Quotulatiousness

June 22, 2026

Authenticity … if you can fake that, you’ve got it made

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apologies to Ted Gioia for the flippant heading on this item. While I may be going for a cheap laugh, he certainly isn’t doing that in this essay on how to discover authenticity in music in an age of AI slop:

“Authenticity required: password?” by liako is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

In my case, I learned about authenticity at home, and from the best possible teacher. Even now, so many years after his death, I’m still learning from Dad’s example. And if I could somehow manage to pass it down on to my children, it would be worth a whole lot more than a gold watch.

I say this in full awareness of the contentiousness and backlash arising from almost any assertion of authenticity, especially in the arts — but in other spheres of life as well. There’s been so much debunking of authenticity in recent years that it’s remarkable that anyone is still willing to use it as a term of praise. Sometimes words in the critic’s lexicon become tainted, defeating the very purpose for which they are applied. The situation is so dire that I might even claim that we are facing an “authenticity crisis” in the arts — especially now with the rapid rise of AI. But even making that statement would spur a meta-backlash against the implicit assumption that there’s any legitimate concern over such a debased concept. After all, why defend authenticity if it doesn’t really exist?

In this regard, authenticity is coming to resemble its kindred word “sincerity”, which now implies the exact opposite of its dictionary definition. As Lionel Trilling points out, in his magisterial Harvard lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, the term “has an effect that negates its literal intention — ‘I sincerely believe’ has less weight than ‘I believe’; in the subscription of a letter, ‘Yours sincerely’ means virtually the opposite of ‘Yours’.” [Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

Progressive intellectual arrogance

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

John Konrad tries to explain the apparently universal intellectual snobbery of progressives, which has brought pretty much every western country into the era of the expert:

Why is the left so arrogant?

Because they put their trust in a global elite. Not directly, but through the media and the universities the elite manipulate.

My dad always said it the other way around: privilege comes with responsibility. But responsibility is hard. Responsibility requires knowledge.

And in a world growing more complex and unpredictable by the year, understanding what’s happening around you takes more and more of it.

Twenty years ago you could walk through Manhattan around noon on a Sunday and watch half the city reading the Times. The thing was massive, but a fast, educated reader could come away with a decent picture of the whole world in a few hours.

Then two things happened.

Craigslist gutted newspaper revenue, and DEI mandates swapped great reporters for morally indignant j-school hacks. The quality and accuracy of information cratered.

At the same time, the internet roared to life and the world got radically more interconnected overnight.

So the elite grew less informed exactly as complexity exploded.

To cope, they borrowed a trick from NASA. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be the best rocket scientist and the best navigator and the best flight surgeon all at once. So mission control compartmentalized. The best person in each silo got a desk. Thruster problem? Everyone turns to the engine expert. Someone’s hurt? Everyone turns to the flight surgeon. The rocket guy never had to learn a thing about medicine.

The elite copied the model. They switched their brains off for anything outside their lane. Everyone specialized inside their own bubble.

But compartmentalization runs on trust. Put one bad actor in mission control, and the moment everyone turns to him, bad things happen.

To guard against that, they doubled down on credentialism. They learned to trust only the experts minted by certain colleges and blessed by certain think tanks.

And the bad actors had a field day. Fraud, disinformation, theft, all of it could happen inside a silo, unseen. And it did.

Then came a mission control director who told them not to worry. Everything was fine. They didn’t know what was going on, but he did, and he was smarter than all of them. He said so, right there in the meetings.

Everyone loves a brilliant, competent boss, especially a charismatic one who seems kind, because it means they no longer have to worry. He’s got it handled. Just trust him.

And trust Obama they did.

But he had nothing handled except his own aura. And he let Marxist actors run loose inside the silos that mattered, education and HR chief among them.

The right was skeptical, so they kept reading, kept hunting for alternative sources, kept trying to make sense of the complexity themselves. Nobody cracked it completely. But they started seeing the big red anomaly lights blinking across the dashboard.

So the smart people on the right kept building broad knowledge while the left stayed siloed. Ten years passed, and the left’s elite fell far, far behind.

They’re starting to see that Obama was a fool. But they’re stuck. You can’t cram ten years of missed homework into a few months. And they’re rich and powerful and have no interest in going back to school.

They have two options. Admit they were wrong and put in months, maybe years, of hard work to take responsibility for their actions. Or keep acting like sheep. If the rewards weren’t there, some might choose the work.

But the system is so riddled with fraud, so many hollowed-out silos kept on life support, that there’s more than enough money sloshing around the NGOs to fund their posh lives.

They have the privilege with none of the responsibility. It’s a comfortable place to sit. They don’t want to change.

But holding that position requires one thing: they have to believe their mission control director has it all under control and is smarter than anyone on the right.

The bottom line is the have to be arrogant. Or the whole house of cards comes down.

June 20, 2026

Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”

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

Canadian Members of Parliament care more for their summer vacations than they do for the rights of Canadian citizens. While this isn’t really news, it’s just the latest proof that our elected representatives are … well, I was about to describe their moral failings in great detail, but that could get me arrested and jailed if-and-when the many authoritarian measures the Liberals want to enact become law. Instead, here’s Michael Geist‘s summary of the way Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Bill, got sent to the Senate on Thursday night:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, passed the House of Commons yesterday with the government invoking a single motion to approve several bills without further debate or individual votes as MPs raced for home for the summer. Bill C-22 will now head to the Senate, where it can expect a rougher ride when study begins in the fall. Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.

The final days of Bill C-22 in the House marked a genuine abrogation of democratic norms. The government moved a motion to shut down the clause-by-clause study in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, preventing the committee from adjourning until the bill had been pushed through. That led to a session that stretched past midnight, as MPs were barred from introducing new amendments and were left to vote on amendment after amendment without any discussion, debate, or even public disclosure of their contents. By the end of the committee session, no one could have known the contents of the bill that MPs had duly approved and sent back to the House for final approval. As noted, once back in the House, there was no further debate, discussion or even a vote. Just a motion that said the deal was done.

If the process was troubling, the rhetoric was embarrassing. I wrote earlier this week about Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews moment, as he said it was time for opposition parties to “choose” whether to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime (a refrain that sounded a lot like Toews’ 2012 comment to Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, who is now the Speaker of the House, that he could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”). Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon pushed that posture further on Thursday by dismissing the bill’s critics as wearing “tinfoil hats” engaged in “paranoia.” The charge fits a broader pattern in which this government treats independent privacy scrutiny as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, seen most clearly in the Bill C-36 approach to strip the Privacy Commissioner of authority over private-sector privacy law altogether.

The committee did approve some government amendments to the bill that improve aspects of the lawful access plan but they are still likely to leave companies, security experts, and privacy advocates concerned. For example, the maximum metadata retention period the government can impose drops from one year to six months, and a category of metadata can now be mandated only where the Minister is satisfied that the category and all of its elements are essential to investigations. That is better, but still not good enough as it is not tied to any actual evidence about why six months is needed and both the costs and risks associated with metadata retention, which is not a requirement in the U.S., are largely unchanged.

As The Reclamare explains, this bill is yet another likely irritant in US/Canadian affairs, as it will expose US citizens’ data to Canadian government oversight:

– A USA person creates/maintains a social media account — lets call it “XXX”

– Using its new C22 law, Canadian RCMP develops a “reasonable grounds to suspect” of “XXX” to a CDN investigation (a low investigative hunch standard under C-22).

– RCMP obtains a Canadian judicial authorization (an “Order”) and sends the Social Media company an International Production Request, which is not a USA warrant, not a §2703(d) order, and not routed through full MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) review.

– The social media company is bound by US law (SCA/ECPA), treats the request as a formal foreign inquiry.

– The social media company discloses limited metadata: summary of login IP ranges, account country setting, and other classification signals to prove USA origin

– This disclosure happens at Canada’s “reasonable suspicion” threshold, which is lower and less scrutinized than the US domestic requirement of “specific and articulable facts showing relevance and materiality” under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) for the exact same type of data.

– The USA user’s metadata, which would normally enjoy stronger 4th Amendment derived judicial protections, if sought directly by US authorities, is handed to a foreign government on weaker foreign grounds, without the same level of US court filtering or notice that a purely domestic US request would trigger.

– The 4th Amendment protection is effectively diluted because the platform’s good faith compliance with the foreign lower bar creates a new, easier pathway around domestic US constitutional safeguards for accounts that platforms classify as American

Canada’s Liberal government continues to chip away at our “Charter of Rights”, under the guise of “Protecting Citizens” and we are moving towards authoritarianism

While I loathe to create friction, I also hope your Rights can help slow Canada’s devolvement

It impacts you too

June 19, 2026

Nobody voted for this kind of dystopian nightmare, Mr. Carney!

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

The Liberal Party, having engineered themselves a majority in the House of Commons, are on a speed-run to the kind of dystopian police state we used to read about in science fiction novels:

Millions of Canadians are beginning to see the similarities between communist regimes and the direction of current government policy.

The pattern is always the same.

It begins with noble promises: safety, equality, compassion, protection, the greater good.

It ends with censorship, coercion, surveillance, prisons, ruined lives, and a police state.

Always.

It comes wrapped in slogans, experts, committees, emergency powers, censorship, enemies of the people, and the belief that the state has the right to crush the individual for the greater good.

Consider…

C-2 – Strong Borders Act
C-22 – Lawful Access Act
C-34 – Safe Social Media Act
C-36 – Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act
C-9 – Combatting Hate Act
C-25 – Strong and Free Elections Act
S-209 – Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act

All seven are live in the 45th Parliament right now. None has received royal assent yet.

Consider that good, law-abiding Canadians are being gradually and systematically disarmed.

This is not a warning about some distant future.

In 2022 the federal government invoked emergency powers it did not have, froze the bank accounts of citizens over their political views, and banned Canadians from funding a protest. Two levels of court have since ruled it unconstitutional — a violation of the very Charter rights every one of these bills now circles.

That was the trial run. It needed an emergency as the excuse.

The seven bills above are the permanent version — the same reach, made routine — so that next time, no emergency need be declared at all.

A free country is not lost in a single day. It is legislated away in pieces, each one introduced with a reassuring name and defended as necessary, while good people keep assuring themselves it could never happen here.

It already did. The only question is whether enough Canadians notice before it becomes permanent.

Read every bill. Watch every one of them. Because this is the stage where it can still be stopped … and perhaps our last chance.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is trying to get Canadians to pay attention to what just one of these bills will do:

Bill C-34 will affect every Canadian. Age verification. AI regulation. A new Digital Safety Commission. Most Canadians have never heard of it. Here’s what it will do.

Michael Geist posts a Substack Note about bill C-22:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, has been reported back from committee and is headed toward passage. There are some amendments, but many concerns remain. The updated bill with changes is at

parl.ca/Content/Bills/4…

There are two changes to metadata retention. First, the maximum retention period the government can impose drops from 1 year to 6 months. Second, it can now mandate a category of metadata only if satisfied the category and all its elements are essential to investigations.

The committee rewrote the definition of systemic vulnerability. A “substantial risk” becomes a “credible risk, based on recognized international technical standards”. But it also added a carve-out: a flaw exposing only a target’s data is not “systemic”.

Added a new section on decryption that says nothing in the Act can be read to compel a provider to decrypt user-encrypted data, unless the provider supplied the encryption and holds the key. Borrowed from US law, but doesn’t fit the same way.

Compliance with ministerial orders is now expressly subject to the systemic vulnerability exception. That addresses a contradiction in the original text, where the duty to comply appeared to be unconditional.

The original bill set no maximum duration on these ministerial orders. This now changes to a two-year cap without the open-ended review-and-extend mechanism.

The amendments will rightly leave many still concerned. Companies considering exiting Canada due to Bill C-22 are unlikely to conclude that it fully addresses their issues. Yet the government is likely to push it through the House today.

June 18, 2026

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report

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

At The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian expresses his disgust and contempt at the British government which has categorically failed to protect a quarter of a million girls and young women from sexual predators imported by that government, which then actively covered up the crimes. It’s impossible to put into words just how cowardly every politician, every police officer, and every “social worker” has been for decades in allowing these crimes to flourish:

Click the image to open the report PDF

I was not expecting to learn that the grooming gangs have been operating since 1955. Seventy-one years. At least two generations of British children have been savagely sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism, willingly helped and encouraged by not only the State, but by our “Journalistic Betters”.

I was not expecting to learn that the victims number a quarter of a million. At minimum.

The least job of a society — the very minimal function expected — is the protection of the innocent and the defence of those who cannot protect themselves.

The Government of Great Britain — from the least to the highest — not only failed in this most minor of duties, but actively aided and abetted the destruction of the innocent and the depredation of the defenceless — with the enthusiastic assistance of “professional” “journalists”.

Seventy-one (71) years. Two-hundred and fifty-thousand (250,000) children raped. Trafficked. Tortured.

I don’t ever bloody well want to hear any English person tell me I don’t need guns again. “The police will protect you” you say, with that supercilious smirk. Read that report again — especially the part about the police failing to protect children, CHILDREN for God’s sake — and then get sodding bent.

I am furious. I don’t want apologies — I want officers executed. I want politicians hung in the public square, their possessions seized. I want journalistic edifices chained shut and set on fire.

I want the bloodshed and retribution visited upon those responsible, those who enabled, and those who willingly ignored to be of a level that will snarl softly to British people for ages to come:

“Do. Not. Fail. Again.”

Bastards.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, X Freeze summarizes some of the findings from the report:

Perpetrators:
~87% of convicted group-based CSE offenders had Muslim names. Estimates put the real figure at ~95% Muslim. Networks were almost entirely Muslim men — overwhelmingly Pakistani. Massively disproportionate to population share.

Enabled by honour-shame clan culture and Islamic doctrines that treat non-Muslim girls as available property: Muslim superiority over kuffar, al-walā‘ wa-l-barā‘ enmity to non-Muslims, no fixed age of consent, and rules allowing sexual use of captives.

How the grooming worked:

Girls as young as 11 were befriended by young Muslim men who treated them like adults, supplied alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. They were collected in taxis from school gates, care homes and streets, taken to houses, flats, restaurants and hotels, then raped repeatedly by groups of men, passed between perpetrators, tortured, filmed, and told they were “white trash” or “kuffar” who deserved punishment. Many became pregnant while still children. Some were trafficked to the Middle East for Islamic marriage.

failure & cover-up

Every pillar of the state failed catastrophically for decades:

  • Police ignored reports, criminalised victims instead of perpetrators, destroyed evidence and bailed known rapists.
  • Social services placed children in trafficking hubs inside children’s homes, closed cases despite clear signs, and retaliated against whistleblowers.
  • NHS recorded genital injuries, multiple STIs in children as young as 13, and rape pregnancies — then discharged victims back to their abusers.
  • Schools saw older men collecting girls at the gates and heard disclosures, yet often excluded the victims rather than protecting them.
  • Politicians (especially Labour-controlled councils and the party nationally) denied knowledge, blocked or watered down inquiries, suppressed ethnicity data, and prioritised electoral support from Muslim voting blocs and “community cohesion” over child protection. Fear of being called “racist” paralysed action. Sadiq Khan repeatedly insisted there were no grooming gangs in London, despite the Metropolitan Police holding reports of girls being raped by groups of men in hotels and other locations across the capital.

On her Substack, Celina identifies the specific state failures that perpetuated what started as isolated, local crimes:

The central thesis of the Rape Gang Inquiry Report is unequivocal: the estimated 250,000 victims were the victims of a deliberate collapse of the British state’s safeguarding architecture. Across every crucial sector, the state chose institutional convenience over the lives of children.

The Police: Criminalisation and Complicity

The Inquiry documents how officers frequently arrived hours late to missing persons reports, actively discouraged parents from filing complaints, and routinely closed cases without conducting basic forensic or digital examinations.

The most pervasive failure was the ideological decision to view the victims as willing participants in their own destruction. Children like Chloe, found highly intoxicated in the cars of adult men, were labelled “prostitutes” making “lifestyle choices”. By framing the organised rape of children as consensual sex work, the police absolved themselves of the legal requirement to launch resource-heavy investigations into organised crime syndicates.

When victims or their families did provide actionable evidence, it was routinely mishandled, ignored, or actively destroyed. Ross, the father of a survivor named Phoebe, testified that vital digital evidence handed over to the police was inexplicably deleted from the device while in police custody. When Grace’s abusers repeatedly breached their bail conditions and stalked her family, the police took no action, rendering protective non-molestation orders entirely meaningless.

The bureaucratic responses were often farcical. In some instances, the only formal action taken by police was issuing “harbouring notices” to the men, pieces of paper warning them not to associate with the child. When the men inevitably ignored these notices, no further enforcement followed. Furthermore, the Inquiry uncovered a deeply entrenched “two-tier” policing system. While forces surrendered to the fear of disorder from certain communities, they aggressively targeted the victims and their families. Chloe was arrested in her pyjamas after her mother called the police for help, kept in a cell until 2:00 AM, and released onto the streets without transportation, leading directly to her being picked up by a gang member and trafficked nationwide.

Most disturbingly, the report highlights allegations of direct police complicity, referencing whistleblower accounts of “cop nights” where officers were allegedly active participants in the trafficking and abuse of girls using police vehicles. The revelation that an abuser could be legally accepted as an “appropriate adult” for Michelle during police questioning underscores a force either dangerously incompetent or wilfully blind to the dynamics of coercive control.

Social Services: Abandonment and Retaliation

If the police failed to enforce the law, social services failed to enforce basic humanity. Across multiple districts, social care systems identified the precise markers of severe exploitation, truancy, self-harm, sudden wealth, STIs, missing episodes and consistently chose to look away.

The Inquiry demonstrates that social workers frequently undermined protective parents, isolating children from their families and placing them in residential care homes and semi-independent units that functioned as drive-through delivery systems for the gangs. Children were centralised, making them easier targets.

Jane, a victim placed in semi-independent living at 16, was trafficked directly from her state-provided accommodation. When she disclosed the abuse and the exchange of money to the staff, she was told it did not constitute trafficking because she was over 16. The staff then blackmailed her, threatening to blame her for the exploitation if she complained further. Following a psychiatric hospitalisation, Jane discovered that all statutory care records from her placement had been mysteriously “lost or destroyed,” legally obstructing any path to future accountability.

When internal whistleblowers attempted to expose the ongoing grooming, trafficking, and financial abuse of children in these units, they were met with severe retaliation. An unnamed social worker who acted as an Interim Co-Manager testified that after raising concerns about untreated exploitation risks and unlawful housing practices, she faced sudden suspensions, the removal of payments, fabricated allegations, and career-ending professional isolation orchestrated by senior leadership to protect the council’s reputation. Social services actively punished those who tried to protect children.

Schools:

Teachers and school administrators observed older men waiting at the school gates to collect young girls in taxis. They noted sudden drops in attendance, drastic changes in behaviour, and physical exhaustion.

Instead of recognising these as textbook indicators of exploitation, schools responded with punitive measures that pushed the children further to the margins. When Chloe’s trauma manifested as truancy, the school repeatedly placed her in isolation, compounding her emotional distress and alienation. When Jen was bullied to the point of wetting herself because a teacher refused her access to the toilet, the school ignored her subsequent self-harm and suicidal ideation, failing to initiate any safeguarding response.

In the most tragic instances, schools actively protected the abusers to avoid scandal. When Rachel’s autistic daughter disclosed that she had been orally raped by a peer, the school failed to effectively safeguard her, allowing the alleged perpetrator to remain on the premises. She was subjected to relentless physical and online bullying by students linked to the abuser, which was filmed and shared online. The intimidation escalated until the twelve-year-old took a fatal overdose of colchicine, stating she “just wanted everything to stop”.

Rupert Lowe explains his next steps after the publication of the inquiry report:

June 17, 2026

Canada’s new civic religion, with the “land acknowledgement” as the daily rite

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

L. Wayne Mathison shows how cultural boundaries changed radically over relatively short periods of time in what is now Manitoba, rather discrediting the fairy tale we tell our children about pre-contact First Nations living in peace and harmony:

Canada’s institutional obsession with land acknowledgements and historical guilt has officially jumped the shark.

Every university lecture, corporate meeting, school event, and government memo now seems to begin with the same rehearsed confession about whose land we are supposedly standing on. It has become a civic ritual, complete with liturgy, original sin, and mandatory public piety.

Strip away the administrative sermonizing and the whole thing rests on a very shaky version of history.

We are expected to pretend pre-contact North America was a peaceful, static, eco-friendly paradise where distinct peoples lived in permanent harmony until Europeans arrived and ruined everything.

That is not history. That is mythology.

Worse, it is patronizing. It strips Indigenous peoples of their full humanity by pretending they were somehow immune to the normal forces that shaped every other society on earth: ambition, conflict, trade, migration, alliance, conquest, revenge, and expansion.

The actual history of this continent was not a postcard. It was dynamic, complex, and often brutal.

The Haudenosaunee expansion during the Beaver Wars reshaped huge parts of what is now Southern Ontario. The Huron-Wendat, Neutral, and Erie peoples were devastated, displaced, or absorbed through war and political domination.

On the plains, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Iron Confederacy, and others fought long struggles over territory, trade, horses, resources, and survival. Peoples moved. Borders shifted. Alliances formed and collapsed. Some groups conquered. Some retreated. Some disappeared into larger political orders.

History did not begin when Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence.

This land was already a theatre of power, movement, conflict, diplomacy, and displacement long before Europeans arrived.

The modern Canadian narrative treats European colonisation as a unique cosmic crime, as if conquest and territorial displacement were invented in 1492. They were not. Europeans arrived as a technologically dominant global power and did what powerful groups had done across human history, including on this continent.

That does not make the suffering harmless. It does not erase broken treaties, residential schools, forced relocations, or government abuse. Those things happened, and they matter.

But a serious country cannot build its future on a childish version of the past.

Every habitable part of the world has been taken, lost, fought over, inherited, traded, defended, and taken again. The people Europeans encountered were not frozen in moral perfection. They were human beings living inside history, not outside it.

The guilt industry does not repair the past. It often paralyzes the present.

Canada cannot move forward by treating itself as a permanent crime scene or by dividing citizens into inherited moral categories of “settler” and “Indigenous”.

We can tell the truth about cruelty, conquest, broken promises, and injustice without pretending history had a correct stopping point right before European ships appeared.

A mature country does not need ritual guilt.

It needs honesty, equal citizenship, legal clarity, and the courage to build a future instead of endlessly prosecuting the past.

June 16, 2026

Piketty’s bid for another fifteen minutes

Filed under: Economics, France, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m not an economist, so my personal opinion on Thomas Piketty’s work is based purely on the reports of others … you could say I’m not a fan. In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille discusses Piketty’s latest push to impoverish the rich nations for the noble cause of “global justice”:

Piketty’s 2021 paean to socialism and central panning.

Celebrity economist Thomas Piketty won fame with a claim that, in market economies, capital accumulates in the hands of the already wealthy, leading to increased inequality. The message found a receptive audience among people eager to believe economic success isn’t earned. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney cited Piketty in his own 2021 book-length argument that economic activity should be managed by people like Carney.

And now Piketty is back seeking new fans with a scheme for top-down central planning of the world’s economy. He is the co-director of the new Global Justice Report from the World Inequality Lab.

Introducing the project, Piketty posted on X, “The world today is characterized by large-scale inequalities. And a climate crisis is looming over us. We urgently need a new vision for global progress in the 21st Century. One that grounds human development and equality in planetary habitability.”

Piketty shoehorns an impressive number of buzz phrases into a few lines. He includes concerns about equality and inequality, climate change and progress that should send thrills through college campuses. But Piketty has a talent for tapping into the moment. In this case, at a time when Freedom House’s annual report finds that “Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025,” the economist and his colleagues propose authoritarian policies for shaping the entire planet to their liking.

In his post, Piketty asks, “What would it take to achieve high prosperity and equality while remaining within planetary boundaries?” He answers that “energy transition” (meaning moving away from power sources that produce carbon) is necessary, as well as “labour hour reductions, growth caps in rich countries, less material consumption, and changes in food habits.”

The report itself asserts, “The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.”

To fight climate change and battle inequality, Piketty and company want “full income convergence across countries by 2100.” This requires, in part, limiting growth to “around 0-0.5% in today’s richest regions (North America/Oceania, Europe).” They argue that near-zero growth in rich countries “does not mean that their living standards stagnate” because people will benefit from flattened incomes.

On his Substack, Tim Worstall says that the latest Piketty emission disproves the “we need a global wealth tax” case of fellow French economist Gabriel Zucman:

So Tommy Piketty has released his big report self-pleasuring over how a few Frogs are going to run the global economy forever. The Guardian, of course, thinks there’s merit in it:

    One of the report’s key aims is to bring every country to today’s rich-country level of €5,000 per person per month in purchasing-power terms. The figure for sub-Saharan Africa is €290. The report proposes a new global fiscal and monetary architecture: taxes on the very rich would build the public realm, while a Keynesian “clearing union” and new international currency would ease the external constraints that limit poorer countries’ state spending.

Super, eh?

But the plan doesn’t just try to get the poor up to our standard of living — an excellent goal in and of itself, obviously. It also insists that we don’t increase our standard of living. For a century. Which is, you know, going to be a little more difficult.

So, how is this to be achieved? Well, this is Piketty — Frogs, eh? — so it’s going to be truly swingeing taxation of anyone who puts their head up above the parapet. The global 1% in fact.

And, well, this isn’t wholly true but it’s a useful rule of thumb, the top 1% globally is about the top 10% of the UK. -Ish, you know? Somewhere just above £50k a year for an individual in the UK. £150k for a two adult w/children household perhaps. That’s the level at which the 90% income tax swinges into action.

Oh, and, lovely wealth taxes on top too.

The effect of this is to kill economic growth. That’s what it’s designed to do too. You’ve enough, you rich bourgeois bastard, you, so that’s all you’re going to get and we’re going to use punitive taxation to make sure that’s true.

Well, OK, it’s a plan, right?

Universal suffrage has its drawbacks

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Democracy is a better system than many others that have been tried over the centuries, but it’s far from perfect. Giving everyone the vote sounds like a good idea: you have some small theoretical degree of influence over the people who run the country (note the “theoretical” here). Devon Eriksen points out one of the problems with universal suffrage today:

The problem with universal suffrage is that the more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the smaller the fraction of people there are in it with the native intelligence to understand how it works.

When the majority of humanity was employed in whacking at the dirt with a pointed stick, and the height of technology was a slightly better pointed stick, anyone with a triple digit IQ could understand what was going on.

Now, we have things like stock markets, the internet, transportation infrastructure, and the Linux kernel, but most people who vote are unable to conceive of these as anything but large piles of chocolate coins, or something else they can put their mouths.

Because that’s how the average monkey interacts with money. They stack the blocks, the research assistant gives them a token, they exchange the token for a banana.

It’s no good trying to explain to the monkeys what supply chain is, or how a trillion dollars worth of rockets can’t magically be converted into a trillion dollars worth of bananas just because they’re both measured in dollars, as if a six-foot man and a six-foot plank of wood were interchangeable.

Finding a slightly different explanation, or getting the monkeys to sit still and really listen, doesn’t really help.

Because the problem isn’t just that the monkeys aren’t paying attention. The problem is that the monkeys are monkeys.

Their brains simply don’t have the developmental capacity to grow the neural connections they would need in order to grasp and manipulate the concept.

In the long term, this is why universal democracy is doomed. Because societies that let retards vote will fail, and be replaced by those that don’t.

You may think that we, as a society, face a great variety of problems. We do not. We have only one. Retards. Every other problem we have is downstream from their inability to understand the consequences of their political opinions.

But to fully grasp the implications of this, you have to understand that the definition of “retard” changes over time, as technology advances, because the IQ level required to grasp what’s really going on gets steadily higher and higher.

Eventually, the category “retard” grows until it includes the average person.

This has already happened.

Nick Knudsen isn’t dumber than the average guy. But the average guy, the 100 IQ salt of the earth guy that’s sitting on the next bar stool over, can no longer understand the modern economy. And this isn’t correctable, because the problem isn’t ignorance, it’s complexity.

You can’t make Nick Knudsen smarter by telling him things. You can’t even make him less ignorant, because the bare facts aren’t believable to someone who doesn’t have the framework to understand how they fit together.

The people who understand what’s going on are so much smarter than him that he doesn’t even think they sound smart.

He thinks they sound crazy.

June 15, 2026

The British by-election in Makerfield and the split on the right

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Normally, single seat contests are not all that newsworthy in countries using the Westminster-style of Parliamentary democracy, but the Makerfield by-election in the Manchester region of England seems to be rather more significant. The Labour Party candidate is widely seen as the successor-in-waiting to Sir Keir Starmer (by everyone but Starmer, apparently). The main opposition was expected to be Nigel Farage’s Reform party’s candidate, but the vote on the right is also being contested by Rupert Lowe’s breakaway Restore Britain party. Splitting the vote between Reform and Restore might let an unpopular Labour party win the by-election and start the process of ousting Starmer from Number 10 Downing Street. This might keep Labour in power for another year or so, which is plenty of time to bring in a few hundred thousand “refugees” or enact stricter censorship rules, or any of a number of other hugely unpopular things.

Sean Gabb explains the situation from a libertarian point of view:

The coming by-election at Makerfield has provoked a familiar argument on the patriotic right. On one side are those who denounce the intervention of Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain movement. Labour is vulnerable. Reform has a realistic chance of victory. Any division of the anti-Labour vote therefore appears self-indulgent and destructive. Rupert Lowe, they say, may have legitimate grievances against Nigel Farage. He was certainly treated badly by Reform UK. But personal grievances ought to be put aside when the national interest is at stake. If Labour can be defeated, then Labour should be defeated.

On the other side are those who see Nigel Farage as the problem rather than the solution. They argue that Reform UK is little more than a vehicle for containing public anger. Every time popular discontent threatens to escape the boundaries of acceptable politics, Farage appears, gathers up the protest vote, makes a series of compromises, and then leaves the underlying structure untouched. In this view, Rupert Lowe is valuable because he threatens Farage’s position. The sooner Farage is challenged and replaced by a man of greater integrity, the better for the country.

Both positions have a certain logic. Both also rest on assumptions that do not survive contact with political reality.

The first assumption is that Britain stands on the verge of some great political rupture. If only the correct party can gather enough votes, or if only the correct leader can emerge, the existing order will be swept away and replaced with something fundamentally different. Of course, there are examples of such transformations. Russia in 1917 saw the destruction of one ruling class and its replacement by another. Iran in 1979 witnessed the collapse of a monarchy and the rise of a revolutionary theocracy. Similar examples can be found elsewhere. Yet these events were exceptional. They occurred when the existing state apparatus had ceased to function effectively. The old order was no longer capable of commanding obedience. Administrative structures had broken down. The loyalty of key institutions could no longer be relied upon. Under those conditions, revolution became possible.

Britain is not presently in that condition. The country may be badly governed. Its political class may be incompetent. Its institutions may be corrupt and increasingly detached from the interests of the population. None of this amounts to state collapse. Modern Britain remains one of the most centralised and administratively sophisticated states in the world. It possesses powers of surveillance, regulation and information management that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. The police state is often clumsy. It is frequently absurd. It is not, however, weak.

This matters because fantasies of imminent revolution are often based on a misunderstanding of where Britain actually stands. People look at social decay, demographic change, collapsing public services, and widespread public dissatisfaction, and assume that these conditions must shortly produce some decisive confrontation. They forget that highly organised states can survive astonishing levels of dysfunction. The late Soviet Union endured decades of stagnation. The Ottoman Empire acquired the nickname “the sick man of Europe” long before it finally disappeared, and that needed the Great War. It was the same with the Hapsburg Empire. Decay and collapse are not the same thing.

If revolution is improbable, perhaps the answer lies in electoral victory. This is the second assumption behind much of the argument over Makerfield. Perhaps Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe will eventually enter government through the ballot box. Once there, they will make the necessary reforms. Immigration will be reversed. The bureaucracies will be cut back. The censorship apparatus will be dismantled. Industry will be restored. The country will begin moving in a healthier direction. This belief is less implausible than dreams of barricades and insurrection. But less implausible is not the same as plausible.

The great theorists of elite rule explained the truth of democracy more than a century ago. Gaetano Mosca observed that every society is governed by an organised minority. Vilfredo Pareto described the circulation of elites, whereby personnel change while underlying structures remain. Robert Michels formulated his famous Iron Law of Oligarchy, according to which every large organisation develops a permanent leadership class that becomes increasingly independent of its nominal supporters. These men disagreed about many things. On one point they were united. Democracy changes faces more readily than it changes systems.

The reason is obvious enough. Every viable state possesses a permanent administrative core. Civil servants, judges, regulators, military officers, police officials, academics, media managers and corporate functionaries form an interconnected network of expertise and influence. Governments come and go. This network remains. It possesses continuity, institutional memory, technical knowledge and the immense advantage of permanence. The elected politician arrives promising radical change. The permanent apparatus replies with delay, obstruction, reinterpretation, consultation, procedural complexity, judicial review, regulatory resistance and media hostility. The shock is absorbed. The energy dissipates. The machine grinds on.

European World Cup tourists in the US

Filed under: Europe, Media, Soccer, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Larry Correia notes that Europeans’ reactions to visiting the United States changes once they get out of the big cities:

The posts from World Cup Europeans seeing actual America has been great. The shock and awe is hilarious.

I think it’s because their perspective has been based on TV shows (overwhelmingly set in LA or NYC, which get everything wrong about the rest of the nation because the writers are usually provincial liberal dorks who despise the rest of the country) and when they do come here as tourists it is to the same handful of tourist places. Which are always artificial, weird, and crowded.

It turns out that when you get away from our big stupid blue cities, and all the societal decay that comes from liberals not being able to govern worth a shit, America is actually really awesome.

I’ve been to 45 US states. I’ve enjoyed all of them. Even the blue ones, once I’m away from the parts that are entirely paved where lawless crazy people are allowed to shit in the streets and threaten everyone. It’s just a collapse of leadership, and democrats being inept, not giving a fuck as long as they’re still getting paid, or actively rooting for society’s destruction because they’re deluded morons who think they’re going to build a socialist utopia from the ashes.

America has managed to isolate that retarded shit tier philosophy mostly to our big blue city liberal enclaves, where lawless dumb shit can rule, while the rest of us live relatively normal lives, and our politics are primarily based on keeping those assholes away from our stuff as much as possible.

But the cool Europeans have been trapped on a continent where that philosophy rules EVERYWHERE. They’ve got nowhere to escape from their mediocre control freaks. Their shocking discovery that normal sane people can still just do things, and make things, and build, and have fun, and be safe, and raise their kids, is what’s making this whole thing fun.

I don’t follow soccer, futbol, whatever. But I am cheering on some Europeans right now. 😀

Update: Fixed broken link.

Elysium: Greed and the Crab Trap

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 23 Jan 2026

Elysium is one of those films I like more for the world it presents than the story it tells. It’s a tale of two worlds, a wealthy break-away civilization in orbit and a slowly dying civilization on Earth. On the surface it’s simplistic, preachy even, but underneath it posits some important questions both by what it tries to do and what it doesn’t even attempt to address.

00:00 Intro
01:18 Healing Magic and Healthcare Access
03:22 Overpopulation and Automation
04:18 Technology in Layers
07:50 Easy Answers to Hard Problems

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Ninti’s Gate – the prologue to Stellar Drift, coming later this year.
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June 14, 2026

The “Dissolution of the Universities” draws ever closer

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Steve McGuire reacts to more news about the conscious dumbing-down of modern university programs:

A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35.

Another “said the earliest version of the … course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts”.

“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught”, the first one said.

To which John Carter responds:

The academic death spiral is something to behold.

Demographics are steadily reducing the size of the student body, squeezing finances and driving bankruptcies.

At the same time, standards collapse is destroying the quality of the students the universities admit.

We’re already at the point where it’s common knowledge that a degree signals essentially nothing about intellectual ability. AI is exacerbating this, since cheating is so easy now.

Kids are already starting to forgo university, since they don’t think the cost of the credential is justified. That cuts even more deeply into the number of students universities can attract.

Universities respond by reducing standards even further (thereby accelerating brand destruction), by reducing tuition (which cuts even more deeply into budgets), and by firing professors in low-enrollment majors (reducing program variety, especially in the small seminars that are generally the most rewarding experiences for students).

[…]

“How can this be reversed?”

It can’t. There are pathways for individual institutions to revive themselves, even to prosper, but the sector as a whole is cooked. The death spiral is driven by prestige collapse as well as the demographic cliff, and intellectual prestige is inversely correlated to the size of the student body. More students means lower standards. That is especially true with a demographic cliff.

The only way to survive this crisis is ruthless elitism. Stop trying to edutain the fat middle of the bell curve, and refocus on the right tail. Become a place where the smartest people gather, and from which anyone who isn’t a 2-sigma outlier is excluded. This makes the school an arena in which intellectual iron can sharpen against iron. Elitism restored, prestige follows.

Next, eliminate the 500 person intro lectures. Admin loves these, since the high student:teacher ratio makes them cash cows. But they’re functionally no better than watching YouTube videos. Refocus on small seminars. This offers value that the Internet can’t.

Schools that take this path will restore or build reputations that will enable them to survive. However, they won’t be large. There is no future in which huge institutions keep tens of thousands of professors and administrators on payroll.

Update, 15 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.

June 13, 2026

The intellectual dangers of “nostalgia economics”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mani Basharzad explains that although resurgent socialist beliefs are a bad sign, there’s actually a worse danger to modern economies that isn’t a coherent ideology but all the more potent because of it:

Custom image by FEE

If someone asked me what the most dangerous economic ideology is, many would expect an Austrian to give a typical answer: Marxism, socialism, or Modern Monetary Theory. Yet I believe there is another way of thinking that is even more pervasive. It is not a coherent body of ideas like those ideologies. Rather, it is a sentiment so widespread and socially accepted that it threatens not merely economic freedom, but our very understanding of progress itself. I call it “nostalgia economics”.

Recently, the singer Sting suggested that the rise of toxic masculinity is partly the result of the “loss of manual jobs”, claiming that because many men no longer use their hands and physical strength in their daily work, unhealthy masculine traits are on the rise. Like many commentators on the political left, he also blamed Margaret Thatcher for Britain’s economic transformation. “Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards”, Sting said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”

This is nostalgia economics in action. A global celebrity whose music can be streamed instantly on another continent, who earns income through digital platforms, and whose career depends on modern communications and services, criticizes the very service economy that makes his success possible.

A person in thrall to nostalgia economics will take the blessings of progress for granted while romanticizing a past that never truly existed. Imagine living in the world of Charles Dickens: you would not have had access to a typewriter for much of your life, if at all, since it was only commercialized in the late 19th century. More importantly, you would not have had access to electricity. The conveniences we now consider basic would have been unimaginable luxuries.

The economic historian Norman Stone illustrated the extraordinary pace of modern progress through the experience of the novelist Henry James:

    In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a cinematograph. Within very few years, he could have had a Freudian analysis, travelled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even of space-travel.

Had Sting been alive in 1890, a world tour would have looked very different. A journey from London to New York would have taken more than a week rather than a few hours. International audiences, instant communication, and global entertainment markets would have been beyond imagination.

The glorification of manual labor is one of the most overrated ideas in modern political discourse. This tendency is not confined to the left. Ambitions to revive manufacturing employment through government policy often draw on the same nostalgic impulse. But what exactly are we trying to return to?

Perhaps literature offers a more honest answer than politics. Oscar Wilde observed that “all unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour” involved unpleasant conditions. He went even further, commenting that “there is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading”.

The reality of industrial labor was far harsher than many modern observers imagine. In Britain, workplace fatalities have fallen dramatically over the last century: fatal injuries to employees dropped from around 4,400 a year early in the 20th century to around 200 a year by the end of the century. Coal mining, one of the occupations most frequently romanticized today and the first industry Sting evoked, exposed workers to constant danger and disease. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (“black lung”) claimed well over a thousand lives annually. What would a laborer enduring dangerous conditions, long hours, and chronic health risks have given for an air-conditioned office job?

One thing Sting did identify is that men generally do need more physical activity in their lives both for general physical health but also for mental health.

Hating on Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire

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

It shouldn’t be surprising that so many people are doing what they can to raise resentment against the very rich in general, and Elon Musk in particular. Stoking resentment of the better off has always been a viable short-term political play, and it’s not every day we see wealth of this scale:

Reddit meme

For all these dumbasses claiming if they had Elon’s money they’d end world hunger, cause world peace, educate everyone, or whatever, blah blah blah … No you wouldn’t. You’re full of shit and everyone knows it, because that’s not how the world works.

Throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it. The entire history of government demonstrates that. Saying vapid nonsense just makes weak, unimaginative people with a childlike grasp on reality feel better about themselves for caring harder, while accomplishing nothing.

Meanwhile, the guy you hate revolutionized EVs and self driving cars, brought affordable reliable internet to every corner of the Earth, and is making the dream of colonizing space real. And the process of doing all that has given hundreds of thousands of people jobs.

While you posture about how you’d give everybody an imaginary unicorn, he’s done stuff that’s actually changed the world for the better.

And you don’t get it. You can’t get it. Because you’re just too fucking small.

And even the Globe and Mail, which used to consider itself the most respectable and influential newspaper in Canada goes for the “hate the rich” market:

But some people just can’t help themselves and ginning up the hate and envy is all they can do:

For the left, it’s important that you do more than view billionaires with skepticism. You have to actually hate them. You have to blame them for every ill that befalls you, and you must actively resent their wealth.

One way that the left accomplishes this is by framing their gains as somehow your losses.

Congressman Greg Cesar (D-TX) decided to try that on X Tuesday with this banger.

Now, it’s interesting that he talks about their wealth being three times what it was 15 years ago, but doesn’t account for what the rest of us are dealing with. Instead, he engages in an apples-and-oranges comparison.

For starters, the increase in net worth for billionaires has nothing at all to do with whether your life is three times better than it was back then. There are too many variables. Someone who was unemployed and homeless and got a job, built a life back up, and then started a successful business is a lot more than three times better off, right?

Plus, it doesn’t account for differences in the cost of living or anything else.

Instead, a better metric is whether the median household net worth in America has increased a similar amount. So, I went to Google, then got its AI to generate a graph for me showing what’s happened over that timeframe.

While that’s not three times, it is 2.5 times the median net worth 15 years ago, and since this caps at 2022, it may well have increased even more.

In other words, the net worth of ordinary Americans seems to be mostly keeping up with that of the billionaires.

Cesar’s question, though, is disengenuous because the cost of living has gone up about 53 percent over that timeframe. So while net worth has increased, so has the cost of living. Not enough to completely drain away the gains in net worth, but enough that people aren’t living three times better than they were.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?

It’s not enough that, on average, Americans are much richer than they were 15 years ago, and by about the same amount as the billionaires, because that won’t foster the necessary resentment the left needs to push through their policies. You have to resent their wealth, and that’s less likely if you realize you’ve gained as much as they have by percentages. You have to feel like their wealth has been taken from yours, otherwise you’re less likely to look at wealth redistribution as a good thing.

And wealth redistribution is what it’s always about.

The Laurentian Elite

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

The people who actually rule Canada — including but not limited to Liberal Party members — don’t mind “populists” who want to “spread awareness”, because it’s about as ineffective as can be and dissipates some of the energy that might otherwise be used to oppose the Laurentian Elite’s preferred outcomes:

Homesteaders, agrarians, and populists relying on “spreading awareness”, protesting, or Americanisms like “we the people” and “the silent majority” aren’t nearly as effective or influential as people think they are.

A deeply unpopular Laurentian liberal elite minority, one that increasingly LARPs as blue-state Americans and takes its cues from them, managed to transform the country against the popular will.

Over a roughly twenty-year period between the 1940s and 1960s, they spent decades scheming behind the scenes. They changed the flag, lured French Canadians into supporting them through the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism by promising greater national recognition of Canada’s French heritage, then dropped the whole thing almost immediately. They pulled the rug out from under them and basically said, “SYKE, you thought. Here’s infinite immigrants instead.”

In 1971 they pushed multiculturalism and the cultural mosaic, abolished assimilation while polling showed around 80% of Canadians opposed increased immigration. They later entrenched their ideology through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, stacked and empowered a judiciary that would future-proof it, formalized the project through the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, and gradually consolidated influence over the media, education system, and cultural institutions.

The result was a decades-long effort to indoctrinate Canadians into viewing their country as a post-national economic zone built on stolen land called Turtle Island, where Canadians don’t exist, but foreigners are just as Canadian as you and me, borders are morally questionable, and none is illegal on stolen land.

This isn’t going to be reversed through awareness campaigns, symbolic protests, or endlessly posting facts online. Political systems are ultimately shaped by elites and counter-elites. The only way this order gets replaced is if a rival elite, or a political force capable of becoming one, displaces the existing ruling class and takes its place.

That process will almost certainly involve some degree of populism, but populism by itself is not enough. You need people who can actually build institutions, wield power, and replace the current establishment rather than just complain about it or bug off into the woods, or try to balkanize the country.

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