Quotulatiousness

December 31, 2025

Do you want tribalism? Because this is how you get tribalism

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort asks the key questions about where our “elites” are taking us:

What’s the point? No, tell me, what’s the point?

What’s the point of laws if judges reinterpret them until they protect everyone except the people who obey them?

What’s the point of defending a nation if the same system refuses to defend your family from criminals it imported on purpose?

What’s the point of paying taxes if they fund fraud, reward deception, and subsidize parallel systems that never owed this place loyalty?

What’s the point of working, building, serving, if your labor is redistributed to those who broke the rules to get here?

What’s the point of accountability if paperwork matters more than reality, and intent matters less than optics?

I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is that any human with a brain is going to retreat to whatever group rewards his values and sacrifice. If it isn’t the nation, it becomes the tribe. And when it becomes the tribe, this American experiment is over.

A warrior can endure hardship, loss, and some long odds. What he cannot endure is betrayal by design.

When a nation stops enforcing its boundaries, its laws, and its obligations to its own people, it doesn’t just lose control, IT BURNS THE VERY WILL REQUIRED TO DEFEND IT.

I want something to defend that I believe in. We all do. I take the oath deadly serious. But one begins to wonder after awhile if that makes for a patriot or a sucker.

If a Soldier can follow it and die in defense of his country, but on the other side of the coin, there is a politician who can spit on it and get rich while importing and funding pirates … it really makes one wonder: What’s it all for?

@POTUS we know what problems you face. It’s not lost on us. But we are running out of time sir.

One of the things that makes these kinds of scam viable in western culture is that we are high-trust cultures with default assumptions that most people are not trying to exploit kindness and charity. This breaks down quickly once you introduce enough people from low-trust and tribal cultures:

The fraudulent spending of taxpayer dollars we are seeing uncovered nationally all rotates around the essential goodness of the American people.

Daycare for children? Of course — we don’t want our children or parents to suffer because Mom has to work.

Foodbanks? We don’t want anyone to starve. Our nation is better than that.

Homeless shelters? Homelessness is a scourge upon the American dream. We’re better than that.

Home elder care? The generations before us deserve dignity and respect. How could anyone oppose that?

Deep down we are a charitable and giving nation unlike most others. That sense of goodness and charity has been hijacked and exploited by foreign predators for their own material gain.

We need to wise up and toughen up, and understand that not every siren song of charity is on the level, particularly when our tax dollars are involved.

(Also, this reality gives an added layer of meaning to the concept of “suicidal empathy”.)

Ian at The Bugscuffle Gazette explains that importing the third world means that you need to expect your culture will start becoming more like the third world:

It says something1 about he state of Legacy Media when a 20-something kid with an iPhone can do a better imitation of 60 Minutes than 60 Minutes can.

No, Gentle Readers, I am not — in any way — surprised that Somalian immigrants in Minnesota are happily committing fraud — remember, do, that I grew up in Africa.

One of the things that endear Americans — and Western Europeans in general — to me is the sheer naiveté displayed by same. The ability of the average American to remain convinced that the entire World is just like them is rather cute.2

Folks, fraud and bribery is the norm in the Third World. In tribal cultures fraud and bribery are not only the norm, but are the rule.

If the average American reader takes nothing else from this essay, please understand that fraud and bribery are not crimes in the Third World; that fraud and bribery are not only not crimes in tribal society, but they are expected, required, and a perfectly acceptable part of every day tribal life.

And Somalia is not only Third World, but it is excessively tribal.

So, I’m not really mad at the Somalis. You can’t get mad at a gopher for digging up your yard. Gophers got to dig, and tribal cultures got to tribal.

That by no means signals that I don’t think the fraudsters should be excused. Hell, no. Public trials, and if found guilty — maximum sentences. Those lacking in U.S. citizenship, once the full prison sentence is completed, loaded onto a C-5 Galaxy and bodily pitched off of the ramp onto a random Somalian airport tarmac.3

What has stoked my ire is the fact that the Somalis used one of the most heavily-regulated industries to commit their fraud — that should have everyone up in arms.

Childcare is the responsibility of at least one Minnesota State agency — probably more — and will have mandated State-level inspections and audits.

Let me re-state that: Minnesota government employees would be legally-required and paid to walk their happy little arses into those businesses and use their Mk1 Mod 0 Eyeballs to look around at least once a year. If you were an inspector for whichever Minnesota agency(ies) regulates child care facilities, and you never filed a “Hey, something ain’t right” report, it’s time for a Come-To-Jesus Meeting in a brightly-lit room with humour-impaired law enforcement types.

If nothing else, the fact that one of these allegedly fraudulent pre-schools not only mis-spelled “Learning” as “Learing”, but mis-spelled the name of the street in the publicly-posted address should have been a red flag to someone.4

This sheer dollar amount of fraud, over this amount of time, and using this many separate corporate entities means that multiple people in the Minnesota State government knew something stunk to high heaven.

Minnesota government employees who knew of this fraud need to do the maximum allowed felony time.

  1. Not, you know, anything good.
  2. The ability of the average American leader — who is supposed to know better — to do the same is aggravating and dangerous.
  3. Bringing the aeroplane to a full stop during this process not absolutely required.
  4. Us cynical retired law enforcement types call this a “clue”.

December 30, 2025

Tariffs are an economic burden, even when you claim they’re paid by foreigners

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

At the Foundation for Economic Education, David Hebert responds to a recent pro-tariff puff piece from financial columnist, Matthew Lynn:

As Lynn acknowledges, “the tariffs are a tax”. Because they are a tax, they are going to be paid by someone in some form. You can’t have money flowing into the Treasury without someone paying that extra money in some way. Broadly speaking, we can divide the potential payors of American-imposed tariffs into three camps: American consumers, American importers, and foreigners.

One of the oft-cited effects of a tariff is to reduce the amount of imports coming into America. This makes sense and is in fact one of the numerous goals administration officials have pointed to. Insofar as American consumers and importers end up paying the tariff, they will buy less of the now-more-expensive foreign products. We’re already seeing this happen in the US, which Lynn alludes to throughout his article.

If foreigners pay the tariff, they’ll sell less of the now-tariffed goods to the US. This will, as President Trump and others have correctly identified, hurt their bottom line. To offset at least some of this, these countries will try to sell more of their products to their domestic consumers or consumers in countries other than the US. This is exactly what we have seen and what we are seeing, as other countries around the world are securing new trade deals with one another and deliberately excluding the United States from said deals.

So, Lynn is correct to point out that foreign corporations have incurred costs because of the Trump tariffs. However, despite his repeated implication to the contrary, this is not money that goes to the US Treasury. Volkswagen, for example, has raised the price of its 2026 models by up to 6.5 percent, largely due to tariffs, and has indicated that this is just the beginning. That’s more money coming out of American consumers’ pockets. At these higher prices, American consumers are purchasing fewer Volkswagens than last year. Volkswagen’s losses from the tariffs include an almost 30 percent decline in profits from auto sales. Importantly, sales that do not happen count toward the reduced profit that Volkswagen reported but generate no tariff revenue for the Treasury to collect. That Lynn, a financial commentator, does not understand this distinction is deeply troubling.

Who Really Pays the Tariff?

Lynn’s central argument rests on a fundamental confusion between what economists refer to as the “legal incidence” and the “economic incidence” of a tax. Legally, because tariffs are a tax on imports, it is the US importers who must write the check to Customs and Border Protection. But this says nothing about who actually pays the tariff.

For example, when landlords’ property taxes go up, who pays? The landlord will obviously write the check to the county assessor, but unless Lynn thinks that landlords are running charities, that cost gets passed on to tenants in the form of higher rent, less frequent maintenance, or fewer included benefits (utilities or access to designated parking, for example). The legal incidence falls on the landlord, but the economic incidence falls disproportionately on renters, i.e., young Americans already besieged by high housing costs.

Tariffs work the same way. US Customs and Border Protection bills the American importer directly, which is the legal incidence of the tariff. But the economic burden gets distributed among American consumers, American importers, and foreign exporters, depending on the particulars of the individual markets.

Lynn cites the Harvard Pricing Lab finding an approximately 20 percent “pass-through rate,” meaning that American consumers are only paying about one-fifth of the tariff costs. He treats this as a permanent feature of the tariff regime and as proof that foreigners are footing the bill. But the question isn’t who writes the check today, it’s who bears the cost over time. And here, the evidence directly contradicts Lynn’s fables.

As we have seen, pass-through rates are not static, but evolve over time as markets adjust. And every piece of evidence suggests that the pass-through rate has been and is continuing to rise rapidly. Goldman Sachs and the Council on Foreign Relations tracked the evolution over just this administration. Their findings are stunning: In June, US businesses absorbed about 64 percent of the tariff costs, American consumers about 22 percent, and foreign exporters about 14 percent in the form of reduced profits. Just four months later, American businesses absorbed just 27 percent, while American consumers absorbed 55 percent and exporters absorbed 18 percent. Projections for 2026 continue the trend with consumers absorbing 67 percent, exporters 25 percent, and importers just 8 percent.

The logic behind this is simple and has been echoed by President Trump and Scott Bessent themselves. In the initial months following Liberation Day, American importers could not quickly shift to alternative suppliers, giving them little leverage to demand price cuts from existing foreign vendors. Many American importers also believed (or hoped?) that the tariffs were simply a negotiating tool that would be bargained away. Having built up inventories before April, they were able to avoid raising consumer prices, with the belief that the “temporary pains would be worth the long term gains.”

That’s no longer the case. As the BLS notes in its latest import price index report, the price of imports has barely changed. This matters because US importers, not foreign sellers, are legally required to write the tariff check. American buyers pay the foreign company’s price, then pay the tariff on top of it. If foreigners were truly absorbing the tariffs, they’d have to lower their prices to compensate, and we would see a decrease in the import price index. We haven’t. The index is flat, which is evidence that the burden of the tariff is, as economists warned, being paid disproportionately by Americans in one form or another. As the Council on Foreign Relations analysis points out, by October, importers have “had time to seek alternative suppliers, giving them a bit more negotiating leverage.” More importantly, the “trade deals” that the administration has inked have made it clear that substantially higher tariffs are here to stay. All of this gives importers and retailers good reason to continue passing more of the costs along to consumers.

We are already seeing evidence of this happening. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s survey of small and medium-sized businesses, for example, confirms this dynamic. Firms expecting tariffs to persist for a year or longer plan to pass through three times more of their cost increases to consumers than firms expecting short-lived tariffs. As of August, over 45 percent of affected businesses expected their costs to be impacted for longer than a year.

But how does all of this compare to the pass-through rate felt during the 2018–2019 tariffs? The Harvard Pricing Lab — the same data that Lynn cites — actually undermines his entire argument. After just six months, the 2025 tariff pass-through rate is indeed around 20 percent. But if we compare this to the 2018 tariffs, the difference is night and day. After Trump’s first-term tariffs, the pass-through rate stayed under 5 percent after a full year. This isn’t evidence that these tariffs are working. It’s evidence that these tariffs are hitting consumers harder and faster than the previous round.

“This is where Canada is now”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison handily sums up the state of the nation:

I’ve reached the point most people hit right before systems fail.

The point where facts stop working.

Charts don’t matter. Reports don’t matter. Evidence doesn’t matter. You can post receipts until your fingers cramp and political partisans will still clap, chant, and rationalize while the house fills with smoke. They are not misinformed. They are committed. And commitment beats reality every time.

That’s where Canada is now.

The Liberals and the NDP no longer govern with outcomes in mind. They govern with narratives. If the story sounds compassionate, the damage underneath is waved away as acceptable collateral. Housing explodes. Healthcare buckles. Food banks flood. Productivity sinks. And if you point to any of it, you’re told to be kinder, quieter, or more patient.

Patience is a luxury people without power can’t afford.

What scares me isn’t just the policies. It’s the psychology. We are watching a ruling class that confuses control with competence and optics with success. Every failure is met with more management, more spending, more moral language, and less accountability. When reality resists, they don’t change course. They tighten.

That’s where Mark Carney enters the picture, and why he should worry anyone paying attention.

Carney doesn’t speak like a democratic leader. He speaks like a risk officer explaining why losses are necessary. “Sacrifice.” “Stability.” “Confidence.” These are not solutions. They are words used when the model is failing but the managers refuse to admit it. In his world, the problem is never the plan. It’s public resistance to the plan.

That mindset is poison in a democracy.

The Liberals broke affordability and papered it over with subsidies. The NDP cheered and demanded more of the same. Now Carney offers to professionalize the decline. Smoother language. Tighter controls. Bigger levers. Less dissent. He doesn’t promise prosperity. He promises management.

Here’s the part people don’t want to hear.

You can’t fix a country by overruling its citizens.
You can’t tax, regulate, borrow, and moralize your way out of shortages.
You can’t feed kids, house families, or staff hospitals with press releases.

And when governments start treating criticism as a threat rather than a warning, history tells us what comes next. Not reform. Hardening. Surveillance language. Emergency logic. Ever broader definitions of “harm”. Ever fewer off ramps.

This is how civilizations don’t collapse in a bang. They collapse in meetings.

I don’t expect to convince partisans anymore. That window is gone. This is a warning, not an argument.

If you are still cheering while food banks replace paycheques, while hospitals ration care, while housing becomes a privilege, while leaders talk about sacrifice without ever naming their own, understand this: they are not fiddling while Rome burns. They are insisting the fire is necessary.

And once that belief sets in, facts won’t save us. Only consequences will.

By then, our children are already in the smoke.

December 29, 2025

The war against white men didn’t start in 2015

Filed under: Business, Economics, Education, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo responds to Jacob Savage’s essay on the “lost generation” of young white men who have been subject to open and explicit discrimination in education, employment, and loudly denounced for noticing this:

Most people who have discussed Savage’s essay accept his time frame: that the exclusion of white men took place mainly over the past ten to fifteen years. But this is not true. It has been going on for much longer than that, as Nathan Glazer made clear in his comprehensive Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, first published in 1975 and updated in 1987. Government initiatives to provide jobs for women and racial minorities, particularly blacks, were rooted in the equal rights legislation of the 1960s, implemented later that decade and aggressively expanded in the 1970s and 1980s. The National Organization for Women under the leadership of Betty Friedan, for example, brought a lawsuit against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to force it to comply with federal legislation, and sued the country’s 1300 largest corporations for alleged sex discrimination.

Anyone wishing to read a detailed prehistory of what Savage has chronicled can also consult Martin Loney’s extensively documented The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada (1998), which shows how what was called equity hiring in Canada spread across areas such as the police force, firefighting, the civil service, crown corporations, law, teaching, academia, and elsewhere, beginning in the 1980s. What Glazer’s and Loney’s research shows is that discrimination against white men in employment is far more deeply embedded than most people realize and has affected many more men than is currently recognized.

It is ridiculous to castigate Boomer white men, as it seems popular now to do, for allegedly implementing and benefiting from diversity policies. The last thing that should be encouraged is for younger white men to turn their anger on older white men. Many of these older men themselves faced active discrimination, psychological warfare, divorce-rape, and immiseration. Every organ of the culture told them it was time to change, get with it, stop being Archie Bunker, recognize the superior merits of the women and racial minorities their people had allegedly oppressed for so long. White women were by far the majority and most enthusiastic architects and proponents of equity hiring, bullied in turn by the black and brown women with whom they originally formed their alliance against white men (and all men, with a few exceptions).

Older white men may have secured (tenuous) positions of power, but they had no power in themselves as white men. Most of them knew they could find themselves disgraced, friendless, and jobless as the result of an unpopular decision or an unguarded statement. Accusations of sexual misconduct to take such men out of their positions were not confined to millennial males.

I was in the academic job market in 1997, and diversity hiring was already commonplace then. Everyone knew it was going on, and it was signaled both explicitly and implicitly in the advertisements that encouraged applications from women and visible minorities. My friend Steve Brule remembers when affirmative action was brought in at the large chemical company where he worked in 1984. At the beginning, it was said that these programs would be time-limited, lasting only for a short season. Instead, they lasted for well over 40 years and are still going strong.

It is foolish to imagine that such discrimination is now going to lie down and die. There have been a number of occasions over the last few years in which that was confidently predicted (remember Claudine Gay?) and did not occur. Already the diversity advocates, who are legion, are marshalling their counter-arguments and nit-picking the evidence, finding (or lying about) the ways in which what Savage described hasn’t really happened, recalibrating numbers, rationalizing and justifying them. Thousands of academics will spend years joining forces to discredit claims about discrimination, recasting them as a MAGA or Groyper lament and a dangerous attack on the legitimate (but still inadequate!) gains made by valiant women and long-oppressed racial minorities. Recently for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle, in an ostensibly critical article, is still playing with false justifications and outlandish untruths, saying the following about the rationale for equity hiring:

    … One could say of course it’s unfair, but repairing the legacy of slavery and sexism is a hard problem, and sometimes hard problems have unfair solutions. It wasn’t fair to round up huge numbers of men born between 1914 and 1927 and send them off to fight the Nazis, but that was the only way to win.

    One might argue that, but I haven’t seen anyone do so. No one seems brave enough to state baldly that we should penalize White men born in 1988 for hiring decisions that were made in 1985 by another White guy who was born in 1930. Instead what I’ve seen is a lot of deflection.

What bizarre nonsense, what spurious claims even if her point is that such logic is ugly. Discrimination in favor of white men has been illegal since 1964, and affirmative action/equity hiring was already fully in place by the mid-1980s when the “white guy who was born in 1930” was allegedly discriminating in his hiring practices. As McArdle inadvertently shows, we’ve been operating on the basis of deliberately-perpetrated false beliefs for years, beliefs that the intelligentsia adhered to and promulgated.

On the City Journal Substack, Renu Mukherjee argues that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is correct that “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is stop discriminating on the basis of race”:

First, public opinion is clear: Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds have long opposed the use of racial and identity-based preferences. While this trend extends to employment, I’ve studied it extensively in the context of college admissions. The data underscore Americans’ strong support for colorblind meritocracy.

One year before the Supreme Court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether an applicant’s race or ethnicity should be a factor in the college admissions process. 74 percent of respondents said that it should not, including 79 percent of whites, 59 percent of blacks, 68 percent of Hispanics, and 63 percent of Asian Americans. By way of comparison, 93 percent of Americans said that high-school grades should be a factor in college admissions, and 85 percent said the same about standardized test scores. Several surveys since then have produced similar results.

A May 2023 study that I co-authored with my Manhattan Institute colleague Michael Hartney reinforces this point. Through an original survey experiment on the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we asked Americans to play the role of an admissions officer and decide between two competing medical-school applicants. While the applicants’ accomplishments were randomly varied, the specific pair of applicants that respondents saw always consisted of an Asian American male and a black male.

Our objective was to determine whether, and when, Americans believe diversity should take precedence over merit in medical-school admissions. We found that even when respondents were informed that the medical school lacked diversity, the vast majority made their admissions decisions based on merit — in this case, college grades and MCAT scores — not race.

A few months prior to the publication of that paper, for a separate report, I reviewed hundreds of survey questions on affirmative action stored on the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research’s online database. I found that Americans are most likely to say that they oppose “affirmative action” when survey language explicitly describes the policy as providing “preferential treatment” or “preferences” for a given group. This suggests a deep American aversion to racial and gender-based favoritism — which is why Democrats, when pushing policies rooted in such ideology, tend to rely on euphemisms. Republicans should not do what even Democrats know doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, they have sounded like they might. Several prominent Republicans have taken to the social media platform X to argue that “Heritage Americans” — those who can trace their lineage to the Founding era — are inherently superior to more recent arrivals. In doing so, they suggest that the former are entitled to preferential treatment on the basis of ancestry. Here, the logic is that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.

Republican leaders, such as Vice President JD Vance, should reject such grievance-based politics. These ideas were unpopular when Democrats pushed them, and they will be unpopular when Republicans try them, too.

Will 2026 finally be the year Canada abandons food cartels?

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

For reasons unknown, Canadian politicians both left and right have been willing to sacrifice almost anything in trade negotiations except the cosy protectionist scheme we call “supply management”, which enriches a tiny number of farmers in Ontario and Quebec by keeping grocery prices significantly higher than the free market price. On his Substack, The Food Professor predicts that Prime Minister Carney will be forced to give up this market-rigging, anti-consumer scheme in the coming year:

Image from Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University

As we enter 2026, several forces are converging to reshape Canada’s food economy. Consumer empowerment — amplified by social media — continues to accelerate, while geopolitics, particularly tensions with our southern neighbour, are becoming increasingly disruptive. Together, these dynamics will push food policy issues that once lived in technical silos into the public spotlight.

At the top of that list sits CUSMA and supply management. Prime Minister Carney has signaled firmness on market access, backed by legislation that shields supply management from parliamentary debate. That protection, however, is unlikely to endure. Even if the United States has little genuine interest in exporting more dairy to Canada — and even if Canadian consumers show limited appetite for it — President Trump now understands, far better than during his first term, that supply management is a potent political wedge. The system protects roughly 9,400 dairy farmers who exert disproportionate influence over agricultural policy, while compensation payments continue to flow without any meaningful reduction in production or market share. For a growing number of Canadians, this arrangement increasingly resembles a closed loop rather than a public good. The irony is that global demand for dairy is rising and Canadian milk should be part of that growth story. Instead, the system prioritizes insulation over ambition — a missed opportunity at a time when competitiveness should matter most.

January 1 also marks the formal implementation of new front-of-package nutrition labels. Although these symbols have been appearing on shelves for some time, many consumers either overlook them or misunderstand their purpose. Their real impact has been largely invisible to the public: they have already reshaped how food companies formulate products, invest in research, and redesign portfolios. Whether the labels meaningfully change consumer behaviour remains debatable, but their influence on product development is no longer.

[…]

Finally, 2026 coincides with the United Nations’ International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists — a timely moment to reset the debate around meat consumption and livestock production. Rangelands underpin global meat systems by converting grasslands — often unsuitable for crops — into high-quality protein. In a world where demand for animal protein continues to grow, portraying livestock as inherently incompatible with sustainability ignores nutritional, economic, and ecological realities. Well-managed grazing supports rural livelihoods, strengthens export economies, and can enhance biodiversity and soil health rather than undermine them. If policymakers are serious about food security, climate resilience, and affordability, 2026 should mark a shift away from apologizing for meat production and toward recognizing livestock as a strategic pillar of resilient food systems — not a sector to be regulated out of existence

December 28, 2025

It may seem petty to deny entry to EUrocrats, but it’s all they will understand

Filed under: Europe, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At first, I thought it was just another bout of Trump being deliberately petty over trivial stuff, but on reflection, it’s actually a neat way to bring home the message to the EU bureaucrats personally that they will be held responsible for their actions:

RE: Free Speech & Denying Visas to Euro Autocrats

The very most Orwellian mind game happening in the world today is the way authoritarian globalists are attempting to redefine the concept of “free speech”.

In America, “free speech” has long meant that we are free to say or write virtually anything without fear of government intervention or suppression. It is this ability to express whatever we want that makes it “free”.

The authoritarian globalists, however, have stood this on its head. They have decided that in order for their citizens to be “free”, they must be free of ever hearing or reading any speech that might offend someone or sow doubt as to government policies. To these fascists, “free speech” means GOVERNMENT MODERATED speech which somehow — through its moderation — sets people “free” from ever hearing conflicting views. As I said — straight out of Orwell.

Europe is, of course, the hotbed of this fascist redefinition of what free speech means, but we in America have only narrowly escaped this plague by electing Trump. Remember, Biden and his team were reliant on institutionally stamping out so-called “disinformation” as a means of control over the populace. We must be ever vigilant here in the USA that such thuggish government criminality never again be allowed to prosper.

I think it is very important that every citizen of the USA and the world understand the depths of depravity these people will sink to in order to control ordinary people. This is about mind control, and nothing else.

Ultimately, the value of true free speech is that it embraces the idea that we all have agency over ourselves; that we are free individuals who can and should hear conflicting views, and decide for ourselves what is true and just, and what is untrue and unjust. This is sovereignty over the self, and unfortunately Europe has never let go of the concept of serfdom, so self-sovereignty is a threat that must be stamped out.

The Trump Administration has been prescient, bold and effective in denying visas to the Eurotrash autocrats who would see free speech reduced to whatever speech unelected bureaucrats deem acceptable. I cannot commend Trump enough for the thoughtfulness and importance of that action.

In a world where almost all humans are linked by essentially the same communications platform, only one world leader is truly standing for free speech: Donald Trump. And I thank him for it. We all should — even the TDS sufferers.

For a relevant example, Dries Van Langenhove:

Update, 29 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.

QotD: The Middle Ages saw rebellions but no revolutions

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

At some point in this space, we discussed the difference between a rebellion and a revolution. Drawing on Michael Walzer’s key work The Revolution of the Saints, I argued that a true revolution requires ideology, as it’s an attempt to fundamentally change society’s structure.

Therefore there were no revolutions in the Middle Ages or the Ancient World, only rebellions — even a nasty series of civil wars like The Wars of the Roses were merely bloody attempts to replace one set of rulers with another, without comment on the underlying structure. A medieval usurpation couldn’t help but raise questions about “political theory” in the broadest sense — how can God’s anointed monarch be overthrown? — but medieval usurpers understood this: They always presented the new boss as the true, legitimate king by blood. I forget how e.g. Henry IV did it — Wiki’s not clear — but he did, shoehorning himself into the royal succession somehow.

Combine that with Henry’s obvious competence, Richard II’s manifest in-competence, and Henry’s brilliant manipulation of the rituals of kingship, and that was good enough; his strong pimp hand took care of the rest. Henry IV was a legitimate king because he acted like a legitimate king.

A revolution, by contrast, aims to change fundamental social relations. That’s why medieval peasant rebellions always failed. Wat Tyler had as many, and as legitimate, gripes against Richard II as Henry Bolingbroke did, but unlike Henry’s, Tyler’s gripes couldn’t really be addressed by a change of leadership — they were structural. 200 years later, and the rebels were now revolutionaries, willing to give structural change a go.

Severian, “¡Viva la Revolución!”, Founding Questions, 2025-02-27.

December 27, 2025

Diversity is not our strength, no matter how many times they say it is

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter responds to a post from Martin Sellner on the visible results of institutionalized “diversity”:

These are the consequences of anti-white policies!

“DEI” has robbed an entire white generation of their careers and thus the realization of their life plans.

The infographics show the impact of the “DEI” policies on a whole generation of white male millennials.

John Carter:

The young white men whose lives were derailed by this psychosis amount to millions of quiet personal tragedies — careers that didn’t launch, marriages that never happened, children who were never born.

But the civilizational fallout is even worse.

The diversity shoved into the places that should have gone to talented young white men has proven itself unequal to the task, to put it mildly. They weren’t smart enough to be mentored for the positions they occupied. As the boomers shuffle away into retirement, they’ll take their knowledge and skills with them — knowledge and skills that weren’t passed onto the diversity (which was incapable of learning it), but also weren’t passed on to talented young white men (who could have mastered it, but were prevented from doing so). Since the diversity is too dumb to master that material, it’s certainly too dumb to pass it on. The chain of knowledge transmission is broken.

Autodidacticism only goes so far. There’s only so much you can learn from books and YouTube videos. There’s ultimately no replacement for hands on professional training. Those talented young white men have gotten very good at podcasting, trading crypto, growing their presence in the attention economy … But by and large they haven’t been allowed to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. Maybe that won’t matter in the end because of AI, but in the meantime, if you think the quality of everything has nosedived throughout the Cancelled Years, you really haven’t seen anything yet. The dwindling old guard of white male boomers is the only force keeping the lights on. When they leave, the real darkness closes in.

December 24, 2025

The real agenda

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Karl Harrison makes a case for fighting against the key element of the federal government’s all-encompassing drive to control the lives of Canadians because it’s the one that will enable all the other controls to operate:

All Canadians should read this carefully:

“They are flooding Parliament with distraction bills so the public is overwhelmed and cannot see the one bill that makes the entire system possible. More than a dozen federal bills are advancing simultaneously — each attacking a different pillar of Canadian freedom but S206 is the key. They fall into clear clusters:

Bills attacking due process and court rights.
Bill S-206 — Administrative Monetary Penalties (the central pillar) enables penalties without hearings, judges, trials, or common-law protections.
Bill C-63 — Online Harms Act. Undefined “harm”, digital speech penalties, CRTC enforcement authority.
Bill C-27 — Digital Charter Act. Creates federal AI regulators empowered to issue compliance orders without court oversight.
Bill C-52 — Beneficial Ownership Transparency. Expands federal surveillance and administrative enforcement.

Bills attacking parliamentary supremacy (power shift to agencies).
Bill C-26 — Critical Cyber Systems Act. Sweeping regulation by order-in-council, bypassing Parliament.
Bill C-11 — Online Streaming Act. Gives the CRTC unprecedented control over content curation and digital reach.
Bill C-18 — Online News Act. Allows federal regulators to determine access to, and compensation for, digital journalism.

Bills attacking property rights.
Bill C-234 — Agricultural Fuel Restrictions. Expands federal control over farm operations and production.
Bill S-241 — Jane Goodall Act. Sweeping biosafety authority over wildlife, land, and private property.
Bill C-49 — Atlantic Accord Amendments. Expands federal control over offshore land, climate restrictions, and energy development.

Bills attacking freedom of speech and assembly
Bill C-63 — Online Harms Act. Criminalizes undefined “harm”, empowers bureaucrats to judge speech.
Bill C-261 — Misleading Communications Act. Penalties for “misleading” speech — undefined and discretionary.
Bill C-70 — Foreign Interference Act. Mass surveillance powers with vague thresholds.

Bill attacking religion freedom.
Bill C-9 — “Harmful Conduct” Redefinition. Allows the state to regulate spiritual beliefs and pastoral work under “harm”.

The critical pattern. Different bills, different sectors and different rights being attacked. But here is the truth: Every single one of these bills depends on ONE central enforcement pillar, and that pillar is:
Bill S-206 — The Administrative Penalty Switch

Bill S-206, the hub of the entire system, gives federal departments the power to issue penalties without:
▪︎ a hearing
▪︎ a judge
▪︎ a trial
▪︎ due process
▪︎ common-law protections
▪︎ judicial review in practice

It turns federal agencies into their own courts — investigator, prosecutor, judge, and enforcer. No democracy on Earth should tolerate this.

This is the enforcement engine behind:
▪︎ Digital ID
▪︎ CBDCs
▪︎ Carbon allowances
▪︎ Biosafety / One Health rules
▪︎ Smart-meter penalties
▪︎ Travel scoring
▪︎ Online speech controls
▪︎ Zoning & land-use mandates

Data alone cannot control a population. They need the power to punish. S-206 provides it. Remove the keystone → the arch collapses.

Why scatter us with other bills? Because if Canadians focus on S-206, the agenda dies The distraction bills serve one purpose:
▪︎ to scatter attention and exhaust the public.
▪︎ to keep citizens debating side issues
▪︎ to hide the enforcement bill under noise
▪︎ to make resistance impossible to organize
▪︎ to create outrage fatigue
This is how large control systems are built — through distraction around the edges while the core is slipped into place.

What are they building – and why S-206 is the core. Here is the architecture of the planned digital-governance system:
▪︎ Digital ID → who you are
▪︎ CBDCs → what you buy
▪︎ Carbon scoring → how you move & heat your home

December 23, 2025

How Black WWII Veterans Ignited the Civil Rights Movement – W2W 058

Filed under: Education, Government, History, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 22 Dec 2025

Decades before the words Black Lives Matter existed, Black American veterans were already fighting the same battle at home. After World War II, hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers returned from the frontlines of Europe and Asia believing they had earned the rights they had defended abroad. Instead, they were met with segregation, voter suppression, police violence, and terror under Jim Crow laws.

This episode explores how Black WWII veterans became a driving force behind the early Civil Rights Movement — joining the NAACP, challenging segregation in court, organizing protests, and refusing to accept second-class citizenship in the nation they had fought to protect.

From the brutal blinding of veteran Isaac Woodard Jr., to landmark legal battles led by Thurgood Marshall, from the Journey of Reconciliation to Brown v. Board of Education, this is the story of how the fight for freedom moved from foreign battlefields to American streets, courtrooms, buses, and classrooms.

We follow the rise of mass nonviolent resistance through figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the creation of the SCLC — while also confronting the violent backlash, political resistance, and human cost that defined the struggle.

This is not just the history of civil rights legislation. It is the story of veterans who refused to stop fighting — and a reminder that equality in the United States has never been automatic, inevitable, or finished.
(more…)

Suspicious work-permit activity in Saskatoon

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Darshan Maharaja links to a detailed Reddit post that reveals some pretty shady stuff operated out of a small office in Saskatoon:

The Reddit user, /u/SimonBirchDied, says this is the result of only fifteen minutes of investigation:

Like countless others, I’ve grown disheartened and disillusioned with the hiring process in Saskatoon and Canada as a whole. Some of you may have seen more attention around job postings on JobBank offering seemingly great wages, yet applying for LMIA’s due to no suitable local candidates. This post is simply meant to expose what appear to be obvious scams in Saskatoon, so please don’t let it devolve into derogatory racial or immigration issues. This is about the exploitation of both immigrants and the Canadian working class.

Looking at Saskatoon on lmiamap.org, which is a webmap that takes data from JobBank showing businesses that have been approved for LMIA permits, you can see business that have been granted LMIA’s to hire temporary foreign workers. A permit given “>only if no suitable Canadian citizen or permanent resident is available to fill the position. The process is designed to ensure that Canadian workers are considered first for available jobs.”

For example, in 2024 Road Rex Trucking Inc. was granted 5 LMIA permits. When you search Road Rex Trucking Inc., their company address is 2002 Quebec Ave, which is a small generic office building home to the likes of the famous MLM “World Financial Group”. Oddly enough, from one angle on Google Street View the building is blurred, which means someone has specifically reached out to Google and requested it be blurred for privacy.

When you look at their website, https://roadrextrucking.com/team-2/, their “Team” has very generic, obviously stock photos with names that, on the surface, don’t seem to match.

Oddly, the website makes no mention of the sole registered director of Road Rex Trucking Inc, Jaspreet Singh Dhaliwal. There is only one result for that name in Saskatoon, and here is his Facebook account, flexing in front of fancy cars and on vacations. Some of his pictures appear to match the buildings in the Saskatoon neighborhood of Road Rex Trucking Inc’s corporate registered address.

When you Google the name of their founder, Alaxis. D. Dowson, there’s dozens of websites with the exact same template as Road Rex Trucking Inc, with the same layout and “team members”, but for different businesses like electronics, solar panels etc., and listed in all sorts of locations from Edmonton to Dubai.

As they say on the interwebs, Read the whole thing.

December 20, 2025

Ours is a culture that actively conspires against and sabotages its own children

Filed under: Business, Economics, Education, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Following up on yesterdays post (here) on the viral essay about the Millennial “lost generation”, John Carter enumerates the extent of damage done to Millennials in general and Millennial men in particular:

A Bloomberg report from 2023 tracked reported hiring by 88 Standard & Poor’s 100 companies and of 323,094 reported hires from 2018-2021, only 6% were white.

The response to the essay has been an outpouring of suppressed rage that has been simmering for years in an emotional pressure cooker of silenced frustration. The author, Jacob Savage, provides a ground-level view of the DEI revolution’s human cost, beginning with his personal experiences as an aspiring screenwriter, and then widening the reader’s perspective via interviews with would-be journalists and academics. Every subject described a similar pattern of frustrated ambitions in which, starting around the middle of the 2010s, their careers stalled out for no other reason than their melanin-deficiency and y-chromosome superfluity. Young white men were systematically excluded from every institutional avenue of prestige and prosperity. Doors were closed in academia, in journalism, in entertainment, in the performing arts, in publishing, in tech, in the civil service, in the corporate world. It didn’t matter if you wanted to be a journalist, a novelist, a scientist, an engineer, a software developer, a musician, a comedian, a lawyer, a doctor, an investment banker, or an actor. In every direction, Diversity Is Our Strength and The Future Is Female; every job posting particularly encourages applications from traditionally underrepresented and equity-seeking groups including women, Black and Indigenous People Of Colour, LGBTQ+, and the disabled … a litany of identities in which “white men” was always conspicuous by its absence.

The Lost Generation does not rely only on the pathos of anecdote. Savage includes endless reams of data, demonstrating how white men virtually disappeared from Hollywood writing rooms, editorial staff, university admissions, tenure-track positions, new media journalism, legacy media, and internships. He shows how, after the 2020s, they even stopped bothering to apply, because what was the point? The comprehensive push to exclude young white men from employment wasn’t limited to prestigious creative industries, of course. The corporate sector has also adopted a practice of hiring anyone but white men, as revealed two years ago by a Bloomberg article which gloated that well over 90% of new hires at America’s largest corporations weren’t white.

The Bloomberg article was criticized for methodological flaws, but judging by the outpouring of stories it elicited (just see the several hundred comments my own essay got, the best of which I summarized here) it was certainly directionally accurate.

The real strength of Savage’s article isn’t the cold statistics, though, but the heartrending poignancy with which it highlights the emotional wreckage left in the wake of this cultural revolution.

Hiring processes are opaque. If an employer doesn’t extend an offer, they rarely explain why; at best one receives a formulaic “thank you for your interest in the position, but we have decided to move forward with another applicant. We wish you the best of luck in your endeavours.” They certainly never come out and say that you didn’t get hired because you’re a white man, which is generally technically illegal, for whatever that is worth in an atmosphere in which the unspoken de facto trumps the written de jure. Candidates are not privy to the internal deliberations of hiring committees, which will always publicly claim that they hired the best candidate. Officially a facade of meritocracy was maintained, even as meritocracy was systematically dismantled from within.

The power suit-clad feminists who body-checked their padded shoulder into C-suites and academic departments in the 1970s flattered themselves that they were subduing sexist male chauvinism by outdoing the boys at their own game and forcing the patriarchy to acknowledge their natural female excellence. Growing up I would often hear professional women say things like “as a woman, to get half as far as a man, you have to be twice as good and work twice as hard”. [NR: usually with a smug “fortunately, that’s not difficult” tacked on] The implication of this was that women were just overall better than men, because the old boy’s club held the fairer sex to a higher standard than it did the good old boys. Of course this was almost never true, these women were overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs motivated by anti-discrimination legislation that opened up any corporation that didn’t put a sufficient number females on the payroll to ruinous lawsuits. Moreover, a fair fraction of them were really being recruited as decorative additions to the secretarial harems of upper management. Nevertheless it helped lay the foundation for the Future Is Female boosterism that stole the future from a generation of young men.

There was a time, not so long ago, where I naively assumed that my own situation was simply the inverse of the one women had faced in the 70s and 80s. I was aware that I was being rather openly discriminated against, but imagined that this simply meant that I had to perform to a higher standard, that if I was good enough, the excellence of my work would shatter the institutional barriers and force someone to employ me. It took me several long and agonizing years to realize that this just wasn’t true. The crotchety patriarchs of the declining West may have been principled men capable of putting stereotypes aside to recognize merit; in fact, the historical evidence suggests that they overwhelmingly prized merit above any other consideration (just as the evidence suggests that their stereotypes were overwhelmingly correct). The priestesses of the present gynocracy hold themselves to no such standard. They don’t care about your promise or your performance, at all. If anything, performing well is a strike against you, because it threatens them. Nothing makes them seethe more than being outperformed by men. They champion mediocrity as much to punish as to promote.

Young white men had been raised to expect meritocracy. They’d also been raised to be racial and sexual egalitarians. People in the past, they believed, had been bigoted, believing superstitious stereotypes about differences of ability and temperament between the sexes and races that had no foundation in reality, pernicious falsehoods that were developed and propagated as intersectional systems of oppression with the purpose of justifying slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. Naturally they were appalled to have such charges laid at their feet, and so they they agreed that we were all going to try and correct this injustice, and we’d do it by carefully eliminating every potential source of racial or sexual bias, eliminating all the unfair barriers to advancement within society, in particular although not certainly not exclusively via university admissions and institutional hiring. That was the original official line on DEI: that it wasn’t about excluding white men, heaven forbid, no, it was simply about including everyone else, widening the talent pool so that we could ensure both the fairest possible system of advancement, and that the best possible candidates were given access to opportunity. In practice, we were told, this wouldn’t be a quota system: everything would still be meritocratic, but if it came down to a coin flip between two equally qualified candidates, one of whom was a white man and the other of whom was not, the not would win. Fair enough, the young white men thought at first: we’ll all compete on a level playing field, in fact we’ll even accept a bit of a handicap in the interests of correcting historical injustices, and may the best human win.

But the DEI commissars had absolutely no interest in a level playing field. That the playing field wasn’t already as level as it could be was, in fact, one of their most infamous lies. The arena has always been level: physics plays no favourites in the eternal struggle for survival and mastery. If some always end up on top – certain individuals, certain families, certain nations, certain races – this is invariably due to their own innate advantages over their competitors. An interesting example of this was provided by the Russian revolution. The Bolsheviks cast down the old Czarist aristocracy, stripping them of land, wealth, and status, and then discriminated against them in every way possible; a century later, their descendants had clawed their way back to power and prominence. The only possible conclusion from this is that the Russian aristocrats were, at least to some degree, aristos – the best, the noblest – in some sense that went beyond inherited estates.

The young white men did not think of themselves as aristocrats with a blood right to a certain position in life, but as contestants in a fair competition, who would rise or fall on their own merits and by their own efforts. They then abruptly found themselves competing in a system in which it was simply impossible for them to rise, but which also lied to them about the impassable barrier that had been placed in their way. If you noticed the unfairness, you were told that this was ridiculous, that as a white man you were automatically and massively privileged, that it was impossible to discriminate against you because of this, and that in addition to being a bigoted racist you were also quite clearly mediocre, a bitter little man filled with envy for the winners in life, the brilliant beautiful black women who had obviously outcompeted you because they were just so much smarter, so much more dedicated, and so much better because after all they had succeeded in spite of the deck being stacked against them whereas you had failed despite having been born with every unearned advantage in the world.

An entire generation had their future ripped from their hands, and were then told that it was their fault, their inadequacy. They were gaslit that there was no systemic discrimination against them, that their failure to launch was purely due to their individual failings … while at the same time being told that those who were so clearly the beneficiaries of a heavy thumb on the scale were the victims of discrimination, that the oppressors were the oppressed, and that to cry “oppression” yourself was therefore itself a form of oppression.

Do you see how cruel that is? How sadistic? It is more psychologically vicious by far than anything the Bolsheviks did to the Russian aristocracy. At least the Bolsheviks were honest. Although, it must be said, the psychological sadism of the gay race commissars is part of a tradition, communists have often been noted for their demonic cruelty.

“We don’t want to change Canada; we want the Canada we grew up in back”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Gun Owners of Canada refute claims that they want to change the nation and explain that the nation has been radically changed to the agenda of a small, urban pressure group by compliant politicians and civil servants:

For those of us who grew up in or lived through the 1980s and 1990s, the change is impossible to miss.

We remember a Canada where firearms ownership was ordinary, regulated, and largely uncontroversial. Target shooting, hunting, and collecting were part of everyday life. Gun clubs existed quietly on the edge of town. Weekend trap shoots, small-bore leagues, cadets, and hunting camps weren’t political statements, they were just normal parts of growing up.

That Canada had rules. Before the mid-1990s, ownership was governed through the Firearms Acquisition Certificate (FAC) system. You were screened, approved, and expected to act responsibly. Misuse was punished severely. But lawful owners weren’t treated as provisional citizens, waiting to see if the rules would change again next year.

Context matters. In the Canada of the 1980s, firearms that are now politically charged were treated very differently. The AR-15, for example, existed openly within the shooting sports community and was classified as non-restricted at the time. It was regulated, owned by vetted individuals, and largely absent from public controversy.

That isn’t shocking to people who lived through it. It simply illustrates how much the framework has shifted.

Firearms ownership in that era wasn’t limited to a single purpose. Most people participated through sport, hunting, or collecting. Some also possessed firearms with personal security in mind, particularly in rural areas, remote communities, or professions where police response was distant. This wasn’t sensationalized, and it wasn’t politicized. It was understood as part of lawful ownership, governed by responsibility and accountability.

In the Canada many of us grew up in, following the law meant something. If you complied with the rules as they existed, you could reasonably expect stability.

That’s what’s been lost.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Canada transitioned to the modern licensing system and expanded registration, classification, and regulation. The shooting sports community adapted, again, to our own fault. We trained, we licensed, we registered, and we complied in good faith.

What we didn’t grow up with was the idea that entire classes of legally owned firearms could be redefined by regulation overnight. Or that decades of compliance could still end in confiscation, not because of misuse, but because of shifting political definitions and political theatre.

When firearm owners push back against this, we’re told we want to “change Canada.”

From our perspective, we’re responding to the change, not demanding it.

Other democracies have recognized the risk in allowing lawful ownership to exist solely at the discretion of the government of the day. Some have taken steps to ensure that civilian firearms ownership, particularly for sport, hunting, and lawful personal security, is anchored in a way that prevents arbitrary reclassification, while still allowing strong regulation and oversight.

That idea isn’t radical. It’s about predictability, due process, and trust between citizens and governance.

Firearm owners aren’t asking for chaos. We’re asking for the same social contract we grew up with: follow the rules, be accountable and don’t have the ground shift beneath your feet without warning.

So, no. We don’t want to change Canada.

We want the Canada we knew, back:
One where responsibility mattered, laws were stable, and lawful communities weren’t erased by regulation.

Bring that Canada back. This one doesn’t resemble it, at all.

December 19, 2025

“2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life”

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

In Compact, Jacob Savage talks about the “Lost Generation” … not a reference to the group before the “Greatest Generation” who fought and died in their millions in the trenches of World War One … but a much more recent group who are still becoming living casualties of a war fought without weapons and uniforms, but just as bitter and unnecessary:

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man — and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you — in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing — it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014 — born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s — you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

[…]

Institutions pursuing diversity decided that there would be no backsliding. If a position was vacated by a woman or person of color, the expectation was it would be filled by another woman or person of color. “The hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse candidate,” a senior hiring editor at a major outlet told me. “If there was a black woman at the beginning of her career you wanted to hire, you could find someone … but if she was any good you knew she would get accelerated to The New York Times or The Washington Post in short order.”

The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.

And then 2020 happened, and the wheels came off.

[…]

There are many stories we tell ourselves about race and gender, especially in academia. But the one thing everyone I spoke to seemed to agree on is it’s best not to talk about it, at least not in public, at least not with your name attached. “The humanities are so small,” a millennial professor nervously explained. “There’s a difference between thinking something and making common knowledge that you think it,” said another.

So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.

“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and — quite frankly — I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”

The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times‘ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”

It didn’t matter that as far back as 2012 women were more likely to be tenure-track across the humanities than men, or that a 2015 peer-reviewed study suggested that STEM hiring favored women, or even that CUPAHR, an association of academic DEI professionals, found that “assistant professors of color (35 percent) and female assistant professors (52 percent) are overrepresented in comparison to US doctoral degree recipients (32 percent and 44 percent respectively).”

As in other industries, what mattered were the optics. When people looked at academia, they still saw old white men. Lots of them.

“A big part of why it’s hard to diversify is the turnover is really slow,” a tenured millennial professor explained. “And that’s become worse now, because Boomers live a long time.” Many elite universities once had mandatory retirement at 70. But in 1994, Congress sunsetted the academic exemption for age discrimination, locking in the demographics of the largely white male professoriate for a generation.

White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions — the pipeline for future faculty — white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).

Brendan O’Neill on the Islamophobia racket

Filed under: Australia, Government, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Brendan O’Neill criticizes Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in particular, but he’s just the most recent exemplar of western politicians trying to blame society in general and “right wing extremists” in particular for the terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists:

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke a total of 5,022 words in the day after the slaughter of Jews at Bondi Beach. And not one of those words was “Islam”. Or “Muslim”. Or even “Islamic extremism”.

He did talk about the “far right” though. Twice. We need to tackle “the rise of right-wing extremist groups”, he said.

What an odd thing to focus on the day after a father-and-son Islamofascist outfit had mown down 15 innocents, all while proudly displaying the black flag of ISIS.

To fret about the far right hours after suspected Islamic militants had carried out the worst slaughter of Jews in Australian history is cognitive dissonance of epic proportions.

It would be like turning up to the bloody aftermath of a KKK massacre and flat-out refusing to say the words “Klansmen”, “racist” or “white supremacist”. Well, we wouldn’t want to offend the pointed-hood community.

Some Australians were dumbfounded by the PM’s bullish refusal to name the ideology that fuelled this act of antisemitic savagery.

After all, at the time he was holding forth on the various threats to the Aussie way of life, officialdom had found the killers’ ISIS flag and other paraphernalia suggesting they had taken the knee to the death cult of radical Islam.

“What happened at Bondi was an act of radical Islamic terrorism”, thundered Sean Bell of the populist party One Nation. If the PM “cannot be honest” about the “radical Islamic ideology”, he said, “then he has no place leading the country”.

It’s hard to disagree. The first duty of a leader following the barbarous slaying of citizens is to tell the truth. If Albanese can’t even bring himself to mouth the words “Islamic extremism”, how’s he going to fight it?

The PM’s yellow-bellied dodging of the i-word was shocking but not surprising. Other Western leaders have behaved similarly in the wake of Islamist outrages. They have furiously thumbed their thesauruses for spins on the word “extremist” — fanatic, militant, evil — all so that they can avoid committing that most gauche faux pas in polite society: talking about the problems in Islam.

This is the dire handiwork of the Islamophobia industry. For years now, Islam has been ruthlessly ringfenced from free, frank discussion.

Mock Muhammad and you’ll be damned as “phobic”. Crack a joke about the Koran and you can expect a mob of fundamentalists at your front door. Say Islam has an extremism problem and the self-elected guardians of correct-think will drag you off for re-education.

We’ve witnessed the rehabilitation of medieval strictures against “blasphemy”. The end result is that even as women and children writhe in agony from the wounds inflicted on them by Islamist militants, still our leaders won’t say that i-word. It clogs in their throats. They dread cancellation more than they cherish truth.

[…]

After every attack, the same platitudes are trotted out. “Nothing to do with Islam”. “Islam is a religion of peace”. We’re gagged from naming the threat we face, from correctly identifying the men who are killing our fellow citizens.

Believe them when they show you what they are, Oz edition:

In The Line, Ariella Kimmel thinks there are signs that at least some political figures are getting the right lessons out of the events of the last few years:

In the wake of the terrorist attack in Bondi Beach, it seems as if leaders are finally starting to realize the risk of allowing antisemitic extremism to run unchecked for years.

Calgary’s new mayor offered a powerful example of what this means in practice.

At Calgary City Hall’s Chanukah celebration, Mayor Jeromy Farkas delivered remarks that stood out not only for their eloquence, but for their accountability. He spoke plainly about antisemitism and acknowledged the very real fear that Jewish communities are living with. Most importantly, he made clear that civic leadership means showing up publicly, consistently, and without excuses.

In a room of just over a thousand, he declared “let me be absolutely crystal clear. There is no place for antisemitism in Calgary. Not on our streets, not in our schools or campuses, not at protests, not online, not hidden behind slogans, not excused as politics, because Jewish lives are not expendable. Jewish safety is not expendable.”

That moment was especially symbolic given Calgary’s recent past. Two years ago, then-Mayor Jyoti Gondek refused to attend a Chanukah event amid pressure and controversy. Farkas’ presence this week marked a break from that pattern. It signalled that someone, finally, was willing to take responsibility.

That is what leadership looks like.

The Bondi Beach attack should force a reckoning in Canada. If we want to avoid becoming the next headline, this country must do more than mourn; we must decide, clearly and concretely, that extremism has consequences and that antisemitism will not be indulged.

In Canada, politicians were quick to offer condolences. Statements flowed with the standard lines – “my thoughts are with the community”, “our government condemns all forms of hate”, “no one should be targeted for practicing their religion”. The words are familiar, and quite frankly hollow, because for the past two years, many of the same leaders issuing their thoughts and prayers have either ignored, excused, or actively engaged with movements that normalize hostility toward Jews.

Since October 7, Jewish Canadians have watched as public spaces became hostile territory. Synagogues require police protection, while Jewish schools are shot at and community centres are defaced. Rallies openly glorify terrorist groups, call for the destruction of Israel, and chant slogans that any reasonable person understands as genocidal, such as calls to “globalize the intifada”, “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free”, “there is only one solution, intifada revolution”, and “resistance is justified”.

What makes the current moment particularly dangerous is the gap between rhetoric and reality among leaders. Politicians speak of fighting hate while refusing to enforce existing laws against intimidation, mischief, and hate-motivated harassment. They speak of unity while legitimizing groups and movements that openly reject the safety of Jewish communities, even giving funding through government programs meant to combat antisemitism, to organizations that perpetrate it. They issue statements condemning violence abroad while tolerating the ideological conditions that make violence inevitable at home.

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