Quotulatiousness

March 26, 2026

From conservative, traditionalist Wilhelmine Germany to the unbridled excess of the Weimar Republic

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

Celina discusses the wrenching social changes Germany went through as the First World War ended, the Kaiser abdicated, and the Versailles terms were imposed on a still-young nation that didn’t think it had been defeated on the battlefield (it had been, decisively, but the truth was not revealed or understood on the home front):

To understand the death of a civilisation, one must first walk through its ruins. The scene is Berlin, sometime in the mid-1920s, beneath the blinding, electric glare of neon and the suffocating, narcotic haze of the Berliner Luft, an atmosphere that locals gleefully described as an amphetamine-like air that made hearts race, pupils dilate, and morals evaporate until dawn.1 In the shadowed, labyrinthine alleys of a shattered empire, the streets of the capital have been entirely surrendered to a bacchanalia of unprecedented depravity. Prostitutes in various stages of undress crowd the cobblestones. They are openly aggressive, their ranks swollen by pregnant mothers, desperate war widows, and adolescents, all selling their flesh for the price of a meal.2 On every street corner, hawkers peddle cocaine, morphine, and opium to passersby, while newsstands prominently display nudist magazines dedicated exclusively to the exhibition of children.3

Push past the heavy, smoke-stained velvet curtains of the subterranean cabarets, and the full, suffocating scope of the abyss reveals itself. Here, glittering shows parade acres of sweaty, perfumed flesh to the applause of an audience intoxicated by a potent mixture of ecstasy, terror, and moral decay. Cross-dressing men perform grotesque pantomimes of traditional womanhood, while tuxedo-clad women mock the remnants of patriarchal authority, puffing cigars and sneering at the ghosts of their fathers.

Cabaret

For the modern, liberal apologists of the era, this explosion of libertinism is often retroactively celebrated as a vibrant, avant-garde renaissance, a brief, shining moment of progressive emancipation before the darkness of fascism fell. It is romanticised in our modern cinema and theatre as a glorious rebellion against the stuffy confines of tradition. But to the ordinary, rooted citizens of the German nation, the truth was far darker and far more evident.

The normalisation of perversion was not an expression of human flourishing, it was an aggressive, deliberate assault on the family, faith, nation, and the natural order itself. It was the deliberate dismantling of the moral architecture that had sustained European civilisation for a millennium. This was not liberation. This was civilisational suicide and the German people knew it.

Left: Valeska Gert, Dance in Orange, Munich (1918). Right: Olga Desmond performing the ‘Sword Dance’ (1908). Photo by Otto Skowranek.

The Shattered Fatherland: Versailles and the Death of Order

The tragedy of the Weimar Republic cannot be understood without first grasping the significant psychological and spiritual trauma that birthed it. Before 1914, Wilhelmine Germany was a society defined by structure, piety, and an organic connection to history. It was a nation grounded in Christian sexual ethics, where the family was revered as the inviolable bedrock of the state, and where duty, honour, and natural law governed public life.4 Men were expected to be providers and protectors; women were the venerated guardians of the hearth and the moral educators of the next generation.5

The cataclysm of the First World War shattered this world completely. The defeat of the German Empire brought not only physical devastation, millions of young men fed to the meat grinder of the trenches, but an unprecedented spiritual crisis. The humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, specifically the “War Guilt Clause” and the crippling imposition of 130 billion marks in war reparations, stripped the nation of its dignity and its sovereignty.6 The collapse of the monarchy left a gaping void where the Fatherland had once stood, and the pervasive Dolchstoßlegende, the widely held belief that the military was stabbed in the back by domestic traitors, socialists, and cultural subversives festered in the national consciousness.7

  1. https://www.salon.com/2000/11/22/weimar/
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid
  4. https://verso.uidaho.edu/view/pdfCoverPage?instCode=01ALLIANCE_UID&filePid=13308274540001851&download=true
  5. Ibid
  6. https://theoldshelter.com/weimar-republic-and-the-rise-of-anti-semitism/
  7. https://verso.uidaho.edu/view/pdfCoverPage?instCode=01ALLIANCE_UID&filePid=13308274540001851&download=true

Canada’s “national broadcaster” has become an expensive irrelevance

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

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was set up to provide Canadians across the vast heartland of the country with quality news and entertainment options. Some would say it was able to achieve those goals well enough for decades, but with the rise of the internet, fewer and fewer people are watching, listening to, or reading CBC content. In some major cities, the CBC’s share of attention is a rounding error, despite the federal government subsidizing their effort on top of the annual budget they already receive from the taxpayers.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison makes the case for letting the CBC shut down:

CBC Isn’t Being Attacked. It’s Being Ignored. And That’s Worse.

There’s an old business rule most people learn the hard way: if your customers quietly leave, you’re already finished. No protest. No boycott. Just silence.

That’s where the CBC is right now.

You can spin it. You can defend it. You can fund it.
But you can’t fake attention.

We’re looking at a public broadcaster that calls itself the “voice of Canada” while pulling audiences so small they’d embarrass a local radio host. In some cases, tens of thousands of viewers in major cities. That’s not a dip. That’s a collapse.

And here’s the uncomfortable part:

Canadians didn’t lose interest in news. They lost interest in that version of news.

Because when reporting turns into messaging, people notice. When coverage feels selective, people adjust. When tone replaces trust, people leave.

Quietly.

Now layer in Mark Carney.

Carney’s entire pitch rests on a simple belief: that complex societies should be guided by centralized expertise. Managed from the top. Coordinated. Directed. Calibrated.

Sounds efficient. Sounds smart. Sounds like it belongs in a white paper.

But we already have a working example of that model in action.
It’s called CBC.

Centralized control

Institutional messaging

Weak accountability to audience demand

Heavy public funding

And the result?

A broadcaster Canadians are walking away from in real time.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s a signal.

Here’s the reframe nobody wants to touch:

CBC isn’t failing because it lacks resources.
It’s failing because it lost the discipline of needing to be chosen.

When your funding doesn’t depend on your audience, your audience eventually stops depending on you.

That’s not ideological. That’s behavioural economics.

Carney’s model doubles down on that exact structure. More planning. More coordination. More reliance on expert systems that assume compliance instead of earning trust.

But trust doesn’t scale through authority.
It scales through responsiveness.

And that’s the part that’s missing.

This is where the conversation usually derails into tribal nonsense. “Defund”. “Protect”. “Save public media”.

Misses the point.

The real question is simpler and harsher:

What happens when institutions stop adapting because they don’t have to?

You don’t get stability.
You get drift.

You don’t get unity.
You get quiet disengagement.

And you don’t get better outcomes by expanding that model across the country.

You get more of the same, just bigger.

I’ve run businesses. You learn this fast or you go broke:

If people stop showing up, it’s not because they suddenly became irrational. It’s because you stopped giving them a reason.

CBC stopped giving people a reason.
Carney’s approach assumes the reason doesn’t matter.

That’s the disconnect.

Hard line:
If an institution can’t earn attention, it shouldn’t demand trust.

Plur1bus: First Impressions

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

Feral Historian
Published 21 Nov 2025

EDIT: The sound is bad. I should have known better than to edit it on a laptop in-transit, but here we are.

After a few recommendations I started watching Plur1bus, and a few things strike me two episodes in. Let’s see how off-base I end up looking when the season is done.

Also I bounce off a few points raised by Damien Walter in his recent video on the show, which you can find here: • So. What’s PLUR1BUS all about then?

00:00 Intro
00:45 Mind Virus
02:28 Mrs. Davis and the End of the World
04:18 Mandatory Happiness and Self-Delusion
07:08 Commodification
09:02 Stopping the Machine
(more…)

March 25, 2026

Montaigne, a Substacker avant la lettre

Filed under: Books, France, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack (of course), Ted Gioia makes the case that Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne (or “Montaigne” to unwashed moderns) was the historical progenitor of all essayists to follow:

Michel de Montaigne may be the most influential essayist in history — even Shakespeare borrowed from his work (taking some passages almost verbatim). But if Montaigne were alive today, this famous essayist might be mistaken for just another slacker living in his parents’ basement.

Okay, let’s be fair. He actually lived in the family castle. But it still was slacking. At age 38, he didn’t have a job — and preferred reading books. Leave me alone, was his message to the world.

The Montaigne family castle (Photo by Henry Salomé)

But even a castle was too noisy for him — or maybe it was just his wife from an arranged marriage that made him feel that way. In any event, Montaigne eventually decided that he needed total isolation, almost like a monk in a hermitage. So he moved into the tower on the family estate. He called it his citadel.

Here he surrounded himself with books, and announced his intention to devote the rest of his life to reading and philosophizing “in calm and freedom from all cares”.

Montaigne’s tower (Photo by Henry Salomé)

But at age 47, Montaigne had a change of heart. He returned to the world, ready to embark on travels and public service. But before leaving for Italy, he had one last goal he needed to fulfill closer to home — and it would have a decisive impact on Western culture.

During his years in the tower, Montaigne wrote 94 essays, and compiled them in two book-length manuscripts. These he now delivered to a printer in Bordeaux, and paid to have them published. A short while later, he traveled to Paris and proudly gave a copy to King Henry III

In his mind, he was serving as his own patron, drawing on the family wealth to cover the expenses of his debut as an author. But today, of course, we would call this self-publishing — a term that is often (unfairly) used to demean the value and legitimacy of these rule-breaking efforts by do-it-yourself writers.

Call it what you will, Montaigne’s achievement cannot be denied. He not only invented the modern essay — setting the stage for Bacon, Emerson, and so many others. But he also helped shape the human sciences and legitimize the personal memoir. That’s because his essays covered many topics but really had only one subject—namely Montaigne himself, with all his quirks and opinions and hot takes.

His essays marked a milestone in the history of individualism. So, of course it makes sense that they were self-published. That’s what individualists do. They are happy to work outside the system.

I could even imagine our slacker Montaigne publishing these essays on Substack today. You might say that he anticipated the Substack style of writing. His balancing of memoir and analysis, subjective and objective, observation and generalization is very much aligned with what I see on this platform every day.

March 24, 2026

More political and philosophical illusions, left and right

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

Tom Kratman continues his discussion of the illusions that distort how people on the left and people on the right view reality:

There is an illusion – yes, on both sides – of guilt by association. This is related to, but not exactly the same as, the illusion of indistinguishability. How many nail-bomb-building moral sons of Bill Ayers are over on the modern American left? Can’t be too many, I think, based on the serious dearth of Earth-shattering kabooms we hear, or rather don’t hear, lately. How many hair-shirted and sandwich board clad – with said boards reading, “Repent! The end is near!” – folks are there on the religious right? Based on how the typical Christian lives, and those being by no means a particularly bad set of men and women, there aren’t all that many. How many Christians do you really think, given a button that would make the Westboro Baptist Church and all its members go poof, wouldn’t push that button twice, the first time slowly, for the emotional satisfaction (well, that and to savor the screaming1), and the second time, quickly, to make sure. How many leftists and liberals are dead set against gun control? More than a few.

Then there’s the illusion brought on by willful blindness. For example, “No enemies to the left!” said Alexander Kerenski, Prime Minister of Russia, in 1917. Pity Kerenski wasn’t able to see that the people to his left were largely intellectual idiots and dogmatic homicidal maniacs, and that there may have been people to his right who were considerably more reasonable and sane. He said that not too long before being tossed out on his ear by the Bolsheviks, who, interestingly enough, were to his left.

You don’t see as much of this – the notion that there are no enemies to the right – on the conservative side, by the way, though there is some. Still, the next time I see an actual conservative lining up with the American National Socialist Party,2 the KKK, or Stormfront will be the first.

Part of the problem here, I think, is that we take something – civilization, actually – so much for granted that we forget how hard it is to build or to hold onto, and so forget that we have something important in common with our more moderate political opponents. Thus, taking it for granted, we forget that common ground, see the opposition, and so line up with those more extreme sorts for whom civilization is probably just a burden they’d as soon be done with.

  1. Okay, maybe some would just push it the once.
  2. Which seems to have many trivial manifestations. You can find your own links, but why bother?

“Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book”

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

In The Critic, Ben Sexsmith reviews a new book by Matt Goodwin, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity:

Here is an exceptionally easy argument to make:

  1. Mass migration is ensuring that the historical majority in Britain is becoming a minority.
  2. This is the result of policies that have been pursued regardless of popular opinion.
  3. This has had many kinds of destructive consequences.

The first claim is so obviously true that one might as well deny the greenness of the grass. The second is proven by decades of broken promises (see Anthony Bowles’s article “Immigration and Consent” for more). The third requires argumentation, but I think that it is clear if one considers hideous incidences of terrorism, grooming gangs and violent censoriousness, as well as broader trends of economic dependency and electoral sectarianism.

Again, this is not a difficult argument to make. So why is it made so badly?

Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book. It reads like the book of a political operator extending his CV. The left-wing commentator Andy Twelves caused a stir on social media by pointing out various factual mistakes and what appear to be non-existent quotes. Twelves speculates that these “quotes” are the result of AI hallucinations, which is plausible, if not proven, in the light of the fact that two of Mr Goodwin’s sparse footnotes contain source information from ChatGPT.

Inasmuch as Suicide of a Nation makes a form of the argument sketched out the beginning of this article, there is truth to it. But it contains a fundamental problem — it assumes that this argument is so true that there is no requirement to make it well.

“Slop” is an overused term but it feels painfully appropriate for a book that is spoon fed to its audience. Goodwin, who had a long academic career before becoming a successful commentator, is not a man who lacks intelligence. But he writes as if he thinks his audience lacks it. “I did not write this book for the ruling class”, writes Goodwin, “I wrote it for the forgotten majority”. Alas, he seems to think that the average member of the “forgotten majority” has the reading level of a dimwitted 12-year-old. As well as being stylistically simple, the book is full of annoying paternal asides. “In the pages ahead I shall walk you through what is happening to the country …” “In the next chapter we will begin our journey …” Thank you, Mr Goodwin. Can we stop for ice cream?

The book is terribly derivative, with a title that reflects Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower and a subtitle — “Immigration, Islam, Identity” — that all but repeats that of Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe — “Immigration, Identity, Islam”. It is written in the humourless and colourless rhetorical style of AI. I’m not saying it was AI-generated. (Indeed, a brief assessment using AI checkers suggests that it was not.) I’m just saying that it might as well have been.

March 23, 2026

Reject multiculturalism as you would reject fake meat

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

Spaceman Spiff looks at the technocratic dream that we’d all give up on eating meat and instead switch to lab-grown, VC-funded, and Bill-Gates-approved fake meat. It failed utterly, of course, because despite all of the arguments the corporations and the astroturf activists could marshal, nobody wanted it. Vegetarians wouldn’t switch to eating something vaguely kinda-sorta meat-ish, and meat eaters were happy continuing their carnivorous habits. It had no real market, so it was a dud product.

Our technocratic elites have been pushing multiculturalism for even longer than they were pushing fake meat, but just as with fake meat, the more people encounter it, the less willing they are to accept it:

Multiculturalism is the belief many distinct cultures can live together and flourish rather than devolve into conflict.

This is false. It has never worked anywhere.

The world itself is multicultural. The solution that emerged to manage different groups was national borders. Each culture could segregate and live apart from others because they could not successfully live together.

As the failures of multiculturalism become impossible to hide, social engineers reach for ideas to make it work. The latest is civic nationalism. The fake meat of the social governance world.

For all human history we have relied upon the real thing, but now today’s social engineers believe they have discovered a superior recipe, one that avoids the hassle and expense of tradition.

Anyone can become someone like you as long as they conform to an arbitrary list of beliefs, behaviours, laws and customs. We can ignore ethnicity, heritage and history. We can manufacture instant populations with passports and certificates just as we can create synthetic meat by combining the ingredients ourselves.

Like fake meat it looks workable on paper. Not only that, it is presented as self-evidently reasonable. Why has nobody thought of this before? How convenient governments and corporations can import a new workforce and they magically become British, American or Chinese because they “share values” and observe laws.

America was the first to experiment, a necessity after the introduction of non-European immigration in the 1960s. Needless to say they didn’t need it before that.

The country found itself importing people with no historical connection to the American population through heritage or history. Far fewer of them married into the family than previous waves of immigrants from European nations. While importing the world America was becoming the world with its racial, ethnic and cultural tensions.

They convinced themselves they had always been a nation of immigrants and conveniently forgot how long it took even the Irish to assimilate into America despite their ostensible similarity to the founding stock.

Strenuous efforts to make this seem normal, despite its novelty, included the energetic emphasis on shared values or adopted customs since the newcomers were often strikingly different.

Civic nationalism seems to be based on the same faulty reasoning as synthetic meat. We can circumvent the traditional approach using innovation. Why live through centuries of strife for a nation to emerge when you can just hand out certificates and make everyone instantly like you because they claim to respect the law and promise to adopt new customs?

Initially this can seem to work. If a small number of skilled immigrants come they are typically absorbed. Most cultures can do this if the numbers are modest and especially if the newcomers intermarry, or their children do.

Even more so, in traditional societies, including our own until recently, the pressure to adapt was almost universal; no translators, no welfare, no slack whatsoever.

Large numbers of immigrants over short time scales retard the process of assimilation, and generous welfare programmes can derail it completely.

America is also big unlike European nations, so it has taken a while for the full effects to be felt.

Despite the endless hype, people reveal their preferences in their behaviour. They can move. Pro-immigrationists have complained about white flight for decades, one very obvious example of the failure of civic nationalism.

Image from Spaceman Spiff

Just like those inconveniently full supermarket shelves with their synthetic products no one will buy, people run from diversity when they can.

Civic nationalists, like climate zealots, resort to repeating their tired lines about their great intent, how amazing it is all meant to be if people would just get into the spirit of things.

But it is all fantasy. Literal fictions that exist only inside the heads of those who imagine utopia. Real life has its own ideas.

Update: Added missing URL.

Update the second, 24 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Mapping the “Manosphere”

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

Janice Fiamengo says — and a lot will agree with here — that we can’t hate gender studies enough:

As Leo Kearse posted on Substack Notes – “When’s Louis Theroux doing a documentary on THIS manosphere? When’s he going to expose the idiocy of its leading proponents, such as Stella Creasy and Hannah Spencer?”

Nothing beats a threat narrative for a gender studies academic in search of relevance, and what more urgent than the dark corners of the internet where men (and the women who love them) allegedly spread misogyny and male supremacism.

Many academics now claim expertise in this area of gender studies, probing the volatile fragility and violent anxieties of manosphere men, and calling to repentance all who resist the feminist future. Many of these academics are women, making a sweet living warning about male “hate”, but there are plenty of male feminists as well, crusaders against others’ toxicity.

In “Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research“, four scholars of masculinity survey the latest research on digital media and violent extremism. Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua Roose, and Michael Flood claim to have read hundreds of studies of the manosphere, which they call an “online ecosystem of anti-women actors”.

According to them, the manosphere is brimming over with grievance-mongering, grift, and gynocidal fantasy. Nothing in it is good or sincere or well-intentioned. Various sub-genres of online content, including fitness advice, stoicism, and the tradwife lifestyle, are presented as outgrowths of misogynistic extremism from which millions of men and boys require rescue, by force if necessary.

A Roll Call of Buzzwords

The researchers make no distinction between manosphere content generally and what they call male supremacy — or, indeed, between those terms and a host of others, all pejorative. Their introductory paragraph alone provides a roll call of buzzwords that link any dissent from Marxist-feminist orthodoxy to misogynistic violence.

The manosphere, we’re told, is “bound by the belief that mainstream society is a misandrist conspiracy that disadvantages men”. Manosphere groups “frame contemporary gender politics as a ‘war against men'”. These groups also “frequently engage in misogynistic abuse as well as inciting violence against women”, thus creating an “online environment of accelerating harms”.

None of these statements is ever supported with evidence, but it is likely too much to expect evidence: the direct equation between male-positive advocacy and murderous misogyny is no longer a subject of academic debate, if it ever was. It is an axiom.

In one short paragraph, then, we move from non-feminist perspectives to “misandrist conspiracies”, and from belief in a “war against men” to “inciting violence” and “accelerating harms”. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with anti-feminist content will recognize the definitional sleights of hand. Are any of these academics genuinely familiar with the subject they are writing about? It seems more likely that they have taken a shortcut to a politically-approved position.

What about the mass of anti-feminist and male-positive content creators — Rick Bradford at The Illustrated Empathy Gap, Tom Golden at Men Are Good, Alison Tieman and company at Honey Badger Radio, Bettina Arndt at Bettina Arndt, Hannah Spier at Psychobabble, just to name a few — who come nowhere near “inciting violence against women”? On the contrary, they pursue a vision of mutual cooperation and accountability between the sexes by rejecting female privilege and paranoia. Is this manosphere content, or not?

Many men’s rights advocates — researchers like Stephen Baskerville, Paul Nathanson, James Nuzzo, David Shackleton, Gerard Casey, Helen Smith, and Grant Brown, just to name those I’ve been consulting most recently — simply document male disadvantage with evidence. They do not assert conspiracies or stoke grievance.

As for the “war against men”, have our researchers read any of the voluminous feminist writings that celebrate male death and openly advocate a world without them? When feminist leaders — many of them university professors — are not only allowed but actually celebrated for declaring their anti-male hatred and calling for a “decontamination of the earth“, what are sensible people to conclude about anti-male animus?

March 22, 2026

QotD: The treason of the scientists

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Luca Barbato @lu_zero_
    Research is not taking money and then creative-write whatever fits the political faction you align with.

    And that’s why there are at least some people, that value science a lot, that consider burning down or starve “institutions” the correct first step to amend course.

One of those people is me.

I can still keenly remember my first feelings of crushing disappointment back in the 1980s when I started reading the “scientific” literature on gun policy and realized how utterly fraudulent much of it was.

I had grown up loving The Science, thinking of research scientists as the best of humanity, carrying us forward into a better future with honesty and courage. Discovering that there were people who would violate this sacred trust to push a political agenda hurt me.

But it only started with the gun policy literature. Sociology, psychology, political “science”, climatology. Learning how far the rot had spread was deeply dispiriting to me.

And the worst of it wasn’t even the hacks and partisans. The worst was noticing the cowardice of the people who failed to oppose them. Because that part isn’t just an indictment of the successful activists and manipulators, it’s an indictment of almost all scientists, everywhere.

Which is why I now contemplate rude, ignorant populists proposing to burn down large swathes of research funding and find myself rooting for the populists, not the scientists.

Because the lesson needs to be learned. It’s not just about driving out the hacks and partisans. Scientists, as a culture, need to learn the hard way that cowardice has a price — that if you don’t call out politicization when it’s happening, you don’t deserve the trust of the rest of our society, or the funding and privileges that come with it.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-21.

Update, 23 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

March 20, 2026

When pursuit of knowledge shifts to sharing of feelings instead

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

Institutes of higher learning were once places where academic careers involved research, analysis, and logical pursuits to advance human knowledge (in theory, at least, and mostly in practice). Today’s groves of academe are apparently much more about “the feels” than the facts:

An expected and obvious consequence of the Great Effeminization of the Academy is that a great deal of academic output is now about the feelings of academics.

From the peer-reviewed paper “What’s Racial About Matter? A Conversation on Race and ‘New’ Materialism Past, Present, and Future” in Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. (They mean matter in the same sense as a physicist, only they are much vaguer.) My emphasis:

    What follows is an informal, at times undisciplined, conversation about Asian American racial matters between interlocutors who have been in generative dialogue for several years now. This roundtable is the constellation of many other discussions from conference panels to shared meals, reflecting the relational nature of our inquiry. We hope this roundtable can open entry points for those exploring intersections of feminist new materialisms, STS, and studies of race — from its genealogies to its animating new directions. How did we get here, and where do we go from here?

The text itself reads like it was produced by one of those postmodern text generators that were passed around as jokes in the late 1990s.

From the Abstract of “After Hybridity: The Biological Life of the Mixed Race Child” (same journal):

    I argue that renderings of the mixed race child as a metaphor for assimilation and multicultural progress obscure how racial science continues to shape the very definition of mixed raceness. Instead, I frame the mixed race Asian American child as hybrid matter to explore the slippages between their figuration and other abnormally reproduced objects: the genetically modified food organism and cancer.

From the Abstract of “Racial Atmospherics: Greenhouses, Terrariums, and Empire’s Pneumatics” (same journal):

    What happens when we understand air as racial matter? This paper takes up this question by tracking the political, architectural, and artistic genealogies of Cold War phytotrons, or computer-controlled climatic laboratories.

From the Abstract of “Disrupting the Whitened Lemur: Reading Black Trans* Considerations in Feminist Primatology” (same journal):

    In this article, I trace the evolution of female dominance studies in lemurs to explore how logics of cis-heterosexuality and whiteness are embedded in the study of the nonhuman … Following recent theories of trans* and the nonhuman, this essay argues that such critiques illustrate the trans* potential of the nonhuman, which was prefigured by decades of critique in feminist primatology. However, by engaging with recent Black trans scholarship, this essay suggests that such trans* critiques of the nonhuman have stopped short by ignoring the racialized nature of the dyad as a social unit. I thus propose a feminist science studies that attends to Black trans* theory to work against colonial taxonomies and the forced assimilation of the nonhuman world into rigid ontologies for material gain — or what I refer to as whitening processes.

The punchline is that not only are these all from the same journal, but they are all from the same issue of that organ. And that this is only one of many such diaries (the proper word) — funded largely by you via our great benevolent government.

It’s okay to hate …

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

On his Substack, Frank Furedi defends the right to hate:

In recent decades hate has become thoroughly politicised to the point that the mere mention of the word serves as a prelude to discrediting, delegitimating and criminalizing its target. In public life the charge of practising the politics of hate is frequently deployed by leftist promoters of identity ideology against their opponents. The claim promoted by The Guardian that states that “a Tory party that stokes hatred is the real threat to our democracy” is illustrative of the attempt to associate conservatives and other critics of identity ideology with the politics of hate.1

The project of transforming hate into a malevolent ideological standpoint is underpinned by the assumption that all displays of the emotion hate are potentially malevolent. In effect the very human emotion of hate is now frequently demonised as a pathology.

In recent decades hate has been transformed into a stand-alone cultural stigma. According to dominant cultural conventions it is sufficient to use the word hate without any reference to the object of this emotion. It is now common to use the word, Haters. It is not necessary to indicate who the Haters hate. The term Hater serves as a negative identity. As one study acknowledged, “persons branded as ‘haters’ are effectively excommunicated from the polity”.2 The use of the term hater morally contaminates its target.

According to the cultural script that prevails in the West, hate serves as a secular form of moral evil. One expression that captures this evil is that of “The Hate”. By placing a definitive article in front of hate a permanent threat to society is invented. This reified public threat demands vigilance and willingness to mobilise to defeat its manifestations. For example, this is the approach of the campaigning group Stop The Hate.3 The content of The Hate is deliberately left vague so that it can serve as the target of a variety of different campaigns.

The politically motivated designation of hate to describe the behaviour of an individual or a group is not simply an act of description but also a boundary-setting manoeuvre. It basically works as a warning that signals the claim that The Hater cannot be included within the confines of a democratically governed public space. The Hater exists on the wrong sides of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate politics. This sentiment is frequently communicated by the slogan “Hope Not Hate”, which establishes a moral boundary between legitimate and illegitimate politics. From this perspective hate serves as a diagnostic label for illegitimate public life. Imposing a moral quarantine on those branded as haters is regarded is necessary for the maintenance of a just democratic society.

The frequent use of the slogan “Hope not Hate” smuggles a moralising ethos into public discourse. Through the drawing of a moral contrast between the secular evil of hate, hope emerges as a progressive political virtue. The transformation of hate into a morally toxic antithesis of hope assists the political polarisation that afflicts society. Since haters are regarded as beyond redemption dialogue with them is pointless. The only appropriate response to their words is to criminalise it. Hence the proliferation of rules and laws criminalising Hate Speech.

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/04/a-tory-party-that-stokes-hatred-is-the-real-threat-to-our-democracy
  2. Post, Robert, “Concluding Thoughts: The Legality and Politics of Hatred”, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Epilogue, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Hate, Politics, Law: Critical Perspectives on Combating Hate, Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy (New York, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 June 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190465544.003.0013, accessed 12 Mar. 2026.
  3. https://www.stopthehate.uk

Update, 21 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

The BBC is cheerleading Britain’s “baby bust”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Conservative Woman, Dr. Tony Rucinski reports on a recent BBC programme that clearly takes a dim view of parenting:

ON March 13 – the Friday before Mother’s Day – the Centre for Social Justice published Baby Bust, a report projecting that 600,000 British women alive today may miss out on motherhood they actually wanted. Nine in ten young women still hope to become mothers. The ONS confirms the total fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.41 in 2024. The CSJ calculates a “birth gap” of 30 per cent, with 831,000 people turning 50 in 2024 but only 595,000 babies born.

You probably did not hear about it. No identifiable standalone BBC News website article or feature covering the report has appeared. Our national broadcaster had other priorities. Namely a 1,500-word feature headlined “Like a trap you can’t escape: The women who regret being mothers“. It promoted the piece on social media, where it drew hundreds of critical replies. Instead of covering a demographic crisis, the BBC gave prominent space to a piece whose own evidence undermines its thesis – and thus revealed something important about the role it plays in the very crisis it should be reporting.

Its maternal regret article relies on a 2023 study conducted in Poland which estimates some 5 to 14 per cent of parents regret their decision to have children, a review article which synthesises several methodologically incomparable surveys – different countries, different age groups, different question wordings.

The more important point is its arithmetic. If 5 to 14 per cent of parents experience some regret, then 86 to 95 per cent do not. But the BBC devoted a feature-length article to the minority experience and ignored the majority one entirely. The lead case study featured is of a pseudonymous woman, Carmen, who came from a background of violence and dysfunction. But further data unsurprisingly finds the regret rates to be higher among single parents than married ones: 27.3 per cent versus 9.8 per cent. And that adverse childhood experiences, depression, and anxiety were also strongly associated with parental regret.

The BBC’s article however did not mention marriage once. Even the therapists quoted made the case against the BBC’s framing without apparently realising it. They repeatedly stated that regret often reflects “isolation, exhaustion, or lost identity” – failures of support, not failures of motherhood as a vocation.

The far larger and more painful form of regret that the BBC also ignored is the regret of women who wanted children and never had them, the highest figures among those who experienced fertility treatment failure. Or the similar regret found among couples whose fertility treatment did not result in a child. Or that involuntarily childless women’s regret intensifies with age.

The CSJ’s huge figure of 600,000 “missing mothers” just did not fit the narrative the BBC wants to tell.

Nor is this an isolated editorial misjudgment. Between 2023 and 2026, the BBC published a series of prominent features sympathetic to negative experiences of motherhood or to child-free lifestyles, among them: “I felt like a freak because I didn’t want children” (April 2024). “The adults celebrating child-free lives” (February 2023). “True cost of becoming a mum highlighted in new data on pay” (October 2025).

In the same period, not a single piece of the BBC’s coverage of Miriam Cates – the most prominent parliamentary advocate for pro-natalist policy – featured conversion therapy, smartphones and the trans debate, or substantially addressed her work on demographics or declining birth rates.

March 19, 2026

District 9 and the Story of “Race”

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

Feral Historian
Published 14 Nov 2025

Modern society has become a bit obsessed with the idea of race. District 9 subverts some of these assumptions and points at some of the ways that the entire concept of race is a product of the modern era. This one meanders a bit, but I suppose there’s no way around that.

00:00 Intro
02:45 Meet Wikus
05:42 Subverting Race
08:35 Bacon’s Rebellion and Trans-Racial Wikus
12:32 Let’s Talk About Rhodesia
14:48 Perspectives and Narratives
(more…)

March 18, 2026

Viewing-with-alarm “the highly lucrative, hyper-masculine ecosystem of online ‘red pill’ influencers”

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

I first heard of Louis Theroux and his Inside the Manosphere documentary through it being mentioned a few times on a recent podcast, but I’m hardly the one to provide any insight into contemporary political culture, so this is probably not very surprising. To provide some context, I found Celina’s summary to be quite useful:

When the liberal establishment is suddenly forced to confront the grotesque downstream consequences of its own social engineering, its first and most reliable instinct is to pathologise the individual rather than to interrogate the civilisation that produced him. This predictable dynamic is perfectly encapsulated in the critical reaction to the March 2026 release of the Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere.1 The feature-length film, which follows the veteran British broadcaster as he immerses himself in the highly lucrative, hyper-masculine ecosystem of online “red pill” influencers, has been received by the chattering classes as a horrifying, alien glimpse into a shadowy digital underworld of unbridled misogyny, toxic behaviour, and financial grift.2 Commentators, critics, and worried parents have wrung their hands over the crude language, the explicit hostility directed toward women, and the ruthless exploitation of vulnerable, disaffected young boys who flock to these figures for guidance.3 They will undoubtedly draw the conclusion that these internet personalities are a bizarre aberration, a reactionary glitch in the otherwise progressive march of modern Western society that must be heavily censored, de-platformed, or psychologically rehabilitated.

This conclusion is not only incomplete, it is entirely, fundamentally wrong. The true significance of Theroux’s latest documentary is not that it uncovers an isolated network of digital deviants operating on the fringes of acceptable discourse. Rather, the film unintentionally functions as a bleak, unrelenting autopsy of late-stage Western cultural decline. The figures profiled by Theroux, men who monetise male grievance, openly commodify female sexuality, and preach a gospel of ruthless, transactional dominance are in no way rebels against the modern liberal order. They are, in fact, its purest, most distilled, and most logical products.

Through its exploration of this digital underworld, from the sun-drenched hedonism of Miami to the expatriate enclaves of Marbella, the documentary inadvertently exposes a significant and terrifying civilisational breakdown. It reveals a society suffering from the total collapse of traditional gender norms, the complete disappearance of honour, duty, and social trust, and the total ascendancy of a vulgar materialism where attention and capital are the only remaining arbiters of human value. The manosphere is not an alternative to modern Western ideology, it is the inevitable, putrid consequence of a culture that has spent the last half-century systematically dismantling its own moral, religious, and social infrastructure. To understand the phenomenon captured by Theroux, one must look past the superficial liberal moral outrage and recognise the manosphere for what it truly is: a favela culture operating seamlessly inside a wealthy Western economy.

[…]

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is undeniably a compelling piece of television, featuring moments of sharp journalistic insight and necessary confrontation with deeply unsavoury characters. But as a piece of cultural criticism, it ultimately fails because it refuses to look beyond the immediate vulgarity of its subjects. Theroux, and the liberal audiences who will consume his documentary, will walk away from the film comforted by their own moral superiority, convinced that the problem lies entirely with a few toxic men in Marbella and Miami who simply need to be censored, de-platformed, or re-educated.

They will draw entirely the wrong lesson. The manosphere influencers are not an invading force corrupting a healthy society; they are the native flora of the wasteland we have purposefully created. They are the warlords of the digital favela, thriving in the ruins of a civilisation that has actively, joyfully destroyed its own moral and social foundations. The documentary unintentionally captures the catastrophic, unavoidable consequences of modern Western ideology: a low-trust, hyper-materialistic culture where honour is dead, transactional exploitation is the accepted norm, and the relations between men and women have devolved into a state of algorithmic trench warfare.

Until the West is willing to confront the structural causes of this decay, the destructive failures of modern feminism, the atomisation inherent in mass democracy, the fraying of social capital brought about by multiculturalism, and the vast spiritual void of secular materialism, it will continue to produce generations of lost, angry men. And the e-pimps will always be there, waiting in the digital shadows, ready to sell them a monthly subscription to the abyss.

  1. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/louis-theroux-inside-the-manosphere
  2. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/mar/11/louis-theroux-inside-the-manosphere-review-why-doesnt-he-focus-more-on-the-impact-on-women
  3. Ibid

Update: Rob Henderson’s Wall Street Journal article on Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere has also been posted on their free Substack – https://wsjfreeexpression.substack.com/p/louis-theroux-exposes-the-manosphere

A new Netflix documentary takes viewers into “the manosphere,” a loose network of YouTubers, podcasters, live-streamers and online pranksters. Those interviewed in Louis Theroux’s documentary, Inside the Manosphere, claim to teach young men how to become dominant, wealthy and irresistible to women. They pitch a specific idea about male worth. Women enter the world with innate value, they say, though they often contradict this by telling their followers to mistreat women. A man must earn his value, the logic goes, through money, sex and status. Otherwise, he is worthless.

This is a bleak message. It is also a brilliant sales strategy. First you convince young men that they are nothing. Then you charge them to become something. It’s one of the oldest cons in the world, updated for the age of the algorithm.

At first glance, the documentary seems to confirm what critics already suspect. The manosphere is toxic and extreme. But the film reveals the gap between persona and reality. The influencers selling this lifestyle often don’t live it themselves.

Early in the film, Mr. Theroux asks influencer Justin Waller a simple question: How many kids do you have? The man hesitates. Later, we learn he lives with his two children and their mother — he describes her as his “wife” though they are not legally married — who is pregnant with their third child. The man leads a fairly conventional family life, yet he spends much of his online career telling followers that men should dominate women, avoid commitment and establish a rotation of multiple partners.

One influencer known as Myron Gaines brags privately to Mr. Theroux that he plans to have multiple wives. But when Mr. Theroux raises this idea of “one-way monogamy” in front of Gaines’s girlfriend, his facial expression immediately changes. He then says, “Who knows? Maybe I’ll only wanna be with one girl after all.” The credits of the documentary reveal that the girlfriend eventually left him.

March 17, 2026

How Germans were propagandized into supporting the National Socialists

Filed under: Germany, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve read a fair bit about the rise of Hitler after the First World War, beginning when I was in middle school and did a history project on the topic. Yet one aspect of the political success of Hitler’s fascist movement always puzzled me: how such blatant crude propaganda persuaded so many Germans to see things the Nazi way. Over the last five years in Canada, as our legacy media have fallen directly into the clutches of a single political party, I now understand all too well how millions of people getting their world view informed by a single point of view can create and maintain a movement. When all the mainstream media tell effectively the same story in 2026 and go out of their way to praise the government — especially the leader — and belittle and denigrate the opposition parties, it’s easy just to believe what you’re being told and not make waves.

Anyway, back to interwar Germany and their more absolute control of the newspapers and radio stations was used to mould and shape popular opinion:

In the run-up to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, most people in Germany believed what was being put about both on radio and in the state-controlled press, namely that the Poles were committing all kinds of atrocities to former Prussians living in Poland, that they were war-mongering and using threatening language, and that not only was the Danzig corridor rightfully part of Germany, it was the duty of the Reich to defend those subjects living there.

Eighteen year-old Heinz Knocke was from Hameln in central Germany and typical of many of his age. He had absolute faith in the Führer and the rightness of the German cause. Planning to join the Luftwaffe as a pilot, he had had his preliminary examinations and was hoping that with war imminent, his call-up would be accelerated. “The Polish atrocities against the German minority make horrible reading today”, he scribbled in his diary on 31st August. “Thousands are being massacred daily in territory which had once been part of Germany.”

Oberleutnant Hajo Herrmann, a twenty-four year-old pilot with the bomber group III/KG4, also thought the Poles had brought war upon themselves. As far as he was concerned, the Danzig issue was one of principle. It had been German before 1919, was still inhabited mostly by Germans, and since the Poles had rejected any peaceful solution, what did they expect? “The anger that I felt inside at their unreasonableness”, he noted, “matched my sacred conviction: that of German rightness”. For Oberleutnant Hans von Luck, on the other hand, an officer in the 7th Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, the escalating situation had brought a sudden recall from leave just a few days’ earlier. He had found everyone at the garrison in Bad Kissingen near Schweinfurt in high spirits. Neither he nor his friends believed a word of Goebbels’ propaganda about the Poles, but they did believe Danzig and the corridor should be part of Germany once more. “We were not hungry for war”, von Luck noted, “but we did not believe the British and French would come to Poland’s defence”. How wrong he was; for while von Luck may have understood that going to war was not a matter to be taken lightly, even he had blindly accepted Hitler’s assurances that Britain and France were bluffing. It was a feature of Hitler’s rule that he frequently said one thing with immense conviction and authority but quite another once events had been proved him wrong. Such was his grip on the German people, however, almost no-one ever questioned this, and certainly not his inner circle or anyone in the German media. At any rate, all three of these young men had believed parts of the nonsense that had been spouted by Nazi propaganda, whether it be false claims about the Poles, the justness of the Nazi cause for invasion, or Hitler’s assurances the British and French were bluffing. Such was he power of Nazi disinformation.

[…]

Both the Imperial Japanese and the Nazis dominated the new forms of media communication emerging in the 1930s. Propaganda had been a key component of Nazi politics from the outset, and while there were some who had not been persuaded, it had been unquestionably hugely effective, not just within the Reich but around the world too. To a large degree, this was due to Dr Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, and Gauleiter — administrative leader — of Berlin, an old Frankish term that had been resurrected by the Nazis. A former failed journalist and one of the first Nazis, he was utterly devoted to Hitler, so much so he had even given up an affair with a Czech film star with whom he was deeply in love because the Führer asked him to. Although the son of a shop assistant, Goebbels was highly intelligent and despite those humble beginnings had attended several universities and gained a doctorate. Marriage to Magda Quant, a society divorcee, gave him the kind of money and status he needed to help him climb up the Nazi ladder. He had become Propaganda Minister in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, and had immediately announced his prime goal was to achieve the “mobilisation of mind and spirit” of the German people. “We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out”, he said of defeat in 1918, “but because the weapons of our minds did not fire”.

In many ways, Goebbels was as responsible for Hitler’s position as Hitler was himself and he was the man who had largely shaped the Nazi’s public image. It was he [who] had insisted on draping swastikas – the bigger the better – from as many places as possible; it was he who taught Hitler how to whip a crowd into a frenzy; it was also Goebbels who had elevated Hitler into a demigod in the eyes of many. He knew all about manipulation theories, orchestrated heavy-handed mob violence, and in the 1933 election created the “Hitler over Germany” campaign; it was the first time, for example, that aircraft had been used to take a candidate around a country in an effort to reach more people. It worked spectacularly well.

With the Nazis in power, Goebbels had also done much to stoke up the virulent anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology and had done much to turn Nazism into a form of surrogate religion, in which, again, drawing on nostalgia, they had harked back to a “purer” Aryan past to help bind the people both together and behind the Party and, more importantly, the Leader. Goebbels’ influence – his genius – should never be underestimated.

Update, 18 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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