Quotulatiousness

May 28, 2026

“Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred”

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is the natural end result of “hate speech” laws, as a court in Belgium clearly states in the finding quoted here:

These two paragraphs of my verdict are crucial for everyone to read and understand.

“Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.” 1⃣

“For Van Langenhove to have committed a crime, it is not necessary for him to have incited concrete acts of hate or violence. It suffices that others are incited to take on a general attitude of intolerance or disapproval regarding a group protected under the criteria of the Anti-Racism Law.” 2⃣

This means you can go to jail for “inciting hatred” even if your statements were 100% factual (see 1⃣) and even if you did NOT incite concrete acts of hate (see 2⃣).

The benchmark of “inciting hatred” , a crime punishable by prison, is thus “saying something that has the potential of inciting someone to have a general attitude of disapproval regarding a protected group“. This means literally any criticism of mass migration is now a punishable offence. If you cite a statistic, and someone could potentially think less of a protected group (like migrants) because of it, you can be jailed.

The craziest part is that there is no defence possible against this. I brought the scientific studies that I cited to court, but the judge didn’t care 1⃣. I also proved that the hundreds of students present at the lecture included students of all different political affiliations, and everyone was able to voice their opinion or ask questions. The lecture went very calmly, so obviously nobody was incited to hatred. But this too did not matter 2⃣, because if the judge says he believes there is the possibility that someone COULD be incited to “a general attitude of disapproval“, this is enough for the judge to send me to jail, even without any evidence.

I’m telling you this to warn you that by the time these hate speech laws have come into place, it’s already too late. You will NEVER be able to beat these laws in court. You have to stop them before they are implemented. Let my fate be your warning.

May 20, 2026

The seax as an English ethno-national equivalent to the kirpan

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Politics, Religion, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As most will know, the UK government has been steadily working to prevent UK citizens from carrying weapons of any time … except the religious exception for Sikhs to carry the kirpan, which is part of their faith. John Carter claims that the case for the Saxons to carry the seax is at least as strong:

Infamously, as one of its many assaults upon British tradition – the latest of which is the end of jury trials, a right Englishmen have enjoyed since the Magna Carta – the decline’s managers disarmed the British people. The right of (Protestant) Englishmen to keep and bear arms was enshrined in the Glorious Revolution’s 1689 Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment of the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights is essentially a reiteration of this ancient right of Englishmen; indeed, one of the complaints of the revolutionary colonists was that their rights as Englishmen were not being respected by the English crown. The right to bear arms was first expressed in the 1689 Bill of Rights, but its origin is much older, in the ancient Germanic understanding that a free man is an armed man, and that only slaves are prohibited the means of assuring their personal security. Britain’s managerial regime spent the twentieth century patiently gnawing away at the right to bear arms. It began its assault with licensing requirements in 1920, finally escalating to absolute bans following the 1988 Hungerford massacre and the 1996 Dunblane massacre.

As with all of its petty oppressions, the excuse for banning firearms has always been public safety, which the Yookish regime claims to prize much more highly than public liberty, which it does not claim to prize at all, that being the only honest thing about it. The sincerity of these invocations of safety is rendered dubious by the simultaneous premium Westminster, Whitehall, Number 10 Downing, and Buckingham Palace place upon the uninterrupted mass importation of humanoid dross from the most violently dysfunctional countries on the planet, which (notably) started in earnest at almost exactly the same time that the British people were disarmed.

It was not enough to take away the tools of self-defence. The principle of self-defence was also effectively eliminated: if a private citizen injures or kills a criminal in the course of defending himself against criminal predation, he will be charged as a criminal himself. The British people are expected to outsource their personal defence to police who refuse to defend them, in a country to which their government deliberately imports as many dangerous men as it can. Notably, defence against dangerous men of diversity is particularly frowned upon, because this is racist; indeed, even to complain about diversity danger is treated as a worse crime than rape, robbery, assault, or murder. The Yookay arrests more people for speechcrime than any other country on the planet.

Since firearms are banned, Britain’s criminal element has turned to knives, leading to a long-standing hysteria over knife crime. “Zombie-style knives” and “ninja swords” were banned in 2024 and 2025, while online knife sales now require 2-step age verification. There have even been calls to ban knives with sharp points, which would present certain challenges to the culinary arts. Meanwhile the stop-and-search policies intended to control knife crime on the streets are routinely derided as racist, as it is (surprise!) overwhelmingly young black men who are caught with concealed knives, which of course they conceal because their intent is to use them in the commission of robbery, assault, and murder. Which the British people are not permitted to defend themselves from, and which the Yookish police refuse to do anything about.

All of this raises the question of why, precisely, Digwa was walking around with a big knife.

The answer to this is that Digwa is a Sikh, and Sikhs have a special carve-out for the kirpan, a ceremonial knife which their religion mandates they carry with them at all times, as (if I understand correctly) a symbol of resistance to oppression and their readiness to always be prepared to defend the weak from injustice. Symbolic or not, the kirpan is a very real knife, with a very real edge.

The special religious dispensation granted Britain’s Sikhs is merely the most visible double-standard when it comes to keeping weapons. We saw another example during the Southport riots, when large numbers of Muslims turned out on the streets with machetes. Rather than arresting the lot of them (which the Yookish authorities couldn’t do, as they were busy filling the prisons with British protesters), the law enforcement officers on the scene advised them to hide their weapons in their mosque, which out of respect for the delicate sensibilities of the vibrant Islamic community the police would certainly never even dream of searching. One wonders just how many mosques are hiding caches of weapons.

Unlike the benevolently blind eye the Yookish authorities cast upon their treasured Muslims, however, the Sikh exemption is actually written into law.

As the Nowak case broke across social media a few days ago, a lot of people called for an end to this double standard. If whites are disarmed, then everyone else should be as well. There should be no special treatment on account of their heathen gods.

This is an understandable position, but I think it’s the wrong one. It is the thought pattern of The Raped.

Rather than wanting to drag Sikhs down to the subbasement of slavish cuckery into which they’ve been pressed, Anglo-Saxons should instead demand that they, too, be allowed to arm themselves.

The Sikh argument is that their faith requires that they be armed at all time.

The Saxon argument is similar to the Sikh, but if anything it is even more fundamental.

The name Saxon derives from the seax, the characteristic short sword carried by the Germanic invaders who made England their home in the 5th century. “Saxon” literally means “the sons of the knife”, “the people of the blade”, or “the swordsmen”.

The very identity of our tribe is intertwined with privately held armaments. This is pre-political; it’s pre-religious; for the Saxon, armaments are an identitarian symbol that goes to the very core of what a Saxon is. To remove the seax from the Saxon is to strip him of his identity. Which, of course, is the avowed goal of the Fabian social engineers who have laboured for generations to reconstitute the definite form of the Anglo-Saxon into a pliable mush of generic, vaguely-defined, ahistorical, and universally extensible “values” that no Anglo-Saxon had even heard of until five minutes ago.

The same principle obviously applies to knife crime. Criminals are opportunistic predators. They avoid hard prey. There’s profit in jacking up easy meat to get a free iPhone, but not so much in getting stabbed into fresh meat yourself. If every Saxon wore a seax, street crime would very rapidly become a non-issue.

Of course, from the perspective of the Yookish governing apparat, the powerlessness of its subjects against criminal predation is quite an insignificant price to pay in exchange for ensuring the powerlessness of the autochthonous helotry against the apparat itself. If anything it’s a bonus. The regular humiliation of being forced to endure low-level criminality encourages a feeling of helplessness. The rainbow communists will therefore never “allow” the Saxon to rearm himself.

But what if the Saxon wore the seax without permission?

May 14, 2026

Lynching

Filed under: History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Kratman shares some thoughts on lynching:

“1930 Lynching” by e-strategyblog.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

So, in honor of the white liberal idiots (Lord, forgive us our redundancies) and black race grifters, who seem to infest X, some old thoughts on lynching:

So I was musing on lynching. It occurred to me that merely because someone was lynched it does not necessarily follow that they were either innocent, nor that the lynching was improper or wrong. Of course, we think of it, or most of us do, today, as being a purely racist phenom, applied entirely to innocent black folks. Neither of those is true.

I think we can divide lynching into several different levels and levels of legitimacy.

1. In a place of high crime where the law does not exist. In this case, yes, of course, do what you must to preserve life, liberty, and property, to protect your friends, neighbors, and family.

2. In a place of high crime where the law exists but has become purely notional, where criminals are not generally pursued, tried, convicted, or punished, and where this is no real hope for improvement. In this case, too, lynching is likely legitimate, for two reasons, the ones set out above and, further, to humiliate the arms of the law and the political branches into doing their jobs.

3. In a place where the law exists, where criminals are pursued, tried, and convicted, things become murkier. Note that I left off “punished”. In this case, I would argue, the law has become as ineffective as #2, above. Parts of California under Soros-supported prosecutors, I am looking at you. On the whole, in these places, I would suggest that lynching has at least some legitimacy.

4. Illegitimate lynching starts where the law is operative, and largely works, but where people — and this is where black folks tend to come in — are both impatient and want to terrorize some folks into general acquiescence. I am thinking here of people dragged from jail, after conviction, and put to death. It’s been done to both whites and blacks, but more to blacks.

This is wrong both because of the terrorizing aspect AND because you have just, from the perspective of those same black folks, changed matters into something highly analogous to #1, above, the law doesn’t apply to or defend them, so of course they can legitimately engage in self-help.

5. The least legitimate form, indeed, it is totally illegitimate, is when the law works, but people just want to engage in self-help, largely for the reasons in #4, and without there ever being an indictment, presentation of evidence, conviction, or anything but a mob operating with a mob’s IQ, which is roughly that of a none-too-bright earthworm.

There are some odd nuances here. For example, take someone with diplomatic immunity who kills your child. I have no answer, yet, for this, but, as a practical and personal matter, have to say that I would personally hunt the son of a bitch down and have lumber and nails handy.

May 13, 2026

“Electoral authoritarian” regimes

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

eugyppius points out that the reflexive descriptions of the former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s government as “electoral authoritarian” fail to note just how authoritarian the rest of the EU’s national governments have become:

this description of an “electoral authoritarian” regime applies far more aptly to Germany than to Hungary. What did Orbán do, defund a few NGOs? meanwhile our police, intelligence agencies & state media have all collaborated for years to keep the opposition out of power.

And after some harumphing from the cheap seats, he followed up with:

Various people are clapping back at this, so let me tell you what is happen in liberal democratic non-authoritarian Germany:

– Getting raided by police, charged with speech crimes, etc. because you post online is a professional risk, I personally know various people to whom this has happened and I live my life with a bunch of opsec annoyances for the day it happens to me.

– State media coordinates with intelligence agencies to smear and harass not only the political opposition but their prominent supporters, for example by doxxing them, getting them fired, subjecting them to harassment.

– The state funds a vast “civil society” network of violent street thugs to intimidate the political opposition and also anybody identified by state-sanctioned ops like those detailed in the above item. Opposition party congresses, other events routinely disrupted by coordinated civil society protests, where the local population is sympathetic (as in many east German venues) they bus in protesters from the west and the big cities to create the necessary atmosphere.

– Domestic intelligence agencies use espionage methods to surveil and compromise the political opposition; among other things they pay informants, tap telephones, read emails, and so on. We’ve had various indications that materials gathered in these operations are then used for state media smear campaigns.

– Yes, domestic intelligence openly coordinates with state media and certain private media elements too. Various aspects of political coverage in Germany are staged by secretive unelected bureaucrats.

– Procedural rules, other laws are routinely changed in ad hoc ways to disadvantage political opposition, though we haven’t had any outright gerrymandering like in the US so that means Our Democracy is safe. 👍

And:

I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. I’ve spent years documenting this shit on my blog and literally none of the present Hungary hyperventilators have ever given the slightest shit. Orbán was a guy who observed the Euro freak show as it is manifested in countries like Germany and tried in a kind of inept half-hearted way to imitate this machine from the right, the results were ridiculous and transparent and like 25% as effective as what the German state gets up to but nevertheless all these clowns confronted with a hint of their own methods started shrieking about FaSciSm.

May 9, 2026

QotD: Morality and taxation

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

First off, “morality” doesn’t have jack shit to do with taxation. You pay what you legally owe. Nobody willingly pays the government more than they legally owe.

This has always been this way since America has had income taxes. There is endless court precedent. You pay what you legally owe. That’s it. If you pay less than you legally owe, then the government will fine or imprison you. If you pay more than you legal owe, the government will laugh and laugh, because you are an idiot, and you deserve to be poor.

Every single person who barks about how somebody else should be paying more? They themselves are paying the minimum they can get away with. As they should. As should you.

I remember when I was taking my first tax class back in college. This class was all accounting majors by this point. At the beginning of the semester the professor (who’d had a long career as a tax guy) gave us an imaginary family as our clients and had us do their taxes. One kid didn’t take advantage of all the obvious deductions for his clients. When the professor asked why, the kid said some mushy thing about how he didn’t think it was FAIR to keep that money from the government … Holy shit. The professor ripped this kid a new asshole. HOW DARE YOU!?! IT IS NOT THE GOVERNMENT’S MONEY! IT IS YOUR CLIENT’S MONEY. YOU OWE THEM YOUR BEST! IT IS YOUR SACRED DUTY TO SAVE THEIR MONEY! YOU DISGUST ME AND YOU SHOULD NEVER BE A CPA!

That class was one of my favorites.

Basically, you pay what you owe, no more, and anyone who claims otherwise is full of shit.

Larry Correia, “No, You Idiots. That’s Not How Taxes Work – An Accountant’s Guide To Why You Are A Gullible Moron”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2020-09-28.

May 4, 2026

Chief Narcissist of the Supreme Court of Canada

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, David Knight Legg explains why the Chief Justice should recuse himself from deliberation on an upcoming Supreme Court case involving the Freedom Convoy 2022:

Canada’s Chief Justice Richard Wagner has installed a lifelike bronze bust of himself in our highest court.

It should be called “Narcissus Canadiannus”

– There is no precedent for something this vulgar in the history of the Court. It should be taken down. Richard fancies himself.

– Richard also fancies his own opinion on things. He violated legal due process and the Court’s reputation by publicly accusing the Convoy — who protested backwards federal Covid policies that were soon dropped — of “anarchy” and “hostage taking”.

Now that the Convoy’s freedom of speech, assembly and due process rights have been asserted by lower courts the Supreme Court has to consider the appeal of the federal govt and weigh the rights of citizens against the decision of the federal government to impose the Emergencies Act to suspend those rights.

Wagner’s lack of judicial discretion in the first instance makes his recusal from such an important rights-defining case important because it signals not just fairness in the content of the decision but in the way the decision gets reached by the highest Court.

He has already shown his bias. Any decision against the convoy poisons the integrity of the Court if he remains present.

But Richard — the man with the bust of himself in our Court — doesn’t imagine himself under the law he imposes on others. He hasn’t completed any graduate work in law or published any academic work in law, philosophy or jurisprudence so it’s hard to know how he justifies himself in these matters.

Ironically, he has a reputation for warning others — including those far more qualified in formal jurisprudence than he is — not to critique Canadian judges like himself or their (increasingly bizarre and politicized) decisions.

But, from the Magna Carta onwards, Richard should know that in law as in politics dissent is democracy.

The dissent of the Convoy and the growing critique of Richards own bizarre behaviour and inability to articulate a judicial philosophy is exactly what’s needed to save Canada — and the Court’s reputation as a place where justice — not the ego of the Justices — is at stake.

Richard should recuse himself. And remove that vulgar bust from the Supreme Court.

#SCC #RuleOfLaw

Melanie in Saskatchewan also has concerns, expressed as an open letter to the Chief Justice:

To Chief Justice Richard Wagner,

Your refusal to recuse yourself from the Emergencies Act appeal, as reported in the National Post, is not a demonstration of judicial confidence. It is a failure of judgment at a moment that demanded restraint.

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

You have justified your decision on the basis that your prior public comments did not address the specific legal questions before the Court. That argument may satisfy a narrow, technical reading of judicial conduct. It does not satisfy the standard Canadians are entitled to expect from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

The governing principle is not whether you commented on the precise statutory interpretation of the Emergencies Act. It is whether a reasonable and informed person would conclude that your previously expressed views could influence your assessment of the case.

You publicly characterized the convoy as the “budding start of anarchy”, described residents as being “taken hostage”, and spoke in terms that conveyed clear condemnation of the events and participants. Those were not neutral observations. They were judgments about the nature, legitimacy, and perceived threat posed by the very situation now under review.

This appeal is not a retrial. It does not exist to rehear evidence or relitigate the convoy as though the past can be reset. Appellate review in Canada is focused on whether the law was correctly interpreted and properly applied to established facts, with significant deference given to the findings already made by the lower courts.

That distinction matters.

[…]

As Chief Justice, you are not merely a participant in this case. You are the steward of the reputation of the Supreme Court of Canada itself. That reputation rests not on assertions of impartiality, but on decisions that demonstrate it beyond reasonable doubt. In choosing not to recuse yourself under these circumstances, you have not strengthened that reputation. You have placed it at risk, at a time when public confidence in national institutions is already fragile. The damage may not be immediate, but it is real, and it is yours to own.

April 30, 2026

Latest luxury belief just dropped: “microlooting”

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

Rob Henderson identifies the latest addition to the broad suite of luxury beliefs held by the over-educated, over-privileged people who will never bear the costs of their anti-civilizational thoughts:

In a 1955 essay titled “The English Aristocracy”, novelist Nancy Mitford suggested that as goods became more affordable, England’s upper classes could no longer rely on material possessions to distinguish themselves from the masses. Instead, Mitford wrote, “it is solely by their language that the upper classes nowadays are distinguished”.

Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker proved this point last week in a conversation hosted by Nadja Spiegelman at the New York Times. It unfolded in a carefully staged loft that signaled taste and status. Ms. Spiegelman proposed a new word for shoplifting: “microlooting”. Mr. Piker later remarked that “many Americans, I think, are totally oblivious to this political language”.

“Stealing” sounds so tawdry. Microlooting is cleaner — a minor offense laundered into a boutique act of political protest. Indeed, much of upper middle class life is about rebranding disreputable behaviors to retain one’s position in the social hierarchy. The pattern is familiar. Mitford sorted vocabulary into “U” (upper class) and “non-U”. U-speakers said “vegetables” and “spectacles” and “lavatory”. Non-U speakers said “greens” and “glasses” and “toilet”.

Today, the favored words of the upper class come from a mishmash of therapy culture and human resources. Lazing off at work has become “acting your wage”. Saying no means “setting boundaries”. Infidelity is “ethical nonmonogamy”. Prostitution is “sex work”. Divorce can be called “conscious uncoupling”. Neglecting close relationships is “protecting your peace”. Listening to someone vent is “emotional labor”. Recall that in 2021 the AP Stylebook announced that a “mistress” must now be called a “companion, friend or lover”.

And shoplifting is “microlooting”.

Five years ago, I texted a high-school friend who had been released from prison. “Good news”, I told him. “You’re not an ex-felon anymore, you’re a justice-involved person.” He replied, “Okay Rob, you’re not a college graduate anymore, you’re a classroom-involved person.”

At UnHerd, Poppy Sowerby pours scorn on the well-to-do New Yorkers’ sudden discovery that “five finger discounts” are fun and socially conscious ways to strike back at “the man”:

The New Yorker columnist Jia Tolentino, the NYT‘s Nadja Spiegelman, and Hasan Piker — the midwit Marxist streamer accused of electrocuting his dog and who admitted having solicited a prostitute (not so against the free market now, ey?) — gabbed about “microlooting” — small thefts justified by the fact that, as Spiegelman puts it, “It’s so hard to live ethically in an unethical society”. Quick-fire scenarios are floated; stealing from the Louvre, Piker says, is “cool”. Stealing from supermarket chains is “not a big deal” in a “utilitarian sense”, says Tolentino. And Spiegelman wonders why she should “have to pay for organic avocados” when Jeff Bezos “has too much money” (Amazon, which he founded, acquired Whole Foods in 2017). Antisocial behaviour is justified here — explicitly or tacitly — under the lazy logic of “protest”.

Unlike microlooting, however, Tolentino finds “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup … profoundly selfish, immoral [and] collectively destructive” — presumably the bimbo-coding of that drink is unrelated. The lines of moral permissibility seem to be drawn, in other words, along the exact same lines of what these rich, educated progressives consider “cool”.

And that’s the real problem. Progressives have always found extravagant ways to reframe the ills which they personally enjoy — prostitution, pornography, choking women. Now shoplifting gets the same treatment. Tolentino is not really stealing lemons because it’s a way of flipping the bird at Bezos; she’s stealing them because she wants them. Nor are the barrier-bumpers actually trying to signal their dissatisfaction with the frequency or cleanliness of public transport — reasoning I have actually heard with my own ears, despite the fact these things can only be improved by the very funding the free riders are withholding; they are bumping barriers because they just don’t want to pay. Nicking groceries and dodging fares are age-old problems. What’s new is the towering cowardice of those who can’t admit that they, like most people, act mainly out of self-interested desire.

The appealing but deceptive idea that low-level criminality is a laudable demonstration against “the system” in fact conceals envy towards those in that “system” who, like Bezos, have known success. This resentment is particularly native to the media class, whose peers tend to out-earn them in higher-salaried fields like law and finance — conferring on writers like Spiegelman and Tolentino the faintly plausible whiff of bookish martyrdom. Nevertheless, and particularly in New York, mag luminaries can still live in $2.2 million brownstones in Clinton Hill; sticking it to the man by pilfering in the produce aisle might pass in grim artists’ squats, but five-finger discounts are harder to justify on six-figure salaries.

Update, 1 May: 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.

April 24, 2026

The Mailbox Test

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a thread about the ethics of setting up a trap that will only be effective if someone attempts to destroy it:

The Mailbox Test, like the breakfast test, is an excellent way to tell who you can allow to wield power in your society.

Goes like this:

    If someone is hurt trying to destroy someone else’s stuff in order to take pleasure from their pain, do you sympathize with …

    The aggressor because he got hurt?

    Or with the guy who owns the stuff, because he wasn’t the aggressor?

You can have people in your society who fail the Mailbox Test. That’s okay … they can work at hospices, or shelters for orphaned kittens, or something.

But you cannot allow them to vote, or otherwise wield political power. Because if you do, they will open the gates of the city to the enemy.

I am personally tired of everyone pretending that people who enjoy ruining things for random strangers are just kewt smol beans who are only aggressive because of all the complex socioeconomic factors and lack of resources.

They knew someone would be hurt by what they did. They knew that someone had done literally nothing harmful to them. And those two ideas, in combination made them feel pleasure. And they went and did it.

That is the sign of a rotten soul.

Defending ourselves and our property is not just a right, it’s a moral obligation. Otherwise, we just kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with, someone who may not be able to defend herself.

I don’t care if a vandal breaks his arms trying to destroy my stuff. Because I value my stuff more than a vandal’s arms. And the fact that he tried to destroy somebody else’s stuff shows that he, too, values his arms less than the opportunity to hurt somebody.

We cannot allow such people inside the city, and we cannot give the keys to those who would open the gates for them.

Another response to the original post from Kit Sun Cheah:

Sure, this adheres to a strict interpretation of Just War Theory.

However … we’re talking about a mailbox.

A mailbox is not a weapon. It does not serve any military purpose. Its existence is entirely inoffensive.

That is why it is an easy target.

A reinforced mailbox is purely defensive. Do not meddle with it and it will leave you alone. Strike it, and Newton’s Third Law kicks in.

Poke it and nothing will happen to you. Try to smash it and you risk smashing your own arm. It does not amplify an incoming force, it merely resists and returns it. Thus it is inherently proportionate.

No law or theory of war requires that you advertise your capabilities. Concealment may feel wrong to a certain type of personality, but openness is not always a social good.

Yes, you can fortify the mailbox in a blatantly obvious fashion. Some ne’er do well will notice it, then decide to pick another easier mark.

You have deterred an attack on your own property by redirecting attention to someone else’s.

Now suppose the mailbox were covertly fortified. A vandal strikes it and is injured. He passes along word to his friends, and their friends. Then they will start to wonder: are all the mailboxes reinforced?

They can’t tell, so they must assume every mailbox is fortified.

Thus, covert reinforcement does more to deter aggression than overt reinforcement. And ultimately, we want to see an end to mailbox destruction.

This post is not about just war theory or mailboxes.

Update, 25 April: 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.

April 23, 2026

The SPLC in the news

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

The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) is in the news this week for unusual reasons — not SPLC lawyers levelling accusations against individuals, elected officials, or corporate leaders, but the SPLC itself being hit with very serious charges from the US DoJ:

For nearly a decade, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville has been portrayed as a defining moral crisis of the Trump era. Across the media and in political speeches, Charlottesville became shorthand for “Trump-era” hate. In his 2019 campaign launch, Joe Biden called Charlottesville “a defining moment for this nation”, describing how “Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis” marched bearing “the fangs of racism”.1

He condemned President Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment. In Biden’s words, the president’s equivocation “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it”, and thus signalled a threat “unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime”.2 Polling at the time showed the public broadly agreed, nearly 60% of voters said Trump had “encouraged” white supremacists by his response, and a majority disapproved of how he handled Charlottesville.3 In short, Democrats and sympathetic media used Charlottesville as a concrete proof-point that Trump had unleashed a racial crisis, and that the country was in “a battle for the soul of this nation”.4 This narrative was presented earnestly by them: far-right violence in Charlottesville would be a national wake-up call about racial hatred that, in their telling, demanded urgent political action.

The Indictment: SPLC Charged

Last week, a new development has upended that narrative. On April 21, 2026, the Department of Justice announced that an Alabama grand jury returned an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the prominent civil-rights nonprofit best known for its “hate group” lists, charging it with wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.5 The indictment alleges that from 2014 to 2023 the SPLC secretly funnelled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals in violent extremist groups.6 For example, DOJ spokesmen say SPLC paid large sums to figures associated with the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, the Aryan Nations and others. Crucially, prosecutors claim SPLC used covert methods: it opened bank accounts in the names of “fictitious entities” (with names like “Center Investigative Agency”, “Fox Photography”, and “Rare Books Warehouse”) to disguise payments to its paid informants. By routing donations through these shell accounts, SPLC allegedly hid the true destination of the funds. In effect, donors were told their money was helping to “dismantle” hate groups, but a portion of it was instead being diverted back to the leaders and organisers of those very groups, all while SPLC publicly denounced them.7

The indictment lays out telling examples. One SPLC “field source” reportedly received over $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance.8 Another informant was actually in the inner online circle that planned the Charlottesville rally itself: prosecutors say he “made racist postings” in that chat group and even “helped coordinate transportation” to the August 2017 march, all while being paid by SPLC.9 The DOJ press release quotes FBI Director Kash Patel, who bluntly said SPLC “lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups” while “paying the leaders of these very extremist groups”.10 Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche similarly charged that “the SPLC is manufacturing extremism to justify its existence”, using donor money not to combat but to “stoke racial hatred”.11 DOJ officials argue that, if proven, SPLC’s actions amounted to an elaborate fraud: donors were intentionally misled, and false statements were made to banks to conceal the program. In sum, the indictment portrays SPLC as doing “the exact opposite” of its claimed mission, funding racial hate rather than fighting it. All of these details are, of course, allegations. The legal question at this stage is whether prosecutors can prove intent to defraud, but the charges alone lay bare a startling claim: that an organisation central to defining and fighting extremism may have been materially involved with it.

  1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/25/joe-biden-charlottesville-defines-trump-presidency/
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid
  4. https://www.jta.org/2019/04/25/politics/biden-makes-trumps-charlottesville-reaction-the-center-of-his-campaign-launch/
  5. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and/
  6. https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/g-s1-118275/southern-poverty-law-center-indicted-on-federal-fraud-charges/
  7. https://abcnews.com/US/southern-poverty-law-center-facing-justice-department-probe/story/
  8. https://www.wunc.org/2026-04-21/southern-poverty-law-center-indicted-on-federal-fraud-charges/
  9. Ibid
  10. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and/
  11. https://abcnews.com/US/southern-poverty-law-center-facing-justice-department-probe/story/

On a lighter note, The Babylon Bee asks you to donate to the SPLC today to support a needy racist in your community.

April 16, 2026

The EU has managed to revive smuggling as a viable career

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

We’ve all read reports on how bold and forward-focussed the European Union is, but do we give them equal credit for their diligent efforts to revive dying industries?

Title page of a book covering the trial of seven smugglers for the murder of two revenue officers. In the preface the author says “I do assure the Public that I took down the facts in writing from the mouths of the witnesses, that I frequently conversed with the prisoners, both before and after condemnation; by which I had an opportunity of procuring those letters which are herein after inserted, and other intelligence of some secret transactions among them, which were never communicated to any other person.”
W.J. Smith, Smuggling and Smugglers in Sussex, 1749, via Wikimedia Commons.

In late March, European Union (E.U.) officials announced they had taken down a five-country cigarette-smuggling operation and seized over 40 tons of tobacco products. The ambitious network reportedly transshipped the cigarettes far and wide to obscure their sources and destinations, while also hiding them in hidden compartments built into cargo containers. Why would smugglers go through such effort to move perfectly legal products, and why would the authorities care? In Europe, as in the United States, the answer is the same: sky-high taxes.

Smuggled Smokes in Hidden Compartments

In announcing its efforts against the smuggling network operating in Italy, France, Poland, Switzerland, and the U.K., the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which worked with international law enforcement agencies as well as police in all five countries, noted the smugglers used “maritime and commercial routes designed to evade customs inspections”, passed shipments “through Georgia, Kenya, the Netherlands and Turkey, in order to hide the true origin of the illicit goods”, and that “false bottoms were used as hidden compartments built into containers to conceal the tobacco”.

At the conclusion of the investigation, “enforcement activities were carried out at the Port of Genoa, leading to the seizure of close to 41 tonnes of manufactured cigarettes, with an estimated loss of customs duties, excise duties and VAT exceeding €10 million”.

Absolutely nothing motivates government officials like the extraction of taxes from the public. And lots of tax money is at stake when it comes to cigarettes.

Taxes Make Up Most of the Price of Cigarettes

This month, the Tax Foundation, which has a branch in Brussels, reported that “cigarette smokers in the European Union pay far more in excise taxes than they do for the cigarettes themselves”. Report authors Jacob Macumber-Rosin and Adam Hoffer wrote that excise taxes in the E.U., which are intended to deter smoking as much as to raise revenue, start at the equivalent of $2.11 per pack and that the “total excise duty is at least 60 percent of the national weighted average retail price”. Value-added taxes are tallied after excise duties are levied.

“The highest tax in the EU is levied in Ireland at €10.71 ($12.58) per pack of 20 cigarettes, followed by France at €8.09 ($9.51) and the Netherlands at €7.77 ($9.13)”, they added.

April 12, 2026

How to Legalize Scapegoating – Death of Democracy 11 – Q3 1935

Filed under: Germany, History, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson

Published 11 Apr 2026

Nuremberg Laws explained: how Nazi Germany turned antisemitic street violence into state policy in 1935. In this episode, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin on the third quarter of 1935, when the Kurfürstendamm riots, Goebbels’ propaganda campaigns, and Hitler’s regime culminated in the passage of the Nuremberg Laws.

This historical analysis breaks down how the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor stripped German Jews of civil rights, redefined citizenship around “German blood”, and replaced chaotic mob violence with systematic bureaucratic persecution. The video also explores the role of Joseph Goebbels, the SA, the coming 1936 Berlin Olympics, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, worsening shortages in the Nazi economy, and the collapse of democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression in the Third Reich.

This episode is essential viewing for anyone interested in Nazi Germany, Holocaust history, antisemitism, Nazi propaganda, the rise of fascism, and the origins of World War II. It shows how legal language, public conformity, and state power combined to normalize persecution long before the worst crimes were fully visible.

April 9, 2026

The NFL’s “Rooney Rule”

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

As the NFL in its modern incarnation exists as an exception to the normal rules governing corporate structure under US law, you can readily imagine that the NFL’s legal teams are extremely sensitive to the changing winds at the federal level. At a time that the federal government was emphasizing providing employment equity, the NFL scrambled to implement a hiring solution that gave black coaches a better chance of being hired for head coaching opportunities. The winds have shifted recently and the NFL risks being caught on the wrong side of evolving legal decision-making:

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles said he “absolutely” believed that he was sometimes brought in by NFL teams just to check the “Rooney Rule” box.

The Rooney Rule is an NFL policy instituted more than two decades ago that requires teams to interview — though not to hire — at least one minority candidate when hiring new coaches.

The rule was designed to increase the number of minority head coaches in the NFL, a goal it has failed to achieve. For years, it has been a source of moral controversy, but new developments suggest it may now be a legal issue for the league.

Last week, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) sent a letter to the NFL calling the Rooney Rule “blatant race discrimination“, adding that hiring decisions should be based solely on merit.

Though the NFL says it believes its policy “is consistent with the law” and promotes fairness, others have indicated the Rooney Rule may be on the chopping block, given recent legal challenges to other forms of racial preferences.

“There’s no question that the environment has changed in recent years“, said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the son of Dan Rooney, for whom the rule is named. “We do have an obligation to make sure that our policies comply with the laws, whatever the law is, and whatever the changes in law might be.”

Art Rooney didn’t specify the laws the NFL may not be in compliance with, but he might have been referring to last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services. In that decision, the court unanimously ruled that separate standards for minority and majority plaintiffs seeking redress for racial discrimination were illegal.

The ruling undercut the ability of organizations to use race or sex in hiring decisions — even for ostensibly benign or diversity-promoting purposes — because majority-group plaintiffs are now allowed to sue under the same legal standard as minority groups.

As I wrote at the time, the Ames decision was likely to be a wrecking ball to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which employers had used for years to discriminate against majority ethnic groups (and non-focus minorities, such as Asians), in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

March 31, 2026

QotD: Slavery

Filed under: China, History, Law, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As sociologist Orlando Patterson (b.1940) has observed:

    It is impolite to say of one’s spouse or one’s debtor that they are part of one’s property. With slaves, politeness is unnecessary. (Slavery and Social Death, P.22)

What makes a slave different from a wife, professional player or even a serf is that a slave is in a state of social death: they have no claims of social connection that their master (or anyone else) need pay attention to beyond that to the master.

This is not to say slaves have no legal personality — all slave systems are very well aware that slaves are people. Rather, the relationship of exclusive domination was such that they had no connections that anyone had any obligation to respect other than to their master.

Other individuals might be in relationships of servitude under a master but still retained connections with others subject to presumptive respect. This was true even of serfs and is what distinguishes various forms of serfdom from slavery. Even under Russian serfdom, a serf marriage was a legally recognised marriage; a serf father had legally recognised authority over his family; a serf could legally own property. Once somebody had suffered the social death of slavery, they were utterly bereft of any such connections.

Both serf and slave lacked any choice of master or about the nature and content of that mastery: that is what makes both forms of labour bondage. Nevertheless, a serf had legally recognised relationships, and choices about them, that a slave simply did not.

Slaves are violently dominated: the whip or equivalent has been a control device in every known system of slavery. They are natally alienated: both from from any (positive) standing from their ancestors or claims over their descendants. They are culturally degraded: whether in naming, clothing, hair style, marks on the body or required acts.

All this serves to establish, mark and reinforce the relationship of domination. For that level of domination is required to turn one human into the possession, and so the property, of another. (Karl Marx’s talk of “wage slave” is not only rhetorical excess, it is contemptible rhetorical excess: a manifestation of his comprehensive mischaracterisation of commerce.)

None of these key features of domination require the acknowledgement of the wider society. There are likely slaves in every major city in the world, even in economically highly developed democracies with the rule of law.

While it can be helpful to have your relationship of domination over a slave recognised by others, the crucial thing is the acknowledgment by the slave. Slavery is a relationship between people about an owned thing, where the slave acknowledges that they are the owned thing. This is a key element in the humiliation of slavery.

The mechanisms of domination are, however, obviously much more powerful if they are embedded in wider institutional acceptance of slavery. Where there is no such wider acknowledgement, then even greater isolation from the wider society is required to establish and maintain the relationship of domination.

In social systems that openly incorporate slaveholding, a slave’s state of domination, of the social nullity of no independent connection, normally meant that they could not be a formally recognised owner of property: that they could not be a legal owner of property, not a person who could have property. They lacked the sort of legal standing that could legally own things.

To do so would require the slave to have social and legal connections, beyond the claims and decisions of their master, that others are bound to accept or respect, and that is precisely what slavery, as a structure of domination of one by other, denies. The Ahaggar Tuaregs express this feature of slavery very directly, holding that:

    without the master the slave does not exist, and he is only socializable through his master. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4.)

Slavery is, always and everywhere, a created relationship of dominion. As the Kel Gress group of the Tuareg say:

    All persons are created by God, the slave is created by the Tuareg. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4)

In a society that accepts slavery, the conventions of acknowledged possession will operate for the master about the slave in a far more complete way than any other claim of property in another human. If other mechanisms of delegated control were sufficiently absent or attenuated, then slaves became preferred agents. The use of slaves as commercial agents was surprisingly common.

In societies dominated by kin-groups, slaves could make preferred warriors or officials precisely because they had no other connection entitled to presumptive respect than that to their master — hence the slave warriors of Greater Middle Eastern (Morocco to Pakistan) Islam.

The danger of kin-groups is that they readily colonise social institutions — rulers come and go, the kin-group is forever. Slave warriors and officials were a solution to that problem in societies where suppression of kin-groups was not a practicable option.

Imperial China found kin-groups useful for economising on administrative costs and Emperors used distance — officials could not be assigned to their home counties — and rotation of officials to inhibit kin-group colonisation of their administrations. Even so, much of the appeal of eunuchs to Emperors was precisely the presumed severing of kin-group ties. (They also had the advantage of being the only males, other than the Emperor, permitted overnight residence in the imperial palace.)

Nevertheless, slavery can exist without such wider acknowledgement by laws. For turning someone into a slave requires forcing them to acknowledge the relationship of domination to the point of being a possession of another.

So, slavery is not, at its core, a matter of property but of domination. Domination to the extent that the conventions of acknowledged possession can apply to slaves entire. Slaves can be turned into property without any other connections with presumptive respect or standing. Yet, even a slave could be a beneficial participant in the conventions of acknowledged possession.

For, so powerfully useful are the conventions of acknowledged possession, that masters have, surprisingly often, allowed slaves to also be accepted beneficiaries of the conventions of acknowledged possession. To be owners of property in practice, if not in law. This was done to lessen the burdens of control, the cost of subsistence or to enable the slave to buy their freedom. The Romans acknowledged this through the concept of peculium.

The Romans, being relentlessly logical in such matters, held a slave to be an owned animal. That is, a human on which such a comprehensive social death has been imposed that they are the legal equivalent of a domesticated animal. (Yet, somewhat awkwardly, still people.)

Just as you can geld an animal, you can castrate a slave. Despite the Islamic slave trade being on a comparable scale to, and lasting centuries longer than, the Transatlantic slave trade, there is no ex-slave diaspora within Islam, unlike the Americas. All children of a Muslim father are members of the Muslim community while so many of the male slaves were castrated.

The Roman concept of property as dominium, as absolute ownership of a thing, may have transferred the domination of slavery into a more general conception of property so as to absolutely separate slave (who suffers dominium) from citizen (who possesses it). Rome ran one of the most open slave systems in human history, such that a freed slave could become a citizen. This necessitated particularly sharp legal delineation of the difference between slave and citizen.

Such dominion is not a relationship between a person and thing (despite claims to the contrary) for it is still setting up a relationship with others regarding what is owned, remembering that the crucial thing in property is not mine! but yours!: the acknowledgement by others of possession and so the right-to-decide. Hence the importance of the signals of possession for slavery.

The Greeks also had citizenship and — particularly in the case of Athens — mass slavery. Greek citizenship was, however, far more exclusive than Roman citizenship and the existence of metis, resident non-citizens, further separated citizen from slave. The Greek city-states also operated much more convention-based, and distinctly less developed, laws than did Rome. If law is a matter of such abstraction as is needed to establish functional differences, and no more, the Romans perhaps felt more need to establish that a citizen could possess dominion.

Conversely, as Romans were not moral universalists, they felt no need to generate some justificatory abstraction about slavery: a slave was simply a loser. If a slave later became a Roman citizen, then, congratulations to them, they had become a winner (and few cultures have worshipped success quite as relentlessly as did the Romans). Hence freedmen would put their status as freedman on their tombstones.

Aristotle — as his moral theory did tend towards moral universalism — came up with a clumsy justificatory abstraction (natural slaves) as to why slaves could be morally degraded. Indeed, the combination of moral universalism and slavery invariably led to justifications that held some essential flaw in the slave justified their domination by others. A process much easier to manage if slaves were from a different continental region, so with distinguishing physical markers of their continental origin.

The Romans had no need of such Just-So stories to justify slavery and did not generate them. Muslims and Christians are moral universalists and so did manifest the need to tell such Just-So stories about enslaved groups: why children of God were being enslaved. (Because that is what they were fit for, clearly.)

Islamic writers generated the first major discourses of skin-colour racism, applying them to the populations they enslaved. In their case, generating both anti-black and anti-white racism, as they systematically enslaved both Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans. It also led to some awkward rationalisations as to why the inhabitants of South Asia could have dark skins but not suffer from any deemed inherent inferiority.

Just as slavery continues, modern totalitarian Party-States have used forced labour — labour bondage — on massive scales, starting with the Soviet Union and then wartime Nazi Germany. Such continues to the present day in CCP China — infamously of the Uyghurs — and the Kim Family Regime of North Korea. From 1940 to 1956, the Soviet Union banned workers moving jobs without the permission of their existing workforce, the key element of serfdom.

Lorenzo Warby, “Owning people, owning animals, controlling attributes”, Lorenzo from Oz, 2025-12-25.

March 28, 2026

Noelia Castillo Ramos, RIP

Filed under: Europe, Health, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Celina provides the background information you certainly won’t get from skimming the mainstream media’s coverage of the death of twenty-five year old Noelia Castillo Ramos:

This is how broken the West has become. On Thursday, March 26, 2026, in a clinically sterile room within an assisted living facility in Barcelona, Spain, the government executed a twenty five year old paralysed rape victim. Her name was Noelia Castillo Ramos.1 Noelia did not die of a terminal illness, nor did she pass away from natural causes. Rather, she was administered a lethal injection by the Spanish state that had dismantled her family, forced her into a hostile and horribly dangerous environment, ignored her horrific violation, and ultimately deemed her broken existence too inconvenient to maintain.2

A still from Noelia Castillo’s Antena 3 interview on March 24.

While Noelia Castillo’s heart was stopped by a cocktail of state-sponsored chemicals, the unvetted migrant men who gang-raped her, shattered her mind, and drove her to fling herself from a fifth-floor window continue to walk the streets of Europe, entirely shielded from justice. They faced zero consequences. She faced the death penalty.

These were the last words that her grandmother said to Noelia: “I love you, my girl; someday we will be together again”.

The fate of Noelia Castillo stands as a single almost perfect, undeniable illustration of everything that is broken, evil, and actively suicidal about modern Western society under progressive, woke, open-border, and secular-left governance. Progressive Europe has functionally and legally decided that native European women and girls are a disposable commodity, just collateral damage in the grand suicidal project of multiculturalism.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_of_Noelia_Castillo
  2. https://www.v2radio.co.uk/news/v2-radio-world-news/gang-rape-victim-25-to-be-euthanised-after-fathers-legal-challenge-fails/

March 25, 2026

UNDRIP’s malign power in Canada

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

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) has been adopted into law by the provincial government in British Columbia and the federal government. In BC, voters were assured that this was a purely symbolic act to advance reconciliation with First Nations groups in the province. But that was deliberate misdirection and lies:

During the debate on DRIPA [BC’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act] in the legislature in late 2019, government ministers of the day waxed lyrical that DRIPA and UNDRIP created no new rights, had no legal force, did not apply to private land, and did not provide a veto. Those assurances were used to justify passing DRIPA, which resulted in the B.C. Opposition unanimously supporting the legislation. It turns out that the government’s assessment and promises were neither correct in substance nor valid legally.

Much has been written lately about DRIPA, some of it wrong. Prior to the B.C. Court of Appeal decision in Gitxaala, some DRIPA defenders insisted it was merely a “process” piece of legislation that bound the government to an arguably undemocratic joint government and Indigenous leadership arrangement, set out in section 3, to evaluate every B.C. statute for conformity with the 46 Articles of UNDRIP and then amend statutes as deemed necessary to create that conformity.

DRIPA itself, though arguably highly undemocratic and perhaps unconstitutional, is not the real problem in this province. The real problem is that DRIPA has been effectively employed as a “smokescreen” by the B.C. NDP and certain of its allies, while the government, secretly and with no explicit public mandate, imposes the Articles of UNDRIP throughout B.C. as a fundamental matter of policy, as though they have the force of law.

Let’s be clear, this is a devious political manoeuvre, much of which is not underpinned in law by DRIPA or, more importantly, by Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence at all.

Notwithstanding statements made to the legislature in 2019 to get DRIPA passed, the NDP government immediately chose to implement a policy approach to UNDRIP throughout B.C. under which UNDRIP Articles would be applied by the government and the public service as though they were, in fact, the law in this province, notwithstanding the fact that they are inconsistent in many respects with Canadian constitutional law.

In the wake of recent court decisions, there is no indication that the government’s policy approach has changed or that the Premier is thinking about backing away from it, even though there is now much greater public scrutiny of what the government has really been up to since 2019.

The Eby government claims to be upset that UNDRIP is now being applied by the courts as the law in B.C., which it knows will create utter chaos. What has upset it more, however, is that the courts have usurped the NDP government’s desire to quietly and secretly implement UNDRIP everywhere in the province as a matter of policy, a policy that they would like to be viewed as law but without being legally enforceable by judges.

This amounts to a policy of subterfuge by a government that has shown an inclination towards deception on matters concerning First Nations. It appears that a law is not a law unless the B.C. government says it is a law, but some laws, like DRIPA, can be used as a false “front” to allow the covert implementation of a complex UN-based policy that is clearly unfit for the Canadian context, with no one being the wiser.

In the National Post, Warren Mirko explains the murky theory that allows “indigenous ways of knowing” to be taken more seriously than science, history, and legal procedure:

Canada is rapidly abandoning a principle that has shaped western democracies since the Enlightenment: the idea that no person or group has privileged access to sacred or divine knowledge unavailable to everyone else.

Now, this principle is being threatened by Canada’s increasing embrace of “Indigenous Knowledge” — whereby knowledge is treated as collectively owned and restricted by ancestry rather than something open to examination and shared across society.

The governments of British Columbia and Canada — both of which have formally adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — endorse “Indigenous Knowledge” as inherited, rooted in ancestral relationships to the land, and encompassing spiritual, cultural and metaphysical dimensions passed down through generations.

Remarkably, the defining quality to possess this knowledge is not study, training, time spent on the land, or lived experience by any individual alive today. Instead, it’s lineage itself.

That’s a paradigm shift. When knowledge is said to be possessed by birth rather than learned, its universality is replaced with mysticism and its value diminished.

This comes with real-world consequences: ancestry-based considerations are reshaping how public land and resources are managed on Canadians’ behalf.

In British Columbia, newly proposed changes to hunting and wildlife regulations are described as being informed by “the best available science and Indigenous Knowledge“. In practice, this means “Indigenous Knowledge” is being used to design a regulatory regime that falls almost entirely on non-Indigenous users. That’s because Indigenous harvesting rights are recognized under Section 35 of the Constitution, not bound by the same hunting seasons, bag limits, gear restrictions, or limited-entry systems that apply to the broader public.

The growing influence of this genetically transmitted, ancestry-qualified knowledge extends to matters of public safety and economic security, like nuclear regulation: “Indigenous ways of knowing and the Indigenous cultural context enhance the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s understanding of the potential impacts of nuclear projects and strengthen the rigour of project reviews and regulatory oversight”, says the government of Canada website.

Governments championing the principles of UNDRIP insist that “Indigenous Knowledge” can be combined with “Western” science to produce better public policy. But this is a contradiction. Knowledge cannot at once be exclusive and universal.

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