Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Nov 2025The Apache Arms carbine was a Thompson SMG lookalike that was made in small numbers in the late 1960s. It was the successor to the Spitfire carbine made by the same people, after the Spitfire was deemed a machine gun by the IRS. The Apache used M3 Grease Gun magazines and was chambered for .45 ACP. It uses a square receiver tube and many of the same cast parts as the Spitfire. It is a very interesting look at how the design was adapted to be legally considered semiautomatic.
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March 25, 2026
Apache Arms Carbine: A Saga of Compliance and Crappy Manufacture
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March 19, 2026
QotD: From the fall of the Soviets to the rise of the Wokerati
… for 50 years the Soviet nuclear threat provided […] an Armageddon to fear, and a reason to rally round the state in the free countries of the West. It provided an unexpected bonus, which protected us all though we did not realise it at the time. Since the USSR was the arsenal of repression, political liberty in the Western lands was under special protection as long as the Kremlin was our enemy. Freedom was, supposedly, what we fought and stood for. Governments claiming to be guarding us from Soviet tyranny could not go very far in limiting liberty on their own territory, however much they may have wanted to.
That protection ended when the Berlin Wall fell. In the same extraordinary moment, the collapse of Russian communism liberated revolutionary radicals across the Western world. The ghastly, failed Brezhnev state could not be hung round their necks like a putrid albatross any more. They were no longer considered as potential traitors simply because they were on the left. Eric Hobsbawm, and those like him, could at last join the establishment. Indeed, fortresses of the establishment such as the BBC now welcomed political as well as cultural leftists onto their upper decks.
Antonio Gramsci’s rethinking of the revolution — seize the university, the school, the TV station, the newspaper, the church, the theatre, rather than the barracks, the railway station and the post office — could at last get under way. At that moment, the long march of 1960s leftists through the institutions began to reach its objective, as they moved into the important jobs for the first time. And so one of the main protections of liberty and reason vanished, exactly when it was most needed.
The BBC’s simpering coverage of the Blair regime’s arrival in Downing Street, with its North-Korean-style fake crowd waving Union Jacks they despised, and new dawn atmosphere was not as ridiculous as it looked. May 1997 truly was a regime change. Illiberal utopians really were increasingly in charge, and the Cultural Revolution at last had political muscle.
Then came the new enemy, the shapeless ever-shifting menace of terrorism, against which almost any means were justified. To combat this, we willingly gave up Habeas Corpus and the real presumption of innocence, and allowed ourselves to be treated as if we were newly-convicted prisoners every time we passed through an airport.
Those who think the era of the face-mask will soon be over might like to recall that the irrational precautions of airport “security” (almost wholly futile once the simple precaution of refusing to open the door to the flight deck has been introduced) have not only remained in place since September 2001: they have been intensified. Yet, by and large, they are almost popular. Those who mutter against them, as I sometimes do, face stern lectures from our fellow-citizens implying that we are irresponsible and heedless.
Now a new fear, even more shapeless, invisible, perpetual (and hard to defeat — how can you ever eliminate a virus?) than al-Qaeda or Isis, has arrived in our midst. There is almost no bad action it cannot be used to excuse, including the strangling of an already shaky economy for which those eccentric or lucky enough to still be working will pay for decades. Millions have greeted this new peril as an excuse to abandon a liberty they did not really care much about anyway.
As a nation, we now produce more fear than we can consume locally, hiding in our homes as civil society evaporates. We queue up happily to hand in our freedom and to collect our muzzles and our digital IDs. And those of us who cry out, until we are hoarse, to say that this is a catastrophe, are met with shrugs from the chattering classes, and snarls of “just put on the frigging mask” from the mob. If I hadn’t despaired long ago, I would be despairing now.
Peter Hitchens, “Democracy muzzled”, The Critic, 2020-09-25.
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March 15, 2026
Using US gun statistics to argue against Canadian gun owners
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Gun Owners of Canada respond to a troll post trying to confuse the legal situation for Canadian gun owners by using statistics from the US, where the laws are significantly different:
Typical. He blocked without further discussion.
But, he’s wrong.
There is a fundamental flaw in using that 1998 [US] DOJ literature review to argue the Stand on Guard Act will lead to more gun deaths. The claim relies on a completely broken comparison between U.S. and Canadian law.
Here is why applying that specific American data to this Canadian bill proposed by the CPC simply does not work.
The DOJ report relies heavily on American statistics where firearms kept for self defense are typically stored loaded and unlocked. That specific environment, meaning immediate and unrestricted access to a loaded weapon, is the primary driver for the increased rates of accidental shootings and suicides highlighted in those U.S. studies.
The Stand on Guard Act does not create that environment in Canada. Saying it does such is just fear-mongering.
This proposed legislation is strictly an amendment to Section 34(2) of the Criminal Code. It establishes a presumption that force used against a violent home invader is reasonable. The goal is to spare Canadians from years of legal limbo for defending their families.
Crucially, this bill does not amend the Firearms Act and it does not repeal Canada’s strict safe storage regulations.
A legally compliant Canadian firearm owner must still store their firearms unloaded and secured with a locking device, or locked inside a sturdy cabinet or safe. Ammunition must also be stored separately or locked up securely in the same safe.
The specific risks identified in the U.S. data, like a child finding a loaded gun or someone in crisis having instant access to a weapon, are mitigated by our existing storage framework.
Debating the merits of self defense thresholds is perfectly fair. However, importing U.S. data based on a completely different regulatory baseline to predict Canadian outcomes is a clear misapplication of the evidence. We need to ground this conversation in actual Canadian law rather than American statistics.
So, as a reminder — welcome to Canada — let’s buy Canadian, support Canadian and recognize Canadian facts.
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March 13, 2026
Enacting the original proposed 12th Amendment
At Astral Codex Ten, guest writer David Speiser discusses the two “extra” proposed amendments that didn’t make it into the Bill of Rights, but crucially, didn’t have an expiration date. The 11th did eventually make its way into the Constitution as the 27th Amendment in 1992, leaving only the 12th original still in limbo. The proposed 12th was a doozy:
Here is the text of the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, the sole unratified amendment from the Bill of Rights:
After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
In other words, there will be one Representative per X people, depending on the size of the US. Once the US is big enough, it will top out at one Representative per 50,000 citizens.
(if you’ve noticed something off about this description, good work — we’ll cover it in the section “A Troublesome Typo”, near the end)
The US is far bigger than in the Framers’ time, so it’s the 50,000 number that would apply in the present day. This would increase the size of the House of Representatives from 435 reps to 6,6412. Wyoming would have 12 seats; California would have 791. Here’s a map:
This would give the U.S. the largest legislature in the world, topping the 2,904-member National People’s Congress of China. It would land us right about the middle of the list of citizens per representative, at #104, right between Hungary and Qatar (we currently sit at #3, right between Afghanistan and Pakistan).
Would this solve the issues that make Congress so hated? It would be a step in the right direction. Our various think tanks identified three primary reasons behind the estrangement of Congress and citizens: gerrymandering, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors. This fixes, or at least ameliorates, all of them.
Gerrymandering: Gerrymandering many small districts is a harder problem than gerrymandering a few big ones. Durable gerrymandering requires drawing districts with the exact right combination of cities and rural areas, but there are only a limited number of each per state. With too many districts, achievable margins decrease and the gerrymander is more likely to fail.
We can see this with state legislatures vs. congressional delegations. A dominant party has equal incentive to gerrymander each, but most states have more legislature seats than Congressional ones, and so the legislatures end up less gerrymandered. Here are some real numbers from last election cycle1:
So for example, in Republican-dominated North Carolina, 50.9% of people voted Trump, 60% of state senate seats are held by Republicans, and 71.4% of their House seats belong to Republicans. The state senate (50 seats) is only half as gerrymandered as the House delegation (14 seats).
In many states, the new CAA-compliant delegation would be about the same size as the state legislature, and so could also be expected to halve gerrymandering.
As a bonus, the Electoral College bias towards small states would be essentially solved. Currently, a Wyomingite’s presidential vote controls three times as many electoral votes as a Californian’s. Under the CAA, both states would be about equal.
Money: This one is intuitive. If you can effectively buy 1/435 elections, you’ve bought 0.23% of Congress. If the same money only buys you 0.02% of Congress, you’re less incentivized to try to buy House elections and more incentivized to try to buy Senate seats or just to gain influence within a given political party. Money in politics is still a thing, but it becomes much harder to coordinate among people. This makes it easier for somebody to run for Congress without having to fundraise millions of dollars. Because it’s less worth it to spend so much money on any one seat, elections to the House become cheaper2.
Polarization: Some of the think tanks that want to increase the size of Congress by a few hundred members rather than a few thousand claim that this increase will fix political polarization by making representatives more answerable to their constituents who tend to care more about local issues than national ones.
I’m more skeptical of this claim, mainly because it seems that all politics is national politics now. There’s one newspaper and three websites and all they care about is national politics. My Congressional representative ran for office touting her background in energy conservation and water management, arguing that in a drying state and a warming climate we really need somebody in Congress who knows water problems inside and out. Now that she’s actually in Congress, it seems that her main job is calling Donald Trump a pedophile3. The incentives here are to get noticed by the press and to go viral talking about how evil the other side is, so that people who are angry at the evil other side will give you money and you can win your next election.
But maybe Big Congress can solve that. Maybe in a district of less than 50,000 there will be less incentive to go viral and more incentive to connect with your constituents. At the very least, it seems that people trust their state representatives more. And when my state representative and my state Senator tell me about the good work that they’ve done and ask for me to vote for them again, they point to legislation that they’ve passed, not clips of them calling their opponents pedophiles.
- In case this smacks of cherry-picking, here is a breakdown of the “error” in every state’s Congressional delegation, state house delegation, and state senate delegation. “Error” here is defined as the difference between the representation of each state’s delegation and the percentage of that state that voted for Trump over Harris (or vice versa). In only two states, Florida and Virginia, is the error greatest in the largest body, and both of those states would have Congressional delegations larger than that largest body. In the case of Florida, their delegation would be nearly quadruple the size of their state house.
- There could also be an effect from the structure of the TV market. Stations sell ads by region, and each existing media region is larger than the new Congressional districts. So absent a change in market structure, a candidate who wanted to purchase TV advertising couldn’t target their own district easily; they would have to overpay to target a much larger region.
- And just to harp on this more, we just blew by the Colorado River Compact agreement deadline and now the federal government is going to start mandating cuts; everybody’s going to sue everybody else. Lake Powell is quite possibly going to dead pool this year, and as far as I can find the congressperson who ran on water issues is saying nothing about it.
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March 8, 2026
The comfortable illusions Canadians tell themselves about the criminal justice system
L. Wayne Mathison describes how far too many Canadians see crime in Canada and how their pleasant imaginings depart from reality:
Let’s talk about the fairy tale we keep telling ourselves about crime in this country.
If you listen to a certain very loud and very sheltered crowd, you would think our justice system is basically a giant vacuum cleaner wandering the streets accidentally sucking up innocent people who somehow tripped and fell into a robbery charge. Apparently every person behind bars is just a tragic first-timer who made one bad decision on a difficult Tuesday afternoon.
That story collapses the moment you look at the numbers.
Statistics Canada shows something much less romantic. Our prisons are not packed with unlucky amateurs. They are filled largely with repeat performers. If someone is standing in court for a property crime, there is about an 80 percent chance they have already been convicted of doing the exact same thing before. For a lot of these offenders, theft is not a moment of desperation. It is a routine. Court is not a moral reckoning. It is paperwork.
Breaking into garages, lifting bikes, stripping catalytic converters. That is not chaos. It is a job description. Getting caught is just an occupational hazard.
Meanwhile the public is told to take a deep breath, retreat into their “inner Stoic,” and accept that having your property stolen is just part of modern urban weather. File the police report. Replace the lock. Pretend the system is working. It takes real mental gymnastics to watch the same small group of chronic offenders rack up dozens of charges while experts patiently explain that we simply need more empathy.
Look at what happens when these people are actually caught. Most walk out with bail conditions that amount to a polite note asking them to please behave. Unsurprisingly, a huge chunk of new convictions in Canada are administration-of-justice offences. That means breaching bail, skipping court, ignoring probation. They break the rules almost immediately. The revolving door barely slows down.
We do not need some grand philosophical rewrite of the social contract to fix this. We just need to stop pretending the public cannot see what is happening. A very small group of highly active repeat offenders causes a huge share of the damage in our communities.
Until the justice system stops treating career criminals like lost lambs who simply wandered off the path, the rest of us will keep paying the bill.
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March 5, 2026
“[I]nternational law is not law; it is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law”
Lorenzo Warby discusses the charming illusion that “international law” is a real thing and must be treated as a real thing:
In domestic (“municipal”) law, questions of illegality arise. They arise because states have laws. They have laws because their laws come with remedies — consequences for breaking the law.
So, it is a genuine question whether President Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in his attack on Iran. But that is a genuine question because the US has a Constitution that matters. The US is a rule-of-law state, no matter how much other common law jurisdictions may point and laugh at how politicised US law is.
Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Michael Murphy (DDG 112) and USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121), Henry J. Kaiser-class fleet replenishment oiler USNS Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO-187), Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Carl Brashear (T-AKE 7) and U.S. Coast Guard Sentinel-class fast-response cutters USCG Robert Goldman (WPC-1142) and USCGC Clarence Sutphin. Jr. (WPC-1147) sail in formation in the Arabian Sea, Feb. 6, 2026. The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to support maritime security and stability in the Middle East.
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jesse Monford via Wikimedia Commons.In terms of the international order, however, there is no such thing as an illegal war, because (public) international law is not law. It is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law. It only pretends to be law as it has no remedies — apart from declarative statements, which are not enough to make it law. (Private international law does have enforceable and enforced remedies, so is law.)
One of the consequences of this is that (public) international law, as an academic discipline, has no substantive reality-tests. There are no decisions by judges that are enforceable and enforced. This has led to academic international law being the vector by which the toxic ideas of the Critical Theory magisterium, that increasingly dominates Anglo-American universities, have infected Law Schools.
(Public) International law should not be taught at Law Schools, because it is not law. It should be taught in International Relations or Political Science Departments. A PhD in International Law should not qualify you to teach in Law Schools. Indeed, if you cannot tell the difference between actual law — with genuine remedies — and a simulacrum of law, you should not be teaching students at all.
Rules-based international order
When folk refer to the rules-based international order, they are not referring to nothing. There are various rules and conventions it is convenient for states, and other agents, to follow.
There is also a difference between the mercantile maritime order and continental anarchy. It is not an accident that the original international conventions pertained to sea travel and trade.
Within continental anarchy, it is relative power that matters. A war that depletes your resources and capacities, but depletes those of your neighbours more, is a winning proposition, within the state-geopolitics of continental anarchy. The geopolitics of continental anarchy leads states to seek weak or subordinate neighbours. The mercantile maritime order, on the other hand, is all about creating win-win interactions.
Russia, India and China are all continental Powers that live, at least to some extent, in a situation of continental anarchy. But they are also trading States that benefit from the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony. The tension between China as a trading nation becoming the biggest single beneficiary of the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony, and the interests of the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), is the central strategic difficulty that CCP China faces.
Israel faces the strategic dilemma of operating in a region of continental anarchy but seeking support from states deeply embedded in the mercantile maritime order. Whether the Middle East has to be a region of continental anarchy, or can it become far more embedded in the mercantile maritime order, is precisely what is at stake in the latest conflict.
Any social order has to be enforced. This is even more true of international orders. As there is no such thing as international (public) law, enforcing an international order is not a matter of rules, it is a matter of those who actively support and enforce that order and those who seek to subvert it.
A vivid example of how central enforceability is to any international order is given by comparing the treatment of Germany after the two World Wars. Germany was treated far more harshly after the Second World War than after the First World War. The crucial difference was that the Versailles order was not enforceable by the victors and the Potsdam order was.
Update, 6 March: 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.
February 28, 2026
Corruption and red tape rise in lockstep
J.D. Tuccille notes that corruption — at least corruption being brought to our attention — is rising at the same rate as bureaucratic red tape. It’s almost as though there’s a correlation between making things harder to do and officials accepting “sweeteners” to make things easier to do …
At the moment, corruption investigations and trials of political figures are taking place in jurisdictions around the U.S. including Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C. These aren’t isolated scandals; the latest edition of an international corruption index finds corruption worsening globally, with the United States earning its worst score to date. Given that corruption involves government officials peddling favors for compensation, it shouldn’t be surprising that evidence suggests the solution lies in reducing the power and role of the state.
[…]
Regulation Breeds Corruption
“EU regulation is not only becoming more cumbersome but it is also pilling in”, Oscar Guinea and Oscar du Roy of the European Centre for Political Economy wrote in 2024. “The amount of new regulation accumulated during the last years has been staggering.”
That matters. In its advice for reducing corruption, Transparency International emphasizes, “there is a broad consensus that unnecessary and excessive administrative requirements for complying with regulations create both incentives and opportunities for bribery and corruption”.
The means by which this occurs is logical enough. Government-imposed permitting and licensing requirements, administrative procedures, prolonged decision-making, and contract awards create a temptation to shorten delays and reduce costs by padding officials’ pockets. In many cases, selling exceptions becomes the real reason for red tape. That phenomenon applies to the entire world, including the United States.
In the U.S., the More Regulations, the More Bribery
In a paper published in the European Journal of Political Economy in 2020, Oguzhan Dincer of the Department of Economics at Illinois State University and Burak Gunalp of the Department of Economics at Turkey’s Cankaya University looked at the relative effects of federal regulations on the corruption levels in U.S. states.
“Power to enforce the regulations gives government officials power to extort bribes”, they wrote. “Government officials have an opportunity to extort bribes from the firms trying to enter an industry because they have the power to issue the industry licenses. They also have an opportunity to extort bribes from the incumbent firms by simply colluding with them and keeping the regulations unchanged and/or strengthening the regulations to increase the costs of entry for new firms. Finally, regulations and the discretionary power given to government officials to extract bribes create incentives for firms to operate in the unofficial economy.”
Specific to the U.S., they examined two decades of data to see how red tape affected the honesty of public officials.
What they found shouldn’t be surprising: “Using the U.S. Justice Department’s data on the number of federal convictions for the crimes related to corruption, and controlling for several economic and demographic variables, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between federal regulations and corruption.”
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February 24, 2026
What did Prisoners eat at Folsom in 1925? – Lamb Curry & Beans
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 26 Aug 2025Lamb curry with onions and carrots served with white bread and plain pinto beans
City/Region: Folsom, California
Time Period: 1916-1933Folsom Prison is infamous, but the food doesn’t sound like it was all that bad, though there was plenty of watery gruel made from the water salt pork had been soaked in, and if you were in solitary confinement, you got a diet of bread and water with beans every third day. Meals weren’t all terrible, though. A 1925 menu show foods like Hamburger Steak with Brown Gravy, Split Pea Soup, and Lamb Curry & Rice, which is what we’re making here.
In the 1920s, a lot of the cooks were using military manuals, so that is where the base of this recipe comes from, along with a list of ingredients from a commissary report from 1933.
It’s actually quite good, though I would add as much as double the amount of curry powder as was specified in the historical recipe. The beans are a little plain, but that’s to be expected.
382. Beef, curry (for 60 men).
Ingredients used:
20 pounds beef.
1 1/2 ounces curry powder.
Cut the beef into 1-inch cubes and place in a bake pan; cover with beef stock or water; season with salt, pepper, and curry powder. When nearly done, thicken slightly with a flour batter. Serve hot.— Manual for Army Cooks, 1916
LAMB CURRIE and RICE
1160 pounds Mutton
830 ” Rice
300 ” Onions
400 ” Carrots
1 bottle Curry
— Commissary report from Folsom Prison, February 1, 1933
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February 15, 2026
Everything you see in the media is kayfabe
Wikipedia defines kayfabe as “the portrayal of staged elements within professional wrestling (such as characters, rivalries, and storylines) as legitimate or real. Although it remains primarily a wrestling term, it has evolved into a code word for maintaining the pretense of ‘reality’ in front of an audience.” It’s hard not to see modern political theatre in that light, as Damian Penny points out:
Sgt. Slaughter and The Grand Wizard, February 1984.
Photo from Wrestling’s MAIN EVENT magazine via Wikimedia Commons.
I know a guy who was obsessed with WWF wrestling (yes, I said WWF wrestling, because you kids better get off my lawn before Diagnosis Murder comes on) when he was younger and got to see it live when it came to his city. After the show, he was shocked to see several of the wrestlers — some of them good-guy “faces”, others bad-guy “heels” — being driven from the arena in the same minivan.
For someone who took the “sport” of professional wrestling seriously1 and was extremely emotionally invested in the performer rivalries, this was kind of like finding out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.2
That’s the first thing I thought about when I came across this piece by Christianity Today‘s Russell Moore, a rare evangelical leader who actually held on to his integrity in the age of Trump, about the Epstein Files:
Reading through the names of those connected with Epstein, one can hardly believe the range listed there. Some were unsurprising: for instance, creepy filmmaker Woody Allen or the man formerly known as Prince Andrew. But even then, the scope is unsettling. Even the Dalai Lama had to put out a statement noting that he was never involved with Epstein. Just as incredible, many of the people listed were partying with those they spend a lot of time telling the rest of us to hate.
Both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton were apparently friendly with Epstein. The New Age syncretist Deepak Chopra is in the documents many times — often with shady, enigmatic phrases — but so are those who accused the pope of New Age syncretism. With Middle Eastern tensions what they are, still the files include both sheikhs and Israelis. All over the files are connections with both left-wing populist provocateur Noam Chomsky and right-wing populist provocateur Steve Bannon. Epstein makes fun of evangelicals yet recommends a James Dobson article.
How can this be?
Maybe one reason is that Jeffrey Epstein figured out the deep, dark secret of this moment: The people who fight culture wars often believe what they say, but the people who lead culture wars often don’t.
[…] And if the Epstein revelations didn’t blackpill you hard enough, check this out:
To be fair, I’m not sure it’s an entirely bad thing that so many decision-makers and “thought leaders” who are sworn enemies in public get along just fine when the cameras are turned off. If they really hated each other, our political culture might be even more messed up.
- YouTuber Drew Allen says you should take wrestling seriously, and honestly he makes a darned good argument.
- I’ll never forget when I found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, and how I was so depressed and hopeless and wouldn’t leave my bed for days. Finally my mother came into my bedroom, sat down on the side my bed and said, “honey, I know you’re sad but you’re in your second year of law school and really we thought you’d have figured this out long ago“.
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February 14, 2026
“People don’t need conspiracies to be absolute utter rabid bastards”
If you search here for the word “Epstein”, you won’t find a lot of relevant hits other than the reporting when he was arrested in 2019 and occasional mentions in posts on other topics. I don’t breathlessly report every little driblet of news or rumour as it floats past, because I’ve seen other moral panics play out in the past (like the Cleveland child abuse scandal back in the late 80s). Ian at The Bugscuffle Gazette has not only seen things like this before, he’s worked in law enforcement on similar (if lower-profile) cases:
Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
The Epstein Files have been released to a tremendous amount of outrage, and I find myself conflicted. There are definitely victims of that virulent parasite, but I worry they’re about to be overlooked.
I’m afraid that this whole mess is starting to remind me a great deal of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s – 1990s.
For those who may be a little too young to remember that little blot on the Copybook of History, it started with a “psychiatrist”1 who had a fondness for the woo-woo — and incredibly debunked — practice of “Recovered Memory Therapy“2, and was spark-plugged by well-meaning3, yet clueless, people who used suggestive questions and leading questions when interviewing children … and wound up with about 12,000 reports of ritual abuse of children — including, but not limited to: child sexual abuse, ritual sacrifice of children, cannibalism of children, child pornography, child prostitution, murder of children, torture of children, and incestuous orgies.
A large part of the American population became convinced that paedophiles associated with Satanism were running child care centers across the country for the express purpose of providing a steady supply of children for devil-worshipping rites.
As one might expect day-care workers and pre-schools took it in the neck … but so did fathers. The “experts” — untrained, inexperienced, unqualified — had a particular case of the ass towards fathers, with the result that several fathers spent years in prison for crimes never committed.
Yeah. Not a one of those reported 12,000 cases turned out to be substantiated. And when I say “Not substantiated” we’re talking about stuff like:
- Children were coached to testify that they had been taken to a cemetery where the graves were dug up and the corpses used for violation. It is physically impossible to dig up an entire cemetery and leave abso-bloody-lutely no trace behind.
- Children were coached to testify that a teenager with Noonan Syndrome had cut the throat of a giraffe, and used the dying corpse for ritual violations. Seriously.
- Children were coached to testify that they had been given to aliens, flown up into space, and violated.
In addition to the coaching, case files were built from statements given by diagnosed schizophrenics; anonymous statements given by people who were later tracked down and found to be — let us be precise here — flat barking bugnuts; and was fueled by the political desire to make hay, or make the other guy look bad rather than — you know — justice.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Other than the fact that innocent people got dragged through the legal wringer, spent years in prison, and had their lives ruined for nothing; the mass-hysteria moral panic4 went that actual, provable cases of child molestation got short shrift.
A vast underground network of Satanic peadophiles conducting ritualistic abuse, cannibalism, and unholy rituals was far more toothsome to prosecutors, the Media, and the public at large than Uncle Badtouch.
Given the choice of making his name by becoming the hero taking on a vast international cabal of highly-connected Satanists … or the day-to-day boring grind of prosecuting the creepy dude at the park — well, District Attorneys are politicians. And politicians gotta politick. Heroes poll better than the unsung.
Which brings us to the Epstein Files.
- I use the scare quotes because he should have been struck off for his wanton destruction of families and innocent people.
- Really good at implanting false memories, not worth a bucket of warm rat spit at recovering memories.
- And let’s face it: Some ill-intentioned folks.
- This went on for years.
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February 8, 2026
“It’s not corruption, it’s community policing”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Peter Girnus explains the recent arrest of several Toronto police officers on a disturbing variety of charges:
I’m a Police Liaison Officer in Toronto.
My job is community relations
The tow truck community.
I provide information.
To my contacts.
In the towing industry.
They provide information back.
To my bank account.
That’s community policing.
My father is also a cop.
He does the same thing.
Family business.
Three generations of service.
To organized crime.
We call ourselves “consultants.”
The tow truck guys call themselves “The Union.”
52 counts of conspiracy to commit murder.
That’s union organizing.
Toronto style.
(more…)
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February 5, 2026
“It was not fear of the crime that silenced authorities, but fear of a word: racist“
On Substack, Celina101 outlines the long and sordid history of official deliberate blindness to a widespread and horrific crime wave in Britain, all for fear that if they paid proper attention they’d be labelled as “racists”:
There are crimes so extreme that the mind instinctively rejects them, not because they are implausible, but because accepting them would require acknowledging a collapse of morality too large to comprehend. Child sexual abuse is one such crime.
Child sexual abuse does not arrive in a single form. It ranges from isolated abductions, to organised pornography networks, to violence carried out by parents or those entrusted with care. Every one of these crimes is horrific, and none should ever be minimised or ignored.
But there is one form of abuse that stands apart, not because it is worse in kind, but because it was allowed to flourish unchecked. The organised targeting of schoolgirls by groups of men who lingered outside schools, fast-food outlets, and transport hubs, grooming children into addiction, sexual exploitation, and prostitution, constituted a distinct and recognisable pattern of abuse.
This pattern was not hidden. It was not unknowable. And yet for longer than a quarter of a century, British authorities chose not to act. Despite the issue being raised at a national level as early as 2003, and despite its presence being well understood in certain towns since at least the late 1980s, it was deliberately sidelined, minimised, and left to metastasise.1
For decades, these gangs were allowed to congregate openly around school gates without consequence. What shielded them was not ignorance or lack of evidence, but an institutional terror of confronting anything that carried racial implications; the shade of their skin protected them.
By 2011, the long-standing silence surrounding the issue began to break. Once the initial barrier was breached, the extent of the abuse became increasingly difficult to suppress.2 Over the following years, British media outlets published a succession of detailed investigations that brought the scale of the crimes into public view.
In September 2012, The Times published an extensive overview of the phenomenon.3 The paper reported that for more than a decade, organised groups of men had been able to groom, exploit, and traffic girls across multiple towns and cities in Britain, often operating with minimal interference from authorities.
Yet, event The Times underestimated the scale of this. By early 2015, senior police figures were publicly acknowledging the scale of the crisis. One officer spoke of “tens of thousands” of current victims of grooming gangs. A Member of Parliament, representing a constituency widely associated with the problem, went further, suggesting that the total number of victims nationwide, past and present, could reach as high as one million.4
These figures are almost impossible to comprehend. They refer to school-aged girls systematically identified, isolated, and exploited over many years. And yet, despite the magnitude of the harm, perpetrators were able to operate with remarkable impunity.
By the end of 2014, the Association of Chief Police Officers confirmed that the number of victims each year ran into the tens of thousands.5 Even on the most conservative interpretation, this would place the number of victims over a twenty-year period well into six figures. Against this backdrop, the number of successful convictions, under 200, stands as a staggering indictment of the system meant to protect the vulnerable and enforce the law.
There is no comparable serious crime in modern Britain where the disparity between victims and convictions is so extreme.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20100620042427/http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/law_order/Asian%2Brape%2Ballegations/256893
- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/944206/Group-based_CSE_Paper.pdf
- Andrew Norfolk, “Police Files Reveal Vast Child Protection Scandal”, The Times, 24 Sep 2012.
- https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/grooming-gangs-ethnicities-how-many-statistics-data-dpx2bfrts#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Cone%20million%E2%80%9D%20figure%20comes,over%20a%2070%2Dyear%20period.
- https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-files-reveal-vast-child-protection-scandal-ffrpdr09vrv
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February 3, 2026
Lawyers versus the genderwoke establishment
On his Substack, Andrew Doyle celebrates the recent court victory of a young woman who sued her surgeon and the psychologist who recommended her for surgery:
It is curious that one of the proven cures for human hysteria is the threat of legal action. During the Salem witch trials of 1692, the supposedly “tormented” girls who had accused villagers of cavorting with the devil “cried out” against a gentleman from the nearby town of Andover. He promptly issued a writ for defamation, and the girls swiftly retracted their claim. It turns out that the forces of God will back down from Satan when faced with the prospect of a lawsuit.
This week, a jury in New York has awarded $2 million in damages to a detransitioner called Fox Varian. Now twenty-two years old, Varian had previously struggled with her gender identity and was subjected to a double mastectomy at the age of sixteen. Both the surgeon and the psychologist were found culpable for not following the standards of care or communicating adequately with each other during the consultation period.
Varian no longer identifies as transgender, but the damage has been done. During the trial, she said she regretted the surgery almost instantly. “I immediately had a thought that this was wrong”, she said, “and it couldn’t be true”. After surgery, she recalled the pain in her chest as being akin to “searing hot … ripping sensations” and that she felt “shame” at the fact that she was now “disfigured for life”.
It goes without saying that no medical professional should be complicit in the mutilation of a child who is so clearly in need of psychotherapeutic support. According to research by the Manhattan Institute, between 2017 and 2023 around 6,000 girls under the age of eighteen had undergone double mastectomies. Worse still, at least fifty of these children were under twelve-and-a-half years old. Activists have routinely claimed that no minors are being subjected to “gender-affirming” surgery. This is a lie.
What now for the many thousands of detransitioners who have grown up to regret their treatment? Even puberty blockers have been linked with testicular atrophy, increased risk of cancer, osteoporosis and impaired brain development. It is shocking enough that all of this was encouraged by those in a position of authority and trust, but we should never forget that it was in the service of a pseudo-religious belief in a gendered soul.
This was hysteria, plain and simple, and not even the brightest minds were immune from falling under its spell. No reputable study has found that “gender-affirming medicine” is beneficial to patients, and yet the medical establishment kowtowed to activist pressure. It is reminiscent of the judges and ministers of Salem, going along with nonsense out of fear that they too might be accused of witchcraft.
Update, 4 January: 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.
January 28, 2026
An ADA unintended consequence in Los Angeles
I’ve heard many people refer to the Americans with Disabilities Act as the worst piece of legislation in US history, and stories like this one make it easy to agree:
Los Angeles’s streets are in notoriously bad shape. Fewer than two-thirds are considered in a state of good repair, according to the city’s Department of Public Works. Broken sidewalks have spawned years of costly litigation, and Los Angeles pays out millions of dollars each year to drivers whose cars are damaged by potholes.
Many cities would see this situation as a mandate for change. And Los Angeles has indeed made a change: last summer, the city quietly stopped repaving its streets. Not slowed. Not fell behind. Stopped completely.
The Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) has not repaved a single street since last June, and the city’s latest budget practically zeros out repaving for next fiscal year. StreetLA crews are still doing some road repairs, fixing potholes and patching problem areas. But the most basic form of urban maintenance — full street resurfacing — has all but disappeared in America’s second-largest city.
Why has Los Angeles stopped repaving its streets? The answer, it turns out, has to do with federal disability rules that, paradoxically, have made fixing roads legally riskier than letting them fall apart. Though well-intentioned, L.A.’s shift shows how such policies can unintentionally worsen urban quality of life.
The clearest explanation of the city’s shift comes from L.A.–based housing and transportation advocate Oren Hadar. Digging through budget documents and engineering classifications, Hadar explained in an essay from late last year that the city didn’t necessarily abandon street work so much as reclassify it out of existence.
The city seems to have invented a new category of repair specifically designed to avoid triggering costly federal accessibility mandates. Instead of repaving streets, StreetsLA now performs what it calls “large asphalt repairs”. As Hadar explained, these repairs address localized damage — areas larger than a pothole but smaller than full resurfacing. Essentially, the city repaves only part of a street rather than the entire width, as shown below.
A “large asphalt repair” on L.A.’s Century Boulevard. Courtesy: StreetsLA on X
But, as Hadar wrote, “the thing about large asphalt repair is that it’s … not a real thing. It appears to be a term made up by the city some time in the last year.”
Why invent a new classification? The reason lies in federal disability law. Under regulations implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act, when a city alters a street, it must also bring associated pedestrian infrastructure into compliance. That means installing ADA-compliant curb ramps at every intersection along the way.
Repaving is considered an alteration that triggers these requirements. Maintenance activities, such as filling potholes or making minor repairs, are not. The city claims that large asphalt repairs are “pavement maintenance activity” and therefore do not require ADA upgrades.
That distinction carries enormous financial and logistical consequences. Hadar found that each curb ramp costs roughly $50,000, totaling about $200,000 per intersection. With roughly ten intersections per mile, curb ramps alone can add around $2 million per mile to the cost of repaving — a figure that often exceeds the cost of the asphalt itself. Design and construction typically take 9 to 12 months per ramp, and federal rules require the ramps to be completed by the time the street is resurfaced.
Update, 29 January: 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.
January 18, 2026
“Voluntary”. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The federal government, rather than abandoning its ridiculous and ineffective “voluntary” firearm buyback program, is determined to carry on:
🇨🇦 The “Voluntary” Trap: Ottawa’s Buyback Is Coercion, Not Consent 🇨🇦
by GoC AdminsThe federal government unveiled the next phase of its firearms confiscation program on Saturday, insisting, yet again, that the process is “voluntary”. But as the details emerge, that claim collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
What the government is offering Canadians is not a choice. It is a trap designed to force compliance through financial coercion and the threat of criminal prosecution.
Beginning January 19, licensed firearm owners will be contacted by the National Firearms Centre and invited to voluntarily declare their property. The declaration period runs until March 31, 2026. Those who comply may receive compensation. Those who do not will be required to surrender, deactivate, or export their legally acquired property before the amnesty expires on October 30, 2026, or face criminal charges for illegal possession.
That is not voluntary. That is coercion dressed in bureaucratic language.
The “Voluntary” Deadline Is a Financial Squeeze
The most manipulative aspect of this program is its timeline.The government has set the amnesty to expire on October 30, 2026, but the window to declare firearms for compensation closes seven months earlier, on March 31, 2026. Owners who wait to see whether a future election, court ruling, or policy reversal intervene are punished for doing so.
This gap is not accidental. It predictably pressures owners to act early, before political uncertainty can resolve itself.
If you wait until the summer or fall of 2026 to see whether the law changes, you will have missed the compensation window entirely. At that point, your only options will be to surrender your property for free or face criminal liability.
Yes, owners can technically wait until October 30, 2026, but only if they are willing to receive nothing in return.
That is not a voluntary choice. It is a financial ultimatum.
🇨🇦 Surrender First, Get Paid … Maybe 🇨🇦
Perhaps the most astonishing revelation from the government’s announcement is that declaring your firearms does not guarantee compensation.
Payment will be issued on a “first-come, first-served” basis, subject to available funding.
In any other context, forcing people to surrender lawfully acquired property without guaranteed compensation would violate basic principles of fairness and due process. Under this program, owners are asked to declare thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars’ worth of property with no legal assurance that the money to compensate them actually exists.
If the budget runs dry, you are still left holding a prohibited firearm you must destroy or surrender. The cheque may never come.
Compliance is mandatory. Compensation is optional.
🇨🇦 A Pilot Project That Already Failed 🇨🇦
Ottawa insists this national rollout will succeed, despite the fact that the pilot version of this program was an embarrassment.
Public reporting indicates that when the government tested the scheme in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, it resulted in the collection of approximately 25 firearms from just 16 individuals. After millions spent on administration, IT systems, and police coordination, only a handful of people participated.
If this were a private-sector initiative, it would have been cancelled outright. Instead, the government is expanding it nationwide without addressing the structural failures that doomed the pilot from the start.
🇨🇦 It’s Not About Safety; It’s About Control 🇨🇦
The government inadvertently revealed its true motivation when officials remarked that they do not want owners using compensation money to “buy an SKS”.
This statement exposes the emptiness of the public-safety argument.
The SKS is already licensed, regulated, and subject to existing Canadian firearms law. By acknowledging that owners might simply replace prohibited firearms with other legal ones that function similarly, the government is admitting that the bans are arbitrary.
The objective is not to remove a particular mechanical risk from society. It is to financially exhaust and discourage lawful firearm ownership altogether.
This program is not designed to stop criminals. Criminals do not declare firearms. Criminals do not comply with amnesty deadlines. Criminals do not interact with government portals.
Only compliant, vetted, RCMP-checked Canadians do.
🇨🇦 The Deadlines Are Real. The Logic Is Not 🇨🇦
Government officials closed their announcement by warning Canadians that “the deadlines are real”.
They are right about that.The government is fully prepared to criminalize people who followed every rule it imposed. People who acquired their property legally, stored it safely, and harmed no one. It is prepared to spend billions enforcing a program that criminals will ignore entirely.
This is not a buyback. It is not voluntary. It is a forced surrender program aimed at the easiest possible target: responsible firearm owners.
While those driving Canada’s violent crime problem continue entirely outside the scope of this policy, law-abiding citizens are left facing a stark reality: Comply now, or be punished later.
History will judge this program not by its press releases, but by its results. And all available evidence suggests it will deliver exactly what it already has: massive cost, deepened division, and no measurable improvement in public safety.
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