victory this year. Note that the cause does not require a victory in 133; there is nothing to stop another tribune in 132 from trying to advance the same bill or a more limited or different version of it. But Tiberius Gracchus’ career absolutely requires success in 133. So instead of desisting, he escalates.
He now breaks clearly with the mos maiorum and plans to take his law directly to the people against the advice of the Senate. Octavius is obviously a problem – he’ll veto anything Tiberius Gracchus tries to do – so Tiberius Gracchus introduces a law to depose Octavius from office. The Roman Republic doesn’t have anything like impeachment, there is no framework to remove someone from office. Instead, the way the Republic works is that all of the offices are held for short duration (one year) and while tribunes and office holders with imperium are immune from prosecution while in office, they can be prosecuted the moment they leave office for any crimes they committed. There is no framework for booting out a tribune like this; the remedy in the customary Roman system is to make sure the next year you elect tribunes who support the idea and try to pass it then. But that remedy doesn’t work for Tiberius Gracchus.
So Tiberius Gracchus passes the law deposing Octavius and then has him dragged from the speaker’s platform (the rostra) and now we have a problem. Because of course Octavius’ supporters are going to view this law itself as illegal and invalid: tribunes are, you will recall sacrosanct, so it’s not clear they can be deposed and it is very clear they cannot be assaulted or dragged. Violating the sacrosanctity of a tribune is, at least notionally, a capital offense and a severe violation of religion and if you think that Tiberius Gracchus’ legal basis for all of this is rubbish, you think he just did it twice. Of course, Tiberius is also a tribune, so you can’t attack him now, but once his year is done, you are probably planning to haul him in to court and let a jury decide if what he did was legal or not.2
In any case, with Octavius removed, Tiberius passes his land reform bill. The law provided for a three-man commission to handle the assessment of what public land was held in excess and then to hand it out. Tiberius Gracchus names as those commissioners himself, his brother and his father-in-law (Appius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 143)). Needless to say, that is a set of commissioners which does not inspire a lot of confidence that the commission will be uncorrupted by politics, a point we’ll get back to in just a moment.
In the meantime, the Senate looked to exert its traditional prerogative over state funds (as it advised the quaestors who superintended the treasury) to hamstring the new commission, but Tiberius Gracchus took advantage of the recent death of Attalus III, King of Pergamum. Attalus had notionally willed his kingdom “to the Roman people” – he had no clear heirs and so perhaps thought by this act to get the Romans to pick one of his relatives to run the kingdom, thus avoiding a damaging civil war – but instead Tiberius, getting the news early, rushed to pass a law annexing the kingdom and using the windfall to fund his commission. The law passes, but this is a breach both of the Senate’s traditional power over state finances, but also its very important role managing Roman foreign policy.
What I want to note in this sequence which is important for understanding what comes next is that Tiberius Gracchus has just demonstrated that, so long as he remained popular, he could use the powers of the tribunate to essentially run the Roman state from the tribune’s chair. Tiberius has now forced not merely a domestic land issue, but also a finance issue and a foreign policy issue over the objection of the Senate and another elected tribune, essentially running roughshod over all of the customary limits intended to keep any one Roman politician from coming to dominate the Roman political system.
Of course if you were an opponent of Tiberius Gracchus, you could at least tell yourself that this is all bad, but at the very least, Tiberius Gracchus will be out of office next year, as it was contrary to custom to run for any office immediately after holding it. Indeed, it was unusual to hold basically any office more than once, save for the consulship (and even then, only for very successful consuls and never multiple years in a row). Those limits are customary but everything about the Roman Republic is customary; if you discounted the mos maiorum, there wouldn’t be any republic left. You’d instead expect that Tiberius would go back to being a senator for a few years while planning his shot at the praetorship – during which he’ll have to survive a series of court battles over the legality of his actions.
So even if he is doing potentially outrageous, dangerous things, at least he’ll be gone in a year, right?
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
- Which, again, noting the complications above, probably means applying that limit for the first time to at least some classifications of land it had not applied to before and also applying it against the socii.
- The Roman court system leaves questions of law – which in most modern courts would be decided by a judge – to the jury itself.
June 10, 2026
QotD: Tiberius Gracchus, Tribune of the Plebs
June 9, 2026
Confucian deference to authority and tradition lead to autocracy and rebellion, time after time
Chinese history is not one of my areas of interest, so I have not read deeply in any specific area. Lorenzo Warby, on the other hand, has a much better grasp of the sweep of historical events in China and some of the philosophical and cultural elements that persist through the centuries:
All political and social philosophies rest, implicitly or explicitly, on some claims or claims about the nature of humans.
Consider the thought of Kong Qiu (c.551 BC – c. 479 BC), known as Kǒngfūzǐ (孔夫子) (Great Master or Wise Teacher Kong), hence Confucius. He held that human nature is naturally good and that it is therefore a reasonable aspiration to create a society of harmony, a society without conflict, if everyone just behaves with the propriety appropriate to their place in society — in particular, according to their placement in the web of social connections. His constant concern for the rites (li 禮) is for people to show the correct forms of, and orientation towards, those socially embedded interactions.
This leads very naturally to a very authoritarian, hierarchical view of politics as enforcing social harmony, particularly as people vary in their willingness and capacity to cultivate such virtuous propriety. The notion that politics is legitimately an arena for bargaining between competing interests — the Western idea of “normal politics” — becomes not a natural way to do politics, but a failure to achieve proper harmony.
Master Kong developed his ideas — that were further developed by disciples and commentators — in a civilisation with no tradition of warrior assemblies, self-governing cities, or deliberative assemblies of any kind. A ruler’s court is a place where officials report, and may even debate, but the ruler decides. You can see this narrow view of politics in comments by Master Kong in the Analects such as:
8.14 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.”
14.26 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.” Master Zeng [Zengzi] commented, “The gentleman does not allow his thoughts to go beyond what his position calls for.”
In such a political culture, judicious quotes based on mastery of a shared literature become a way of communicating to superiors while giving minimum offence. Conversely, political rhetoric has little or no value, because there are not the deliberative assemblies to be swayed by argument. Master Kong deprecated glib persuasiveness, on the grounds that it tended to hide one’s real character (or lack thereof).
Where command-and-control hierarchy is the dominant method of political action, hoping for propriety to pervade the hierarchy has obvious resonance. Putting such propriety as a mechanism for social harmony is a way to, ironically enough, be persuasive — which requires a positive view of human nature. But it also hugely elevates the moral claims of governorship. Hence comments such as:
2.1 The Master said, “To rule by virtue is like the way the North Star rules, standing in its place with all the other stars revolving around it and paying court to it.”
12.17 Ji Kangzi asked about the way of governing [zheng]. Confucius replied, “To govern [zheng] is to correct [zheng]. When you set an example by correcting your mistakes, who will dare not to correct his mistakes?”
This concern for harmonious propriety is not a world away from ibn Khaldun‘s concern for asabiyya. Nor is it so far from recognising the importance of a coherent civic culture in order to maintain robust institutions, which rest on norms and rules. This is a factor that much of mainstream Economics fails to seriously grapple with, leading to incompetent analysis of immigration.
The problem is that this cultural and institutional framework turns the thought of Master Kong, his disciples and commentators, into what is, in effect, one-trick moral propriety politics, however sophisticated other aspects of this tradition may be. The choices of governance are narrowed down to punishment and example:
2.3 The Master said, “If you guide the people with ordinances and statutes and keep them in line with [threats of] punishment, they will try to stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. If you guide them with exemplary virtue [de] and keep them in line with the practice of the rites [li], they will have a sense of shame and will know to reform themselves.”
They are reduced to trying to make autocratic command-and-control politics work as a successful long-term project: as the repeated dynastic collapses in Chinese history show, they did not succeed. Indeed, the recurring pattern of Chinese political reformers and reform programs ending badly reflects that such fail to break out of that autocratic command-and-control pattern, so end up being swallowed by its incentive structures — including the long-term pathologies of bureaucracy and the inherent fears of autocrats.
The most thorough attempt to implement ideas based on rú (儒) classicism (“Confucianism”) in Chinese history was the disastrous reign of Wang Meng (r.9-23), who provides an object lesson in overweening Theory leading to disastrous policies. Ironically, Master Kong himself was against such grand theorising:
9.4 The Master stayed away from four things: he did not put forth theories or conjectures; he did not think that he must be right; he was not obdurate; he was not self-centered.
The episode is a particularly disastrous example of Etienne Gilson‘s principle that the conclusions of the master are the premises of the disciple, thereby all too readily reducing struggles with complexity to a simplifying dogmatism: a trap that scholarly commentary on The Analects often tried to avoid.
The thought of Master Kong also wanders very close to someone is morally better, not only because learned, but because smart and learned. For instance:
5.9 The Master said to Zigong, “Who is the better man, you or Hui [Yan Hui]?” Zigong replied, “How dare I compare myself with Hui? Having learned one thing, he gives play to ten, while I go only as far as two.” The Master said, “You are not as good as he is. Neither of us is as good as he is.”
This arrogance of the appropriately credentialed periodically led to mass outbreaks of infuriated peasants removing educated heads from elite bodies. The most recent manifestations of this were the Cultural Revolution in China and the megacidal Cambodian horrors under Pol Pot but you can see versions of this reaching back into Chinese history — for example, the massacres by Huang Chao’s rebellion (874-884) towards the end of the Tang dynasty (618-907) and the earlier peasant revolts that brought down Wang Meng.
We can also see the same self-righteous exploitive arrogance of those credentialed with “morally proper knowledge” afflicting contemporary Western societies along with bureaucratic pathologies that have also been a feature of Chinese history — remembering that we Westerners copied the Chinese pattern of bureaucratic selection through examination without considering the long-term patterns of Chinese history. Fortunately, national populism generates a less violent outlet for popular frustrations than Chinese peasant revolts.
Update, 10 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.
Stop buying stadiums for billionaires!
ReasonTV
Published 6 Feb 2026Sports subsidies suck.
If sports is a trillion dollar industry, with billionaire team owners and millionaire players, and hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic fans, and weird pervert mascot creatures, why is the government giving them your money?
QotD: The temptations of totalitarianism
One might have thought — I certainly thought — that with the downfall of the Soviet Union, the totalitarian temptation had been exorcised once and for all. This, of course, was a very superficial view. Instead of disappearing, the temptation balkanised, so to speak, and was also repatriated. Totalitarianism had been shown almost as conclusively as anything in the sphere of human affairs to be inherently absurd, intellectually nugatory, and catastrophic in practice. This fact was not sufficient, however, to destroy its attractions — at least for those who desire a complete solution to all of life’s little problems such as how to live and what to live for. A solution in the mind is worth a thousand disasters in the world.
Naturally, it takes a certain level of education to feel the temptations of totalitarianism: they do not occur to the illiterate, for example, but only to the intelligentsia. The latter has increased in size almost exponentially with the expansion of tertiary education, or at least with attendance at institutions of tertiary instruction. In retrospect, it is not surprising that totalitarianism should continue to exert its siren-song in previously liberal societies, particularly when the young, always tempted by radical ideas, face genuine if intractable problems, seemingly worse than those of the previous generation.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Temptations of Power”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-06.
June 8, 2026
Milton Friedman – accessory to Grand Theft Taxation
I’ve only read a small part of Milton Friedman’s work, but I have great respect for him and think that overall, he was a very strong proponent for smaller, less intrusive government. But there’s one terrible thing that he was instrumental in implementing that almost outweighs everything else:
Milton Friedman’s greatest regret.
The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.
Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.
Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.
This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.
Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.
Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard was far more scathing about Friedman:
June 6, 2026
Civil forfeiture is legalized theft where the process is part of the punishment
J.D. Tuccille points out that most victims of civil forfeiture actions in the United States never get a day in court to fight against the theft:
Two years ago, the Netflix film Rebel Ridge turned a common law enforcement tactic into a cinematic study of injustice. In fictionalized form, the movie brought home to audiences the reality that civil asset forfeiture is nothing more than legalized theft. Unfortunately, as documented in a recent Institute for Justice (I.J.) report, while several states have sought to reform the use of civil forfeiture, it remains a source of profit for many law enforcement agencies and a cause of grief to unlucky victims who rarely get to argue their cases in a courtroom.
Forfeiture “Clearly Has Been Abused”
Civil asset forfeiture is “a legal process enabling law enforcement agencies to seize property which is suspected of having connections to criminal activity,” Northeastern University criminology professor Nikos Passas explained when Rebel Ridge spurred Americans to wonder whether cops could really take money and property without convicting anybody of a crime. “The difference between criminal and civil forfeiture is that the criminal one requires a conviction. A civil forfeiture targets the property itself, and often it is done without charging the owner with wrongdoing.”
The problem, he added, “is that by giving a profit motive, a financial motive, to law enforcement it introduces a bias. … It clearly has been abused.”
I.J. has long tracked and battled those abuses. In the fourth edition of Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture, authors Lisa Knepper, Jason Tiezzi, Matthew P. West, Elyse Pohl, and Mindy Menjou document legal changes that have reformed or even abolished civil asset forfeiture in some states, and the work that remains to rein in abuses. Change has been slow because stealing under color of law is a huge moneymaker for government agencies against which people have little recourse.
Seizures by Default, With No Courtroom Proceedings
“Most forfeitures never reach a courtroom, available data show. For example, in a large sample of Indiana cases, just 4% were decided by a judge. Instead, forfeiture typically happens by default,” the recent report notes.
Why is that? It’s often because in their seizures, police departments take enough money or property to be lucrative, but not at a value that would justify a legal fight.
“Very few owners who contest forfeiture have legal representation — just 6% in Arizona and 7% in Oregon — likely because it is prohibitively expensive,” according to the report. “A straightforward state-court forfeiture case costs an estimated $3,300, nearly twice the median cash forfeiture of $1,678 across 24 states.”
Since it’s a civil process and not a criminal one, people on the receiving end of civil forfeiture aren’t entitled to public defenders. Many find the cost of hiring attorneys to be much higher than the value of what is stolen from them by authorities. The money winds up in government coffers without a fight. Those who do fight end up running a gauntlet.
“Even owners who successfully reach a judge typically wait months. Adding together statutory deadlines, the median forfeiture process takes more than six months on paper just to reach a courtroom. … In practice, cases frequently take far longer. In Virginia, for example, half of successful challenges lasted more than nine months, and a quarter stretched beyond 16 months.”
QotD: Richard Nixon – more sinned against than sinning?
The Nixon White House, museum display panels announce, was consumed by “a climate of deep suspicion”. The infamous Plumbers took action against “perceived political opponents within the Federal Government”. A video display allows visitors to choose clips on the theme of Nixon’s “Conspiracy Thinking”. Paranoid, the president mindlessly lashed out at enemies that he hallucinated. This is still the official history, in museum exhibits curated by the National Archives and Records Administration.
On Friday morning, the consistently pro-Nixon docents hadn’t heard about the important Feb. 8 story in The New York Times that describes a plot within the government to spy on the Nixon White House, with Navy Yeoman Charles Radford stealing documents and sending them to the Pentagon as insurance against budget and policy meddling from the person serving as the president of the United States.
The revelation from a newly declassified document, longtime journalist James Rosen concluded, “bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the ‘deep state’. … Nixon proved to a team of federal prosecutors and grand jurors not only that such a beast existed but also that he, guilty as he was in Watergate, had been its victim.”
Chris Bray, “The Nixon Library Is Wrong About Nixon And The Deep State”, The Federalist, 2026-02-13.
June 5, 2026
Canada’s AI “strategy”
I’m at the point where I honestly can’t tell whether this is parody or actual Canadian government policy:
AI in Canada lost before it even got started.
They literally are trying to get AI to give a Land acknowledgement before any session.
Here are 6 statements that show how Canada already blew AI like we all knew it would.
1. “The Government of Canada commits to applying Gender-Based Analysis Plus in a meaningful way across policy design, skills development, innovation, and governance to ensure that AI reflects our values, protects those most impacted, and leads to outcomes that are safe, inclusive, and beneficial for all Canadians.”
2. “Canadian AI must support, reflect, and project Canadian culture, which includes our customs, our history, and our heritage. Canadian voices, languages, communities, and knowledge must also be represented in how AI systems are designed, built, and used.”
3. “support Indigenous self-determination over how AI is built and used in Indigenous contexts, and build domestic capacity to address the specific harms Indigenous Peoples face”.
4. “promote the world’s first AI equity-based national standard on accessible AI to drive inclusive and accessible AI and remove accessibility barriers from AI systems, and ensure Canadian AI reflects the Accessible Canada Act principles.”
5. Repeated framing around “disproportionate exposure and impacts of AI harms to equity-seeking groups” and the need to “address the systemic barriers experienced by racialized communities, persons living with disabilities, and others who too often fall on the wrong side of the digital divide”.
6. “Canada will support and amplify Indigenous-led AI initiatives that reinforce cultural expression and linguistic vitality in Canada and around the world, building on existing efforts …”
The Canadian economy, RIP
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, James E. Thorne writes an obituary for the Canadian economy:
For the record.
In Canada, It Matters How the Economy Dies.
The Canadian economy is dead. It just didn’t die with a crash big enough to satisfy the models. No Lehman moment, no Covid-style cliff, just two negative quarters of GDP, years of falling output per person, negative productivity, and a private sector slowly strangled by rates and regulation while the establishment insists the patient is “resting”.
On the facts, this isn’t ambiguous. Real GDP has contracted for two consecutive quarters on an annualized basis. Labour productivity has been flat or negative since 2021. Real GDP per capita is below its pre-pandemic level. Ontario has logged its worst non-pandemic quarterly job losses since the mid-1970s. The only consistent growth is in government payrolls and compliance, not in private enterprise and investment. If that isn’t recessionary, the word is meaningless.
And yes Macklem threatens rate hikes through all of this insanity.
Yet Canada’s official guardians insist nothing fundamental has broken. The C.D. Howe recession-dating committee says the downturn is not “pronounced, persistent, and pervasive” enough. The central bank warns against overreacting to “technical” weakness. Bay Street talks about “soft landings” and “resilience”. In some quarters, the answer to this slow-motion collapse is not relief, but further rate hikes. Ignore the body on the table, we are told, the vital signs aren’t quite bad enough yet to fill out the certificate.
Their rulebook was built for heart attacks, not cancers. It excels at spotting sudden collapses in aggregate GDP and jobs. It barely registers slow organ failure: a few tenths off real GDP per capita each year, productivity edging down, ugly quarters for private-sector employment and capex offset by public hiring. None of that triggers the old alarms until the damage is permanent.
Meanwhile, Canada has been busy throwing away the advantages that once justified its prosperity. Energy and resource projects are stalled or strangled. Business investment per worker trails peers. A country rich in capital, talent, and geography behaves as if it can live forever off inherited endowments while making it harder to build anything new. That is not “resilience”. It is delusion.
Canada’s economic establishment needs to wake up.
Two negative quarters of GDP, negative productivity, falling GDP per person, historic job losses in the core province, a suffocated private sector and calls for more tightening on top, are not signs of an economy “cooling toward trend”. They are signs of an economy that has already crossed the line from stagnation into decay.
The Canadian economy is dead in the way that matters: as an engine of rising living standards and a place where private capital is rewarded for building the future. It just didn’t die loudly enough for the old definitions. The real question now is not what we call it, but how long our institutions will keep pretending the corpse is “resilient”.
As the propagandists of the mainstream media do everything they can to deflect any hint of blame from their Liberal paymasters, we can still see that things are getting worse, not better:
The federal Liberals are getting fantastic return on their investment … giving our money to the presstitutes of the legacy media in return for kid-glove treatment of the government and attack-dog tactics against the opposition:
Why Do 50% Still Support Carney? My long-winded response.
That is a question we need to take seriously.
Leger’s latest federal polling has the Liberals at 50% support among decided voters, their highest level in that firm’s tracking since the Liberals first formed government in 2015. Abacus also found the political environment still favourable for Carney and the Liberal government. So this is not imaginary. This is not just CBC fairy dust sprinkled over Ottawa. The support is real. The harder question is whether it is rational.
My answer is simple: many Canadians are not voting for results. They are voting for the illusion of relief.
Even though Carney was in the economic background since 2020 he appeared to arrive after the Trudeau years like a man in a clean suit walking into a room after the dog crapped on the floor. Trump threatened 51st State. Carney looked calm. Unlike Trudeau. He spoke in complete sentences. He had the central banker aura. For exhausted voters, that was enough. They did not examine the wiring. They just saw someone who did not seem to be setting the curtains on fire.
Carney’s appeal is not built mainly on performance. It is built on contrast. Compared with Trudeau’s theatre-kid government of slogans, selfies, and moral lectures, Carney looks serious. But “serious” is not the same as right. A surgeon can look serious while operating on the wrong leg.
Canada’s economy is now weak enough that Carney himself has had to acknowledge ugly economic data. Reuters reported him addressing Canada’s technical recession and warning that some data will be “uneven” “ah ah ah” as the government pushes through policy changes. The Wall Street Journal reported GDP weakness, including two consecutive quarterly contractions, while Carney framed the pain as part of a broader economic rebuild.
That is where the sales pitch gets slippery.
When the economy weakens under Conservatives, it is called failure. When it weakens under Liberals, it becomes “transition”, “restructuring”, or “long-term transformation”. Same corpse, nicer label on the toe tag.
The deeper problem is that Canadians were never really asked whether they wanted Carney’s ideology. They were sold competence, not doctrine. They were sold expertise, not a governing philosophy that puts the state, regulators, climate finance, and elite managerial planning at the centre of national life.
Nobody knocked on doors saying, “Would you like a prime minister who believes markets should be bent around elite-defined social and environmental values?” No. They said, “He is smart. He ran banks. He knows Trump. He will steady things.”
That is not a mandate. That is a branding exercise.
And this is why the Conservative attack has to get sharper. Not louder. Sharper.
Calling voters stupid is a dead end. Many Carney supporters are not stupid. They are terrified of Trump. They are tired. They are anxious. They are looking at housing, debt, food prices, crime, productivity, health care, and a country that feels smaller than it used to, and they want someone who looks like an adult. Carney gives them the visual. He gives them the voice. He gives them the vibe.
But vibes do not build houses. Vibes do not raise productivity. Vibes do not lower debt. Vibes do not attract investment. Vibes do not make young Canadians believe they have a future.
The Carney government’s strongest weapon is not success. It is emotional permission. It lets Liberal voters tell themselves they have moved on from Trudeau without admitting the Liberal machine remains fundamentally intact. Same operating system, cleaner looking wallpaper.
That is why 50% still support him.
They are not endorsing the results. They are postponing the verdict.
Canada does not need a better-spoken manager of decline. It needs a government willing to reverse the policies that caused the decline in the first place.
Because a tight ship headed toward the rocks is still headed toward the rocks.
June 4, 2026
Bill C-9 is “what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa”
L. Wayne Mathison explains how the Canadian government persuaded itself to push a “hate speech” bill that will upend centuries of free speech practice and criminalize good-faith arguments. Like many such brainfarts, they cannot imagine what consciously evil people will do with these legal tools in hand:
AI-generated image by L. Wayne Mathison
If you want to see what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa, look at Bill C-9.
This is not just another “hate speech” bill. It is a sign of a much bigger shift.
The old political arguments were about wages, factories, class, ownership, and the economy. That was the old Marxist world. Today’s politics is about language, symbols, identity, emotion, culture, and who gets to decide what “harm” means.
Parliament has stopped arguing about who owns the factory.
Now it wants to control the dictionary.
Bill C-9 reads like a critical theory seminar that escaped campus, found a suit, and got hired by the Department of Justice.
Under the older liberal model, the law punished actions. Assault someone? Crime. Vandalize property? Crime. Block access to a building? Crime. The state dealt with what you actually did.
But C-9 moves the centre of gravity from action to meaning.
What did your words mean?
What did your symbol represent?
What was your motive?
What cultural message did your expression create?
That is not law as a neutral referee. That is law as a cultural therapist with police powers.
The most revealing part is the proposed removal of the long-standing “good faith” religious defence for hate propaganda. That defence existed for a reason. It protected freedom of conscience. It recognized that in a free country, people may express religious beliefs that others find offensive, outdated, or wrong, as long as they are not wilfully promoting hatred or violence.
That was not a loophole.
It was a guardrail.
But to the modern ideological mind, an ancient religious text is not treated as a source of conscience. It is treated as an artifact of power. A legal protection for religious speech is no longer seen as freedom. It is seen as oppression wearing a church hat.
So the guardrail has to go.
And what does government offer instead?
Trust us.
Trust that prosecutors will be reasonable. Trust that judges will interpret the law narrowly. Trust that ordinary Canadians will not get dragged through the process for saying something unpopular, traditional, religious, or politically unfashionable.
Sorry, but that is not how liberty works.
Rights are not protected by hoping the state behaves itself. Rights are protected by limiting what the state is allowed to do in the first place.
That is what makes the Senate debate so revealing. The Senate was supposed to be sober second thought. The old establishment airbag. The place where bad laws were supposed to slow down before hitting the public at full speed.
But now even the Senate is wrestling with a bill built from an intellectual toolkit designed to dismantle the very traditions the Senate was created to preserve.
Bill C-9 does not build social cohesion. It does not repair trust. It does not ask why people are angry, alienated, or radicalized in the first place.
It does what modern bureaucratic progressivism always does.
It manages symptoms by expanding state power.
It turns culture into a compliance file. It treats offensive expression less like a social problem to be answered with argument, courage, and moral confidence, and more like a hazardous substance to be regulated by experts.
The Frankfurt School wrote in dense, foggy jargon to expose hidden systems of power.
The joke is on everyone.
The modern state did not reject those tools. It absorbed them, stripped out the revolutionary romance, bolted them onto the Criminal Code, and called it public safety.
Bill C-9 is what happens when cultural theory becomes administrative power.
It is what happens when the state stops protecting public order and starts managing public meaning.
And that should worry anyone who still thinks freedom means more than government-approved speech.
June 3, 2026
“… basically it’s a plan to make power more expensive while campaigning on affordability”
John Robson examines a few of the ways the Ontario government (and other provincial and state governments) frames what they call “affordability”, yet somehow it always seems to cost more afterwards and nobody is ever held responsible:
In many areas of life, the devil is famously in the details. And it presents both an opportunity and a frustration because there is so much out there deserving readers’ attention that you can’t even follow it all let alone cram it into a newsletter. Including former banking executive Parker Gallant‘s vigilance about the absurdities of the power system in the Canadian province of Ontario that the aspiring Conservative premier Doug Ford promised to fix in the 2018 campaign and then has smugly done nothing about. These things might seem uninteresting if you do not live in Ontario … until you realize it’s just as bad wherever you live. And when we say bad we mean both the cost and the deviousness with which it is presented to, or hidden from, the public. On this very point we like to quote the late great P.J. O’Rourke that “Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud … when someone creates a system in which you can’t tell whether or not you’re being fooled, you’re being fooled.” Which brings us to the shiny new buzzword “affordability” which refers to policies that make everything more expensive and the beneficiaries hide the fraud in tangles of complex bureaucracy.
If you want to get a headache, stay with us while we explain what it is that Gallant tracks. Ontario has what they call the “Independent Electricity System Operator” so politicians can claim whatever disaster is unfolding isn’t their fault. Sure, they make the laws and oversee the creation of the regulations. But heck, these things are “arms’ length” and “impartial” and independent and expert and wise and wonderful so shut up.
Including this nutty system where the province buys power we don’t need at grossly inflated rates from wind and solar virtue-signallers and then sells the surplus at deep losses to the neighbouring province of Quebec and some American states including New York and Michigan. So he looked in depth (we promised a headache) at just half a day, May 19, 2026, because a post by another of the people who keeps an eye on this stuff for the benefit of an indifferent or baffled populace alerted him to something fishy in the IESO forecast of generation by Industrial Wind Turbine operators. But it seems to be hard to find out exactly how much the taxpayers, via this wonderful “Independent” system with its hand in their pockets via the arm of the state, actually paid these IWTs not to produce power.
Paid them what? Yup. It’s how it works. And the idea is that if they didn’t produce the original forecast rather than the revised one we’d have had to pay them even more for what they didn’t do. Weird even by the standards of government. And expensive. As Gallant sums it up:
The net result is that those IWT cost us Ontario ratepayers almost $2.6 million for NOTHING over just the first 12 hours but we should rest assured the IWT owners loved it!
You read that right. The citizens of Ontario paid $2.6 million to the energy producers of the future not to produce energy in the present in just half of one day. If it were typical, it would be over $5 million a day times 365 days in the year so yes indeedy folks nearly $2 billion a year.
[…]
He then looks at various efforts to try to figure out the cost to consumers, including one by “my friend Roger Caiazza (the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York)” based on the auction price of “allowances” in March 2025:
Roger’s conclusion at that time was that the RGGI auctions were adding about $8-11/MWh to the wholesale cost of electricity, for electricity produced by natural gas. That would mean an addition of about 1 cent/kWh on a consumer’s bill. A penny may not seem like much, except when you realize that the average price in the country is less than 18 cents/kWh, so the penny is about 6%.
Imagine if people knew. As he concludes:
remember that the structure of the program is that the amount of allowances goes down every year and the price is intentionally driven up. And data centers are going in all over the place. And the Northeastern states have refused to build new power plants for a couple of decades now in the midst of the climate hysteria. So the 10-15% extra cost being experienced now is only the beginning of much worse to come. The worst part of the RGGI ‘cap and invest’ scheme is that the consumers get absolutely nothing for the increased cost. It is just a gratuitously inflicted injury brought about by completely artificial scarcity. Keep this in mid when you hear a politician from an RGGI state talking about how they care about energy ‘affordability’.
Or, we add, transparency. Or accountability.
June 2, 2026
Judging Javier Milei’s work by the numbers
Thanks to automated translation from the original French on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Laurent outlines what he sees in the data from Argentina before and after Javier Milei became president:
I’ve been wondering for a while now about the (provisional) balance sheet of Milei in Argentina. You read everything and its opposite. So I stopped reading the commentary and looked at the raw numbers.
Argentina is the full-scale experiment that economists have been waiting for for 50 years. Same country. Same people. Same culture. We change ONE variable: the economic method.
Before: decades of statist and Peronist management, “redistributive”. The concrete result? 211% inflation, 42% poverty, a state in permanent deficit that funds its lifestyle by running the printing press.
Then Milei arrives. The opposite method, brutal, acknowledged: we cut, we deregulate, we stop printing.
Two years later ([snapshot] at his arrival (end of 2023) vs today):
Annual inflation: 211% → 31%
Monthly inflation: 25% → ~2%
Public deficit: −5% of GDP → +1.8% (surplus)
Growth: −1.6% → +4.4%
Poverty: 42% → 28%No debate. Judge for yourselves.
And the essential point: these gains don’t go “to the rich” or “to the markets”. They go first to the poorest.
Inflation is the most unjust tax that exists — it hits those who have no assets to protect themselves. Dividing it by 7 is giving back purchasing power to those at the bottom. And 14 fewer poverty points means millions of people, not an Excel line.
For a century, Argentines were told that the state would protect them by spending more and more. Result: one of the richest countries in the world in 1910, ruined. We’ve just reversed the method. Look at the result.
At some point, you have to accept what the facts say: on the economic front, the liberal method has delivered in two years what decades of socialism promised without ever delivering. And it benefits the most modest first.
You can hate Milei’s style — the chainsaw, the excess, the improbable outbursts, he’s nothing like a classic statesman. But you don’t judge an economic policy by the style of the one who leads it. You judge it by what it does to people’s lives.
And the numbers have spoken.
June 1, 2026
America before the Constitution
In The Critic, Clement Knox discusses how the newly independent United States of America were governed — or not governed — under the pre-Constitution arrangements:
Declaration of Independence by John Turnbull (1756-1843), showing the Committee of Five (Adams, Livingston, Sherman, Jefferson, and Franklin) presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 28 June, 1776.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
The historian James Breck Perkins once observed that the Declaration of Independence was French and the Constitution was English. One was a coup de folie — all Gallic bombast and improvisation — the other a coolly logical exercise in state construction.
Often overlooked is that these documents came into effect thirteen years apart. And the story of how the Americans went from the Declaration to the Constitution, from France to England, over the course of those years is filled with lessons for the present.
This year is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. It is also the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Articles of Confederation, which were commissioned at the same time as the Declaration but enjoy none of its renown. This is odd, as the Articles were the founding governmental structure of the United States, the system intended to effectuate the high-flown principles of the Declaration, and did so for over a decade until they were replaced by the Constitution in 1789.
The reason nobody talks about the Articles is because they were disastrous. Under them the United States government had a single legislative branch, congress, whose presiding officer was also the head of the executive branch. There was no federal judiciary. Neither congress nor its president had any real powers. Congress could not actually raise money. It could only “request” funds from the states — requests which were typically ignored. Congress also had no power over the regulation of commerce which meant that states could and did broker trade deals with foreign powers and impose taxes on the trade of their neighbouring states. Moreover, this hapless system could not be reformed as the articles required unanimity among the states to make even minor changes to them.
The regime imposed by the articles brought the nation to its knees. “The existing Confederacy is tottering to its foundation,” James Madison said in 1787, and few would mourn its passing as it “neither has nor deserves advocates.” “No money is paid into the public treasury,” he continued, “No respect is paid to the federal authority … It is not possible that a government can last long under these circumstances.” His pessimism was shared by George Washington who feared that “without some alteration in our political creed, the superstructure we have been seven years raising … must fall. We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion.”
Not prepared to allow the legacy of 1776 to be national ruin, Madison did something extraordinary: he moved to replace a failing regime with a functioning one. In 1786 he organised a convention in Philadelphia with the loosely-defined purpose of “revising” certain elements of the Articles. Once the convention was in session Madison revealed his true purpose. He did not want to revise the Articles but replace it with a constitution of his own composition.
The story of Madison’s high-stakes political gambit and how it played out in the years between the Philadelphia convention and the adoption of the constitution in 1789 is told in The Framers’ Coup by Michael J. Klarman. A professor at Harvard Law School, Klarman has written not just the seminal account of America’s founding but a classic account of how peaceful regime change can occur.
May 31, 2026
How the Nazis Got Rich Preparing Germany for War – Death of Democracy 17 – Q1 1937
World War Two
Published 30 May 2026By March 1937, Nazi Germany had renewed dictatorship, buried Versailles, and turned rearmament into a corruption machine.
Berlin, March 31, 1937. Adolf Hitler’s regime appears stronger than ever. The Enabling Act is extended for another four years, the civil service is bound more tightly to Hitler personally, and Germany formally rescinds its signature from the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty.
But behind the speeches about honor, work, and national revival, another transformation is underway.
In the first quarter of 1937, Nazi Germany moves deeper into an economy built around rearmament, Party patronage, racial exclusion, corporate privilege, and theft. The new German Corporation Law weakens ordinary shareholder control and strengthens management boards. Industrial giants profit from military preparation. Jewish property becomes a field of extortion and enrichment. Hitler himself grows wealthy through book royalties, image rights, hidden payments, and political slush funds.At the same time, the regime tightens control over public life. Civil servants are required to serve the Nazi state without reservation. Journalists, professors, doctors, artists, and Jewish Germans are pushed out of public and professional life. Concentration camp roundups expand beyond political opponents. And on Palm Sunday, Pope Pius XI’s Mit brennender Sorge is read from Catholic pulpits across Germany, openly challenging Nazi ideology.
This episode looks at Germany in the first quarter of 1937: a moment when dictatorship no longer needs to look revolutionary. It looks administrative, profitable, respectable — and permanent. This is the story of how power, profit, propaganda, and fear helped turn a modern state into a robber regime preparing for war.
0:00 Berlin, March 31, 1937
0:47 A World in Crisis
01:10 Germany Extends the Legal Shell of Dictatorship
01:23 Civil Servants Bound to Hitler
01:51 Hitler Rejects the Versailles War-Guilt Clause
02:21 The Enabling Act Is Renewed
02:48 Göring in Rome, Reassurances in Warsaw
03:44 The New Corporation Law
04:00 The Catholic Church Challenges Nazi Ideology
05:08 Police Roundups and Expanding Concentration Camps
05:46 Press, Education, Medicine, and Culture Under Control
08:20 The Nazi Economy: Private Profit, State Power
09:41 Aryanization and Organized Theft
10:20 Rearmament, Industry, and Oligarch Profits
12:21 How Hitler Personally Got Rich
14:55 The Party Mood: Confidence at the Top
15:22 German Public Sentiment and Victor Klemperer
16:20 Analysis: How Results Become Consent
17:06 Conclusion: The Quiet Theft of Democracy
18:27 Never Forget / Support TimeGhost
Canada slips into recession: state media rally to attack official opposition
Even before they became explicitly subsidized presstitutes for the Liberal Party, the Canadian mainstream media have always been far more critical of conservatives, so this pivot to defend the government after official statistics show the country is in a technical recession is very much on brand:
Stuart, this is exactly the problem.
You’re acting like annualized quarter-by-quarter numbers are some exotic partisan invention. They aren’t. That is one of the standard ways GDP is reported and understood.
And the “reporter’s narrative” point is weak. The reporter framed the question as if calling it a recession was irresponsible, even though the numbers show real weakness: contraction, stalled growth, falling investment, weak productivity, and Canadians losing ground.
Pierre did what more politicians should do: he challenged the frame.
Because the frame matters.
When Conservatives warn about decline, it’s “doom”.
When Liberals preside over decline, it’s “complex global headwinds”.
When Canadians get poorer, it’s “resilience”.
When GDP shrinks, it’s “not quite the word we’d prefer today”.
Give me a break.
Canadians do not live inside a Statistics Canada footnote. They live inside rent, mortgage renewals, grocery bills, job insecurity, and taxes. Pierre is speaking to that reality.
The press gallery can massage the vocabulary all it wants. The country is weaker, poorer, less productive, and more expensive.
That is not a narrative.
That is the room.
The Liberals are getting great value for their money — well, our money — as even though the economy is tottering, media-massaged messaging is reflected in polls (feel free to doubt the accuracy of polls like this if you like):
