Quotulatiousness

June 10, 2026

“Don’t talk to the police”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Canadian lawyer Ian Runkle (aka “Runkle of the Bailey”) jokingly suggested that he needed to make a change to his normal billing practice:

This rustled the jimmies of Jake Sun:

Which led to a more extended discussion from Ian:

Okay, ignoring the whole Canadian vs. American thing, let’s talk about this notion that it is somehow un-American to advise people not to speak to the cops.

Cause holy shit that’s funny.

First, when the cops want to put you in jail, cooperating with them and making that easier for them is a real dumb move. If you’re sitting in the interrogation room it’s not because the cops are looking to help you find a burglar or because you’re calling 911. It’s because they want to put you in jail, potentially for years. Wanting to help them at that point is as dumb as it gets.

Second, your right not to talk to the cops is enshrined in the Constitution in both Canada and the U.S. In other countries, likely not as much, which means that being able to tell the cops “Fuck you, no” is absolutely American, both because it is a thing in America and because exercising your Constitutional rights is an American and patriotic thing to do.

Third, if we’re talking about the United States specifically, we’re not talking about a country founded on respect for and obeisance to authority. The slogan was never “Give me Liberty, if the government allows it”. No one asked for a permit to throw tea in the harbour. The U.S. was not founded on the principles of obedience and deference to authority, but instead the rights of the individual against authorities are fundamental to the American experience.

America is not and never was about “Yes, sir.” It’s far more about “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.”

QotD: Tiberius Gracchus, Tribune of the Plebs

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

Tiberius Gracchus’ proposal to fix this problem [the perceived loss of free farmers from whom the Roman army was raised] was the lex Sempronia Agraria. The law proposed to enforce a legal but long ignored limit on the holding of ager publicus,1 restricting individuals to holding just 500 iugera (c. 311 acres), with the state revoking the leases on the remainder and using the reclaimed land to then provide small plots for free to the Roman poor, with a rider that these plots could not be sold (to avoid them being reconsolidated into elite estates).

And here it is worth noting that kind of government the Romans had to understand the response. The Roman Republic had written laws but no written constitution – instead, the rules for office holding, for conducting the business of the Senate, for running the assemblies and so on were all customary: the Romans governed themselves in accordance with what they called the mos maiorum, “the custom of the ancestors”. In a sense then, certain practices, if practiced long enough, became a sort of law-of-tradition to themselves and of course one of those customs – practiced at this point for, at minimum around 150 years – was the continual leasing of large amounts of ager publicus to the point that the leases were treated as a form of ownership: people used that land as security for loans, they built houses on it, they buried their parents on it and so on. Because the leases were presumptively renewable and had been for decades if not centuries, under the mos maiorum, the holders of ager publicus had long considered the land theirs. And of course the upset parties are rich and powerful, so their opposition was significant and meaningful, politically.

In brief, the way this plays out is that while Tiberius Gracchus does have significant popular support for his motion (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 9.1), much of the elite are opposed. He draws up a quite conciliatory version of the law, which proposes to compensate the holders of large amounts of ager publicus for their lost leasing rights and to then give them the remainder of their leased land (so they needn’t fear a second lex agraria and a third and a fourth and so on), but according to Plutarch in the face of continued elite opposition, shifts back to a less conciliatory version of the law (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 10.3). The resistance to his law centers on another tribune, Marcus Octavius, himself a large holder of public lands, who plans to veto the law and uses his own powers as a tribune to disrupt the process (along with some fairly clear shenanigans by some of the wealthy, like trying to hide the voting urns to prevent a vote on the law and so on).

Now there are a few things to note at this juncture in the story. First, there being ten tribunes, it must never have been very hard to find a tribute willing to gum up the passage of a given law, but that, traditionally, this was a tactic of delay, rather than a hard-stop the way Octavius is using it. At the same time, with real public momentum to make this law happen, one could easily imagine simply waiting Octavius out – he only has one year in office. Except. Except that, remember, Tiberius Gracchus needs a big victory in his tribunate to get his political career [back] on track, a consideration that was clearly significant (thus the reason we’re informed of his quaestorship; we usually don’t know much about even very significant figures’ time in junior offices!). That consideration, I think, serves as important context for Tiberius’ decision to escalate every time he encounters resistance: he cannot afford to simply be the prelude to someone else passing this law: he needs to pass it himself.

The normal method for “deconflicting” two magistrates with opposing vetoes like this was to go to the Senate, which Tiberius Gracchus, hoping his influential supporters would carry the day, did. Instead, according to Plutarch (Ti. Gracch. 11.2) the Senate was merely no help, whereas Appian (BCiv 1.12) describes the Senate as openly upbraiding Tiberius, a strong negative response. Now under the mos maiorum, that would be the end of it: the authority of the Senate (the auctoritas senatus) ought to be so intense that when the Senate speaks in one voice and says, “not right now” then you desist. Remember that in the Roman conception, the Republic is a partnership of sorts between the Senate and the People (the S and the P in SPQR), rather than a situation in which the Senate is purely subordinate to the popular will: if the Senate is strongly opposed, that is supposed to be a veto point that is respected.

But remember: Tiberius Gracchus cannot, politically, desist. He must push through because his political career requires a victory this year. Note that the cause does not require a victory in 133; there is nothing to stop another tribune in 132 from trying to advance the same bill or a more limited or different version of it. But Tiberius Gracchus’ career absolutely requires success in 133. So instead of desisting, he escalates.

He now breaks clearly with the mos maiorum and plans to take his law directly to the people against the advice of the Senate. Octavius is obviously a problem – he’ll veto anything Tiberius Gracchus tries to do – so Tiberius Gracchus introduces a law to depose Octavius from office. The Roman Republic doesn’t have anything like impeachment, there is no framework to remove someone from office. Instead, the way the Republic works is that all of the offices are held for short duration (one year) and while tribunes and office holders with imperium are immune from prosecution while in office, they can be prosecuted the moment they leave office for any crimes they committed. There is no framework for booting out a tribune like this; the remedy in the customary Roman system is to make sure the next year you elect tribunes who support the idea and try to pass it then. But that remedy doesn’t work for Tiberius Gracchus.

So Tiberius Gracchus passes the law deposing Octavius and then has him dragged from the speaker’s platform (the rostra) and now we have a problem. Because of course Octavius’ supporters are going to view this law itself as illegal and invalid: tribunes are, you will recall sacrosanct, so it’s not clear they can be deposed and it is very clear they cannot be assaulted or dragged. Violating the sacrosanctity of a tribune is, at least notionally, a capital offense and a severe violation of religion and if you think that Tiberius Gracchus’ legal basis for all of this is rubbish, you think he just did it twice. Of course, Tiberius is also a tribune, so you can’t attack him now, but once his year is done, you are probably planning to haul him in to court and let a jury decide if what he did was legal or not.2

In any case, with Octavius removed, Tiberius passes his land reform bill. The law provided for a three-man commission to handle the assessment of what public land was held in excess and then to hand it out. Tiberius Gracchus names as those commissioners himself, his brother and his father-in-law (Appius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 143)). Needless to say, that is a set of commissioners which does not inspire a lot of confidence that the commission will be uncorrupted by politics, a point we’ll get back to in just a moment.

In the meantime, the Senate looked to exert its traditional prerogative over state funds (as it advised the quaestors who superintended the treasury) to hamstring the new commission, but Tiberius Gracchus took advantage of the recent death of Attalus III, King of Pergamum. Attalus had notionally willed his kingdom “to the Roman people” – he had no clear heirs and so perhaps thought by this act to get the Romans to pick one of his relatives to run the kingdom, thus avoiding a damaging civil war – but instead Tiberius, getting the news early, rushed to pass a law annexing the kingdom and using the windfall to fund his commission. The law passes, but this is a breach both of the Senate’s traditional power over state finances, but also its very important role managing Roman foreign policy.

What I want to note in this sequence which is important for understanding what comes next is that Tiberius Gracchus has just demonstrated that, so long as he remained popular, he could use the powers of the tribunate to essentially run the Roman state from the tribune’s chair. Tiberius has now forced not merely a domestic land issue, but also a finance issue and a foreign policy issue over the objection of the Senate and another elected tribune, essentially running roughshod over all of the customary limits intended to keep any one Roman politician from coming to dominate the Roman political system.

Of course if you were an opponent of Tiberius Gracchus, you could at least tell yourself that this is all bad, but at the very least, Tiberius Gracchus will be out of office next year, as it was contrary to custom to run for any office immediately after holding it. Indeed, it was unusual to hold basically any office more than once, save for the consulship (and even then, only for very successful consuls and never multiple years in a row). Those limits are customary but everything about the Roman Republic is customary; if you discounted the mos maiorum, there wouldn’t be any republic left. You’d instead expect that Tiberius would go back to being a senator for a few years while planning his shot at the praetorship – during which he’ll have to survive a series of court battles over the legality of his actions.

So even if he is doing potentially outrageous, dangerous things, at least he’ll be gone in a year, right?

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.

  1. Which, again, noting the complications above, probably means applying that limit for the first time to at least some classifications of land it had not applied to before and also applying it against the socii.
  2. The Roman court system leaves questions of law – which in most modern courts would be decided by a judge – to the jury itself.

June 6, 2026

Civil forfeiture is legalized theft where the process is part of the punishment

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

J.D. Tuccille points out that most victims of civil forfeiture actions in the United States never get a day in court to fight against the theft:

Two years ago, the Netflix film Rebel Ridge turned a common law enforcement tactic into a cinematic study of injustice. In fictionalized form, the movie brought home to audiences the reality that civil asset forfeiture is nothing more than legalized theft. Unfortunately, as documented in a recent Institute for Justice (I.J.) report, while several states have sought to reform the use of civil forfeiture, it remains a source of profit for many law enforcement agencies and a cause of grief to unlucky victims who rarely get to argue their cases in a courtroom.

Forfeiture “Clearly Has Been Abused”

Civil asset forfeiture is “a legal process enabling law enforcement agencies to seize property which is suspected of having connections to criminal activity,” Northeastern University criminology professor Nikos Passas explained when Rebel Ridge spurred Americans to wonder whether cops could really take money and property without convicting anybody of a crime. “The difference between criminal and civil forfeiture is that the criminal one requires a conviction. A civil forfeiture targets the property itself, and often it is done without charging the owner with wrongdoing.”

The problem, he added, “is that by giving a profit motive, a financial motive, to law enforcement it introduces a bias. … It clearly has been abused.”

I.J. has long tracked and battled those abuses. In the fourth edition of Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture, authors Lisa Knepper, Jason Tiezzi, Matthew P. West, Elyse Pohl, and Mindy Menjou document legal changes that have reformed or even abolished civil asset forfeiture in some states, and the work that remains to rein in abuses. Change has been slow because stealing under color of law is a huge moneymaker for government agencies against which people have little recourse.

Seizures by Default, With No Courtroom Proceedings

“Most forfeitures never reach a courtroom, available data show. For example, in a large sample of Indiana cases, just 4% were decided by a judge. Instead, forfeiture typically happens by default,” the recent report notes.

Why is that? It’s often because in their seizures, police departments take enough money or property to be lucrative, but not at a value that would justify a legal fight.

“Very few owners who contest forfeiture have legal representation — just 6% in Arizona and 7% in Oregon — likely because it is prohibitively expensive,” according to the report. “A straightforward state-court forfeiture case costs an estimated $3,300, nearly twice the median cash forfeiture of $1,678 across 24 states.”

Since it’s a civil process and not a criminal one, people on the receiving end of civil forfeiture aren’t entitled to public defenders. Many find the cost of hiring attorneys to be much higher than the value of what is stolen from them by authorities. The money winds up in government coffers without a fight. Those who do fight end up running a gauntlet.

“Even owners who successfully reach a judge typically wait months. Adding together statutory deadlines, the median forfeiture process takes more than six months on paper just to reach a courtroom. … In practice, cases frequently take far longer. In Virginia, for example, half of successful challenges lasted more than nine months, and a quarter stretched beyond 16 months.”

June 4, 2026

The murder of Henry Nowak and the failure of British policing

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

Andrew Doyle notes that the very first mention of Henry Nowak’s murder in Spain’s El País (approximately Spain’s equivalent of the Toronto Star, The Guardian, or the New York Times) frames the story as “evil extremely extreme extreme-right-wing Führers pounce”:

While the country is still reeling from the horrific murder of eighteen-year-old student Henry Nowak, an astonishing article has appeared in El País, Spain’s largest national newspaper. Rather than focus on the failures of the police officers, or the institutional bias within the force, the headline steers its readers away from the case and towards the outlet’s own obsessions. The headline translates as “Farage’s far right stirs up hatred in the UK after a young man is stabbed to death by a Sikh man”.

As Alejo Schapire (an Argentine journalist based in France) has pointed out, this is the first and only article produced by El País on the subject of the Nowak killing. Instead of an image of the victim, the newspaper has opted for a photograph of Nigel Farage. The Guardian was similarly histrionic and detached from reality in its coverage: “As ethnonationalist far right drives racist agenda, Reform UK leader felt need to weigh in on murder of Henry Nowak”.

It is one thing to take issue with those who seek to weaponise human tragedies for their own political gain, and quite another to dismiss legitimate criticism of a failed system. Reform UK is by no means a “far right” party, but of course the term has been so promiscuously misused in the press that at this point it might be best to dispense with it altogether. But of course, this is not really about Farage or his response to the murder at all. It is a cynical means of deflecting from the fate of Nowak and what it reveals about the state of policing in the UK.

So what exactly did Farage say to have the Guardian fulminate about his “racist agenda” and for El País to make him the focus of the story rather than the victim? During a live broadcast, Farage praised the Nowak family for their “extraordinarily dignified” response following the conviction of their son’s killer, and went on to say: “I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage”.

And why not indeed? Let’s not forget the shocking details of what happened in this case. Nowak was stabbed multiple times by Vickrum Digwa using a Sikh ceremonial dagger. His mother hid the murder weapon, and his brother called 999 claiming that Nowak had been racially abusive. When police arrived, Digwa repeated this lie. And when Nowak repeatedly told the officers he had been stabbed, one replied “I don’t think you have, mate” and handcuffed him as he lay dying.

At Always the Horizon, Copernican shares his thoughts on the political response to the murder:

Riots have been growing over the last few years in the UK when incidents like this occur. Nigel Farage addressed the incident in a youtube video here. Referring it as a “moment to take a long hard look at ourselves and the country that we’ve become”. He proceeds to say, “All the values and standards of living in a free country, where everyone is judged equally before the law, have been trashed and thrown away”. Nigel Farage demands that “the police complaints operation, the IOPC, needs to get to the bottom of this and produce a report very very quickly.” He also states that the sentencing is unacceptable, as the sentencing of the Sikh was less severe than the minimum recommended for a sustained, aggressive, murderous assault.

Nigel knows how to fix this: file some more reports. Maybe even reprimand a judge for being too lenient. That will surely bring back the murdered man, make whole his family, and un-rape and un-murder the children that have been attacked over the years by numerous violent psychos imported from the third world by domestic traitors. What a British solution: file another report about it.

Keir Starmer took another position. He condemned Nigel Farage for “Whipping up” division against the wishes of Nowak’s family. He believes “Nigel Farage’s Reaction” is the “wrong reaction”. We wouldn’t want division at a time like this. What we really need to do is respect the wishes of the cucked cowards whose son was killed and who took no flesh or blood from the offending Sikh as recompense. Who were cowed by government processes and report filing. Those are the people whose feelings we should be worried about. We would hate for the Sikh community to feel threatened.

To be honest, I agree with Keir Starmer. Nigel Farage’s reaction is the wrong reaction

Rupert Lowe, an MP of the “far-right” British Reform party [correction: Lowe is the leader of the Restore Britain party], is getting closer to the correct reaction when it comes to this murderous Sikh, his community, and the managerial bureaucracy that brought them here and protected them.

That said, I think Rupert Lowe is also heavily couching his language for fear of public backlash, or getting arrested for “inflaming racial tensions”.

Update, 5 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Bill C-9 is “what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

L. Wayne Mathison explains how the Canadian government persuaded itself to push a “hate speech” bill that will upend centuries of free speech practice and criminalize good-faith arguments. Like many such brainfarts, they cannot imagine what consciously evil people will do with these legal tools in hand:

AI-generated image by L. Wayne Mathison

If you want to see what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa, look at Bill C-9.

This is not just another “hate speech” bill. It is a sign of a much bigger shift.

The old political arguments were about wages, factories, class, ownership, and the economy. That was the old Marxist world. Today’s politics is about language, symbols, identity, emotion, culture, and who gets to decide what “harm” means.

Parliament has stopped arguing about who owns the factory.

Now it wants to control the dictionary.

Bill C-9 reads like a critical theory seminar that escaped campus, found a suit, and got hired by the Department of Justice.

Under the older liberal model, the law punished actions. Assault someone? Crime. Vandalize property? Crime. Block access to a building? Crime. The state dealt with what you actually did.

But C-9 moves the centre of gravity from action to meaning.

What did your words mean?

What did your symbol represent?

What was your motive?

What cultural message did your expression create?

That is not law as a neutral referee. That is law as a cultural therapist with police powers.

The most revealing part is the proposed removal of the long-standing “good faith” religious defence for hate propaganda. That defence existed for a reason. It protected freedom of conscience. It recognized that in a free country, people may express religious beliefs that others find offensive, outdated, or wrong, as long as they are not wilfully promoting hatred or violence.

That was not a loophole.

It was a guardrail.

But to the modern ideological mind, an ancient religious text is not treated as a source of conscience. It is treated as an artifact of power. A legal protection for religious speech is no longer seen as freedom. It is seen as oppression wearing a church hat.

So the guardrail has to go.

And what does government offer instead?

Trust us.

Trust that prosecutors will be reasonable. Trust that judges will interpret the law narrowly. Trust that ordinary Canadians will not get dragged through the process for saying something unpopular, traditional, religious, or politically unfashionable.

Sorry, but that is not how liberty works.

Rights are not protected by hoping the state behaves itself. Rights are protected by limiting what the state is allowed to do in the first place.

That is what makes the Senate debate so revealing. The Senate was supposed to be sober second thought. The old establishment airbag. The place where bad laws were supposed to slow down before hitting the public at full speed.

But now even the Senate is wrestling with a bill built from an intellectual toolkit designed to dismantle the very traditions the Senate was created to preserve.

Bill C-9 does not build social cohesion. It does not repair trust. It does not ask why people are angry, alienated, or radicalized in the first place.

It does what modern bureaucratic progressivism always does.

It manages symptoms by expanding state power.

It turns culture into a compliance file. It treats offensive expression less like a social problem to be answered with argument, courage, and moral confidence, and more like a hazardous substance to be regulated by experts.

The Frankfurt School wrote in dense, foggy jargon to expose hidden systems of power.

The joke is on everyone.

The modern state did not reject those tools. It absorbed them, stripped out the revolutionary romance, bolted them onto the Criminal Code, and called it public safety.

Bill C-9 is what happens when cultural theory becomes administrative power.

It is what happens when the state stops protecting public order and starts managing public meaning.

And that should worry anyone who still thinks freedom means more than government-approved speech.

June 2, 2026

Low IQ, mens rea, and actus reus

Filed under: Britain, India, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For those like me whose legal Latin isn’t great, “mens rea” is “the mental state of a defendant who is accused of committing a crime”, while actus reus is a “guilty act” (from Wikipedia). On his Substack, William M. Briggs discusses how legal systems decide when an accused person’s IQ is so low that they lack the ability to understand that their action is illegal:

A gang of gypsies in England gang raped a young girl (and another previously) at knifepoint while filming the deeds, laughing all the while and even posted one of the rapes on social media. At their trial, Judge Nicholas Rowland excused their crimes because he said the criminals were “‘very young’, had low intelligence, a ‘limited understanding of consent’ and were susceptible to ‘peer pressure'”.

    [Rowland] said that the second boy fell into the bottom one per cent in IQ for his age, and he had been diagnosed with ADHD, while the third boy had ‘low intellectual capacity’ and he had a ‘limited understanding of consent’.

Iryna Zarutska, 23, was riding a train in Charlotte, when Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr rose up, slit her throat, and as he was exiting the train gleefully declared he “got” his white woman. Brown had been arrested some 14 times before he murdered Zarutska, for crimes including armed robbery. He was freed each time. For the murder, he was found by Experts to be “incompetent to stand trial”.

Brown and the gypsies were not alone. Recently, there were these cases:

Many states have humane destruction laws that apply when animals (usually dogs) have attacked or killed humans. Florida, for instance, confiscates vicious dogs and puts them down. When any animal kills and eats a man it is usually put down, and most think it wise and prudent to do so. But some curiously argue the animals cannot help themselves, that it is their nature to attack and kill and even eat people, and who are we to judge?

In any case, it is clear that dogs, nor any animal, are not as intelligent as man. Just as it is clear obvious truth that some men are not as intelligent as others. Yet this fact does meet resistance from Equalitarians and Universalists, both forgiving every sin except the sin of claiming sin exists.

[…]

The Eighth Amendment reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted“.

Since 2002, executing a dumb criminal is “cruel”, yet executing an intelligent criminal is not cruel nor unusual. This is odd because, as any dog owner can attest, even dogs can know right from wrong, and even stupid men know murder is wrong.

Scalia wrote in his dissent that an Expert (a psychologist) on one of the appeals testified Smith had “an IQ of 59”. Smith also, and in this case, really had “16 prior felony convictions for robbery, attempted robbery, abduction, use of a firearm, and maiming”. He noted previous courts ruled only the profoundly retarded, those “idiots” who “had an IQ of 25 or below”, had a “‘deficiency in will’ rendering them unable to tell right from wrong”.

On the general topic of IQ, but not directly related to violent crime, ESR discusses the relationship between IQ and the caste system of India:

The caste system as a layered varna system with five classes and numerous integrated jati communities.
Razib Khan

That feeling when your knowledge about how average IQ varies with caste rank in India stops being peculiar arcana and suddenly becomes deeply relevant to US domestic politics …

Anybody who has studied the matter knows that castes in India have been maintaining almost perfect endogamy for thousands of years. About the only significant category of exceptions is that if you have an exceptionally beautiful daughter you *might* succeed in getting her taken as a concubine by a higher-caste man, so their offspring might jump a rank.

With no significant gene flow between jatis, divergences in important traits like IQ and time preference not only don’t smooth out, but actually amplify due to genetic drift and differing selective pressures.

Highest-caste Indians have an IQ distribution a lot like Europeans. Low-caste Indians … don’t. They’re not quite as genetically handicapped as the dimmest populations in sub-Saharan Africa, thankfully, but the spread is wide.

This doesn’t mean all low-caste Indians are stupid; Gaussian distributions don’t work that way. It does mean that importing 10,000 low-caste Indians has very different implications for the host society then importing 10,000 Brahmins.

Segue to the recent news stories about American families getting killed by illiterate Indian truck drivers doing crazy stupid things on the roadways. Those truck drivers are not Brahmins.

This is a recent phenomenon because, until one of our political parties decided to import the entire Third World for vote-farming purposes, we were cream-skimming India. Now we’re not, and this makes a serious difference.

Update: Fixed broken link to ESR’s X post.

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.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress