Quotulatiousness

October 17, 2025

Civilizational collapse is … female

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo addresses the unpalatable contention that female power leads to civilizational disaster:

Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix

Multiple surveys (see, for example, with thanks to James Nuzzo, here, here, here, here, here and here) suggest that when women hold power, they pursue typically feminine preferences and policies. Female-led institutions become more oriented to social justice than objective truth. Feelings matter above facts, context above law, and victimhood above expertise.

Protecting and promoting the allegedly vulnerable — through censorship, shaming, coercion, or lawbreaking/lawfare — becomes a greater priority than excellence or impartiality. Truth-tellers find themselves cancelled, Nobel prize winners reduced to tears, laws and policies applied unequally, white men accused and vilified, criminals cossetted, mental illnesses affirmed, and destructive policies embraced. No one who has paid attention over the past 20 years can be surprised by the findings.

Moreover, our ability to discuss this feminine revolution in values is hampered by the very logic of the revolution, as I will show. Both women and men, deeply disinclined to “harm” women, fail to confront the problem adequately.

Two discussions of the subject — an essay by two social psychologists at Quillette and, more recently, a conference speech by a feisty conservative woman — draw a line under the seeming inevitability of the west’s collapse. Even faced with that alarming prospect, most pundits cannot bear to imagine an alternative to the female-led assault on our core institutions.

Cheering on Women’s Empowerment

A 2022 article in Quillette, “Sex and the Academy“, provides a stark illustration of my thesis. The subtitle rules out the very conclusion the data supports, with the authors emphasizing that “The inclusion of women in higher education is a great achievement for Western liberal societies. How is this changing academic culture?”

The “great achievement”, as it turns out, will almost certainly be a lethal one.

The article was written by two academics, Cory Clark and Bo Winegard, both PhDs in social psychology. Winegard, a male scholar, had an unfortunate run-in with academic orthodoxy that led to his loss of employment; Clark, a female scholar, has a secure academic position. Both authors express enthusiasm for the takeover of academia by women even as they point out its damaging consequences. Neither one advocates any form of resistance, no matter how mild, to feminine academia’s assault on truth.

Summarizing the results of many surveys, Clark and Winegard demonstrate that while a majority of men favor free speech and the advancement of knowledge over emotional comfort, a majority of women prefer conformity, safety, and the protection of victim groups’ feelings. Not all women are indifferent to the traditional underpinnings of western civilization (and not all men support those underpinnings), but the general trends are clear.

Women are significantly more likely than men to support the cancellation of controversial speakers or the suppression of controversial research.

Women also tend to favor the existence of snitch lines to report people who cause offence. Women are more supportive than men of diversity quotas that exclude white men from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions. (It would be interesting to know how many white women support diversity quotas that exclude white women from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions.)

[…]

Asserting that both sides are pursuing worthy goals, the authors downplay the shock value of the findings, which show that women are, overall, less interested in truth and accuracy than men are. Imagine assessing such a finding as anything but catastrophic. Imagine calling the disregard for truth moral.

In place of truth, women value a utopian ideology that they perceive — usually without any consistency or adherence to fact, but nonetheless granted by Clark and Winegard — as “morally desirable”. But morally desirable for whom, and to what end? The use of the phrase, a misnomer, demonstrates how thoroughly the authors themselves are in thrall to the corrosive feminine culture they examine.

There is nothing moral (or generally desirable) about the suppression of truth-seeking research when it conflicts — or is perceived to conflict — with an allegedly emancipatory social goal. There is nothing morally desirable or indeed “protective” about shouting down an academic speaker because of the alleged harm of the speech. Naturally, social justice proponents would be outraged if their speeches were shouted down or their research blocked and censored.

I saw a link to this Helen Andrews article which seems to go well with Janice Fiamengo’s article linked above describing the “Great Feminization”:

… Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

[…]

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—”colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism, obviously. It was also very feminine.

Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.

[…]

The Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP. We assume that these institutions will continue to function under these completely novel circumstances. But what are our grounds for that assumption?

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

If the Great Feminization poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it. The answer depends on why you think it occurred in the first place. There are many people who think the Great Feminization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Women were finally given a chance to compete with men, and it turned out they were just better. That is why there are so many women in our newsrooms, running our political parties, and managing our corporations.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter comments on Helen Andrews’ article:

One thing Helen misses in this otherwise excellent analysis is the role played by prestige. Cancel culture was enabled by the unique circumstance of women weaponizing the prestige of freshly feminized legacy institutions. So long as those institutions retained their prestige, what the people who ran them said really mattered.

Unfortunately for the ladies (but luckily for civilization), this is self-limiting, because prestige is fundamentally an emergent property of masculine competence hierarchies. We see this demonstrated whenever a profession becomes coded as women’s work: its prestige immediately crashes. Feminists have complained about this for years, though of course they misunderstand the mechanism (prestige is a component of male sexual attractiveness, but not of female, and this is biologically hard-wired).

This prestige collapse is now affecting essentially every coopted, feminized institution — universities, news media, publishing houses, movie studios, large corporations, various government agencies, hospitals, courts, churches, all of them wield far less cultural power than they did even a few years ago. The only people who really care what these legacy institutions say are the women who took them over. To everyone else, the angry sounds they make are nothing more than background noise.

This is probably the main reason for the vibe shift. Once the prestige of feminized institutions declined below a certain threshold, their ability to enforce social consensus began to evaporate.

It’s also probably no accident that the Trump administration seems to care a lot more about what the anons of the Online Right say than it does about the opinion of the universities or the news media. All the intelligent young men got pushed out of the institutions, and those ionized particles of free male energy then began to self-assemble online into an ad hoc competence hierarchy where prestige is measured by clout rather than professional degrees, job titles, or institutional affiliations. The anon swarm is entirely informal, meaning that its outcomes are not amenable to antidiscrimination legislation or to procedural manipulation; you can screw with the algo all you want but you can’t actually force people to care what women say just because they’re women (thereby placing women into the position of openly trading in thirst, which gets them attention but certainly doesn’t mean that anyone has to pretend to take them seriously).

All that’s happened so far is that people’s attention has been redirected away from crazy woke females and towards the influencers of the online right. The fever has broken but society is a long way from recovered. The institutions are still under the control of crazy woke females, and this is extremely bad, especially because they are – for biological reasons related to childlessness — only going to get crazier as time goes on. Fortunately no one really cares what they say anymore, so as they throw tantrums as the institutions are reclaimed over the next decade or so, their protests won’t register as anything but irrelevant toddler noise.

October 16, 2025

RIFfing the US federal workforce

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

In Reason, J.D. Tuccille considers the impact of the US government shutdown on the federal civil service:

“Lincoln Memorial During Government Shutdown 2013” by Flickr user reivax is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

As promised — or threatened, if you wandered over to Reason by accident — the Trump administration has started using the government sort-of-shutdown as an opportunity to engage in mass layoffs of federal employees. In the game of chicken between Republicans and Democrats over just how much the government should overspend and on what, the losers so far appear to be some of the almost 3 million Americans who thought federal employment would be a comfortable way to collect a paycheck.

Setting thousands of former government workers loose to seek jobs elsewhere — preferably not involving money forcibly extracted from taxpayers — is a step in the right direction.

Shutdowns Are (Mostly) Political Theater

As we all should know by now, government shutdowns are largely political theater. National parks and museums are closed to inconvenience the public into believing something big is happening even as taxes keep getting collected and government enforcers continue twisting arms to make sure people comply with laws and rules that never should have been imposed.

The Brookings Institution’s David Wessel pointed out last week, “the Justice Department said 90% of its employees would be exempted from the furlough” and “the Department of Homeland Security said in its 76-page contingency plan that roughly 95% of its nearly 272,000 employees would remain on the job if a shutdown occurred”. Agencies accomplish this by defining “essential” employees who remain on the job in the broadest way possible.

Paychecks may be delayed during the shutdown. But after it ends, “employees who were required to perform excepted work during the lapse will receive retroactive pay” and “employees who were furloughed as the result of the lapse will receive retroactive pay for those furlough periods” according to the Office of Personnel Management. Basically, all federal employees eventually get paid whether they continue to work or are sent home for the duration of the “shutdown”.

An Opportunity To Reduce the Federal Workforce

At least, that’s how it usually works. This time is a little different because the Trump administration came into office promising to downsize the federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was supposed to accomplish that goal, but the shutdown offers another opportunity. Even before furloughs began, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent out a memo noting:

    With respect to those Federal programs whose funding would lapse and which are otherwise unfunded, such programs are no longer statutorily required to be carried out. Therefore, consistent with applicable law, including the requirements of 5 C.F.R. part 351, agencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities (PPAs) that satisfy all three of the following conditions: (1) discretionary funding lapses on October 1, 2025; (2) another source of funding, such as H.R. 1 (Public Law 119-21) is not currently available; and (3) the PPA is not consistent with the President’s priorities.

The White House is apparently taking this opportunity seriously. “Around 4,200 employees were laid off in total on Friday,” reports Eric Katz of Government Executive. The biggest cuts were at the Department of the Treasury (1,446 employees) and the Department of Health and Human Services (between 1,100 and 1,200 employees). The Department of Education, which President Trump proposes to totally eliminate, also experienced layoffs (466 or nearly 20 percent of its remaining workforce), as did the Environmental Protection Agency, Homeland Security, and Housing and Urban Development.

Everything this administration does seems to involve a bit of chaos, and the latest rounds of reductions in force are no different. While hundreds of employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were included in the layoffs, some were fired by accident and immediately rehired.

Chris Bray notes that — stop me if you’ve heard this before — a district court judge has ruled that the President doesn’t have the power to do, well, pretty much anything to do with the federal workforce (what is it with the executive branch thinking they have powers that haven’t been explicitly approved by the judiciary?):

After a just absolutely bizarre hearing in a Northern California federal court, a judge has forbidden the Trump administration from laying off government employees. The hearing may have been held in the Court of the Red Queen: After Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Hedges argued that she wasn’t going to get into the legal merits of the Trump administration’s layoffs because the court lacked jurisdiction and the plaintiffs hadn’t met the legal standards for filing a lawsuit, Judge Susan Illston warned that, actual quote, “This hatchet is falling on the heads of employees all across the nation and you’re not even prepared to address whether that’s legal?” Getting laid off is a hatchet attack, so we skip the arguments about ripeness and standing. It’s emotionally dire, a thing that feels very bad. Judges talk like this, now. OH GOD COUNSEL THIS IS LIKE A THING WITH A KNIFE THAT WOUNDS ME. Objection, your honor, inadequate trigger warning. […]

Illston declared the existence of a temporary restraining order from the bench, and I’ve been waiting for her written order to land on PACER. It’s here, and it’s … very … Well, okay: It has a lot of feelings. […]

Opening paragraphs, first page:

Note that the first paragraph frames federal RIFs as historically unprecedented, while the second paragraph frames the current federal RIFS as not ordinary: different than the way RIFs are usually conducted. So this is unprecedented, but it has happened before, and the problem with the unprecedented thing is that it’s not being done the way the thing that has never been done before is usually done.

But anyway, a reduction in force of federal personnel during a shutdown is “unprecedented in our country’s history”. Of course, a reduction of force alone is not at all unprecedented, and the Clinton administration reduced the size of the federal bureaucracy by about 400,000 people. Illston doesn’t articulate a reason why reducing the bureaucracy during a shutdown is worse, or a reason why Clinton RIFs were good but Trump RIFs are a violent hatchet attack, but she clearly feels it. Of course, during a shutdown, the agencies being shrunk have no approved funding, so it would seem to make more sense to be careful about personnel costs, but this argument means that I just hurt people with a hatchet.

Above all, note that the argument out of the gate is a normative argument, not a legal argument. This is unprecedented! This is not ordinary! If a judge feels that something is a little off, she can order it stopped.

October 15, 2025

Hamburg votes to secede from industrial civilization

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

Despite my always plummetting hopes for Canada I have to admit that I do enjoy a little soupçon of schadenfreude with every new bit of evidence from eugyppius that Germany is determined to ostentatiously self-destruct even before the demented Dominion can:

Hamburg is German’s leading industrial city. Its companies add 20 billion Euros in gross value every year. Much of this economic output is related to Hamburg’s happy location on the Elbe and the fact that the city is home to Europe’s third-largest port. All of this has made Hamburg extremely prosperous, which prosperity has filled it with rafts of clueless virtue-signalling morons who have no idea how anything works, why they find Hamburg attractive in the first place or how their hip urban lifestyles are maintained.

In this photo, published by BILD, you can see some of these unmitigated retards having a happy because they’ve just scored cheap virtue points by voting in their own personal energy apocalypse.

Photo from BILD via eugyppius

Specifically, these dumbasses are celebrating because their completely insane popular referendum passed with 53.2% of the vote on Sunday. This referendum, the so-called Zukunftsentscheid (“future decision”), binds the Free and Hanseatic City to achieving total carbon neutrality by 2040, five years earlier than the 2045 goal set by the almost equally insane Germany-wide Climate Protection Law as emended in 2021, which is in turn five years earlier than the 2050 goal established by the selfsame law as it originally passed the Bundestag in the year of the child-saint Greta Thunberg 2019.

Turnout was pretty low in Hamburg last Sunday, with less than 44% of eligible voters bothering to cast a ballot, most of them by mail. Thus just 23% of the most deranged Hamburgians could take their city hostage and commit its government to destroying all of its industry and most of its economic activity inside the next decade and a half. The biggest joke is that when Hamburg has finally achieved the sacred Net Zero, it will make absolutely zero net difference to anything. Hamburg is responsible for something 0.022% percent of CO2 emissions globally. The city is not even a rounding error.

The referendum was an initiative of Fridays for Future, but it gathered the support of various social and environmental organisations, among them Greenpeace, the union Verdi and even FC St. Pauli. It will successively cap annual CO2 emissions sector-by-sector, imposing a slow and relentless strangulation in turn on transit, households, commerce and industry.

October 14, 2025

The Thatcher Centennial

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

Monday was Thanksgiving Day in Canada, Columbus Day in the United States and — at least for some — the Margaret Thatcher Centennial in Britain:

Former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1983. She was in office from May 1979 to November 1990.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

One hundred years ago – October 13th 1925 – Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, an English market town in the East Midlands. She was raised in the flat above her father’s grocery shop. That’s to say, she came from the same class as the ladies out on the streets of Epping and elsewhere protesting the rape of their children and their demographic dispossession in one of the oldest nation-states on earth, and despised by Starmer et al for not getting with the death-by-diversity programme.

Young Margaret grew up to become a research chemist, a barrister, and finally a politician called Mrs Thatcher — always “Mrs Thatcher”: I cannot claim to have given her any other specific advice but I did suggest she should not accept her alleged upgrade to “Baroness Thatcher”, as if one of the rare consequential members of the political class was of no greater rank than such wretched figures as Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. The only guy who got any mileage out of it was CNN’s Larry King, who took to introducing her as “Margaret The Lady Thatcher”, like Sammy The Bull Gravano. She achieved greatness as a missus, and should have remained so, like Mr Gladstone rather than Mr Gravano.

Mrs Thatcher shaped events as opposed just to stringing along behind them. There have been nine prime ministers since, but, like a guest on my Saturday music show, I can’t name them, can you? Trimmers and opportunists, charlatans and at least one traitor (Johnson). Her present successor has momentarily thrilled the pseudo-Tory press by being marginally less disastrous in her conference speech than she was expected to be, so weird kinky mummy fetishists like the Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley are now drooling excitedly if dementedly that “Mummy is back“. The Conservative Woman is rightly contemptuous. Mrs Badenoch seems a pleasant enough lady after a fashion, but a third-of-a-century ago, when I last lived in London, certain types of women would put their business cards in red telephone boxes offering, ah, specialised services to middle-aged men whereby one could be fitted with an oversized nappy and put in a giant pram to throw your toys out of, after which Nanny would have to discipline you. It does not seem to me a useful political framing.

It does, however, testify to the long shadow of Mrs Thatcher. At the Tory conference, she was much invoked — for the same reason pre-Trump Republicans used to cite Reagan: he was the last good time before Bush/Dole/more Bush/McCain/Romney … So it goes with Maggie, the last good time before Wossname/Whoozis/Whatever/the “Heir to Blair”/Fat Blair/the Hindu Hedge-Funder … It is forty-six years since Mrs T arrived in Downing Street. She quite liked “Winston”, as she was wont to refer to him (although whether to his face remains unclear), but she would have found it odd had the 1986 Conservative conference banged on about him incessantly. That is not an encouraging sign, either for the party or for the country.

Mrs Thatcher’s success bred a lot of resentment, not least among the resentful twerps of her own party, who eventually rose up and toppled her — over her attitude to Europe, of course. Just after the Fall of Thatcher, I was in the pub enjoying a drink with her daughter Carol after a little light radio work. A fellow patron, the “radical” “poet” Seething Wells, decided to have a go at her in loco parentis, which is Latin for “in the absence of her loco parent”. After reciting a long catalogue of Mrs Thatcher’s various crimes, he leaned into Carol, nose to nose, and summed it all up: “Basically, your mum just totally smashed the working classes”.

Carol was a jolly good sport about it, as always, and bought him a pint. And it has to be said that this terrible indictment loses a lot of its force when you replace the word Thatcher — or “Vatcha!”, as the tribunes of the masses liked to snarl it, with much saliva being projected down the length of the bar — with the rather less snarl-worthy formulation “your mum”.

October 13, 2025

Speculation that J.D. Vance “maintains a Twitter alt, that he is in fact an anon poaster”

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

The latest post from John Carter at Postcards from Barsoom includes some interesting speculation about how well J.D. Vance has handled his engagement with social media trolling and why that might be:

Gigachads on the official DHS X account only provide evidence of one poaster in the administration, but this is a poaster in a very prominent, public-facing role, who has been allowed to do this for quite some time now, obviously without rebuke. That strongly suggests that the administration smiles upon the memelord, and it also makes it more likely that the chud running the DHS X account is far from alone. An obvious question is why the DHS would be so tolerant of its social media manager posting right wing memes, when this is guaranteed to draw the ire of the left. One possible explanation is that the administration wants its anon army to understand that they have guys on the inside. Memes are a tool for informal coordination; by posting these memes, the administration is winking at the base, telling them “We’re listening to you, and as for CNN … we don’t think about them at all. Now follow our lead …”

The young men powering the new administration were acculturated within the free-wheeling environment of loosely connected online networks, in which irony and ambiguity is simply the water in which they swim, and the only hierarchy is the one established by informal influence and demonstrated ability. They are not accustomed to subordinating their activities to directives pushed down from the summits of rigid org charts. Their basic assumptions are individual initiative, freedom of action, and a magpie willingness to grab good ideas wherever they can be found and put them to immediate use without waiting for permission.

And it is not only the junior staffers and federal agents who have this mindset.

Importantly, at 41, Vance is a young man by political standards. His cultural assumptions are not those of network news, but of digital networks. When the Vance memes making fun of his weight, or riffing off of his remark to Zelensky that he never even said “Thank you”, started circulating, he didn’t get mad about them. He laughed, and rolled with it, because he understood that – coming from the online right – these memes were an expression of affection, the way you rib your friend by calling him a faggot and he pokes you back by calling you a fat retard. Naturally the feminized left does not understand this at all. They think that these memes are humiliating to Vance and so spread the memes themselves, while interpreting the popularity of the memes amongst the online right as an indication that the base loathes him. As always, the left lacks theory of mind for their opponents. Imprisoned within the iron bars of their own ideological-managerial cage, the left has completely failed to learn the lessons of participatory media, and like a general staff doggedly trying to break the trench lines with cavalry charges, continues to try to fight the current war with the weapons they used to win the last one.

There is widespread speculation that Vance’s comfortable navigation of meme culture comes from direct experience, that he maintains a Twitter alt, that he is in fact an anon poaster. There is of course even speculation as to which account is his, although naturally, no one knows for sure, and Vance sure isn’t telling.

If there are poasters in the administration, we might expect them to treat policy the way they learned to handle memes. Any random small-account anon might come up with an absolute banger of post … so why shouldn’t they be able to come up with banger policies, too? Why limit themselves to adopting policies developed inside the long, tedious processes of bureaucratic committees and comfortable think tanks? If rapisthitler1488 has a good idea, well, why not use it? You can just do things. This attitude is at the heart of what Dudley Newright calls the “up-the-chain phenomenon”.

We’d also expect an administration laced with poasters to pay careful attention to the online right, using it to gauge the public mood in order to correct course. At its worst this could turn into audience capture, but at its best this enables a much more responsive reaction to public sentiment than that afforded by polling data since it is both immediate and disintermediated. Rather than waiting for the polling agency to carefully word a question to get the answer it wants, and then painstakingly call up and interview a statistically representative and unbiased sample so that it can provide rigorous Poisson errors for the answers to its biased questions, public sentiment can be analyzed as soon as people start tweeting, and evaluated in terms of the public’s own words. In essence, the poastocratic administration becomes akin to a livestreamer monitoring the chat.

Finally, we might expect to see the administration deliberately trolling the base. Experienced influencers know that outrage bait drives engagement. If you want to move in a certain policy direction but are being pressured behind the scenes not to do that, or conversely if you are being pressured to do something you know will be unpopular, an excellent way of assembling the political capital necessary to do what you want is to announce that you’re going to do the opposite. The howls of outrage from the base then provide you with the excuse you need to do what you wanted to do in the first place. “Let me check with the boss … Well, sorry, I’d really love to help you, but the boss won’t let me do that.”

OK, you say, this is all very interesting, an emergent feedback loop of cybernetic governance linking the networked hive mind to the traditional institutions of government, but is there any actual evidence beyond some meme-slop posted by the DHS in an effort to assure the base that they are getting the Got What They Voted For Award? Well, let’s get into that.

Update, 14 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

Communism, Socialism, and Star Trek

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

Feral Historian
Published 23 May 2025

There’s a long history of Star Trek being equated with communism, both in praise and condemnation. But is it really mappable to modern politics, given that it assumes a different set of socioeconomic conditions? More to the point, is socialism (in the Marxist transitional sense) just a dead-end?

00:00 Intro
00:51 What’s Capitalism?
04:00 Communist, not Socialist
07:14 Theory and Practice
08:51 Goals and Process

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October 12, 2025

QotD: Male privilege revealed

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent documents the author’s 18-month experiment living as a man named Ned. She decided to embark on this experiment to explore gender dynamics from “the other side”, so to speak. Vincent, a liberal journalist with a strong feminist background, decided she wanted to understand men’s lives and social roles from within. She recognized, accurately, that men change their behavior when a woman is present, and she was curious to see how they were when no women were around.

Vincent described herself as a “bull dyke” and held strong feminist views. She expected, throughout the course of the experiment to uncover the secrets of male privilege and the societal advantages that, she was sure, are afforded to men. She anticipated that living life as a man would validate her beliefs that men lead easier lives and wield unchecked power. She figured that, at the very least, she could enjoy a couple of years as a powerful male.

Vincent disguised herself as a man by getting a new hair style and giving herself a fake five o’clock shadow, among other things. She had always been considered rather masculine in her usual feminist and lesbian circles, so she figured she could pass rather easily as a man, if perhaps a slightly effeminate one. She was right.

Her initial assumptions changed when Vincent discovered that men, contrary to her expectations of power and privilege, face their own unique set of pressures and struggles. Men, she discovered, were expected to suppress any signs of vulnerability. This quickly led to feelings of extreme isolation that she did not expect. Nobody “had her back” because, as far as they knew, she was just a man, and should “man up”. She quickly realized that men do not have inherently easier lives. Her preconceived notions of in-born male advantage evaporated. She was getting worried.

She realized that women do not have empathy for the struggles of men.

Norah, as Ned, experienced the behavior of women toward men firsthand. At one point, she tried dating women as a man. She figured this would be incredibly easy for her. Not only was she a woman herself and knew how women think, but she was also a lesbian and already liked women. She worried at first that she’d be too good at it and would have to tell interested women that she was a woman to stop them from pursuing her.

The reality was sharply different from her expectations. Her apparent femininity came across as her simply being an effeminate man. This caused women to be disinterested in her and their rejections were dismissive, cold, and often extremely brutal. Women would sometimes treat her with suspicion or outright hostility as they assumed her intent was negative.

These interactions eventually led Vincent to start developing misogynistic thoughts. That’s right: women treated her so poorly when they believed her to be a man that she started to develop misogynistic thoughts.

Interestingly, many of the supposedly straight women she had attempted to date, even those who had been brutal and cold toward her, immediately expressed interest in a lesbian “hook-up” when she told them she was a woman who had been disguised as a man for the sake of journalism.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a “straight woman”. Is there even a such thing as a lesbian?

CTCG, “UNDERCOVER: A Feminist’s Year Living as a Man”, Codex Trivium Cosmic Genesis, 2025-06-16.

October 11, 2025

Toddler politics – don’t discuss, just shriek and cry and hit

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

At Woke Watch Canada, T.G. Kelemen illustrates the difficulty of trying to have a logical discussion with someone who refuses to engage intellectually as an adult and instead pours everything into the kind of emotional incontinence toddlers indulge in:

Source: Frances Widdowson, Facebook

It’s 2025.

Ask a question, get a tantrum. Make a point, get a protest.

And if you’re unlucky enough to be a calm, middle-aged academic like Frances Widdowson, who dared to speak plainly about a hoax everyone else is pretending is holy scripture, you don’t get debate.

You get a mob.

You get walls pounded. Doors blocked. Students shrieking like toddlers in a sugar crash. And who’s leading it?

Not war-hardened political activists. Not deep-thinking men of conscience.

No — it’s women. Grown women. Educated. Empowered. Enraged.

But not enlightened.

Welcome to the “regressive” West, where a large and growing portion of womanhood has been educated not to argue, but to erupt. To scream instead of speak. To censor instead of counter. To “feel”, and then enforce those feelings on everyone else.

What used to be a bad breakup is now a political position.

What used to be a mood swing is now being proposed as legislation.

Kamloops: Hysteria and Mass Psychosis

Let’s rewind. Canada. 2021. The Kamloops Indian Residential School story breaks. “Unmarked mass graves”, they say. “215 children”, they whisper. Every outlet repeats it. Politicians take a knee. Flags at half-mast. Even the Pope apologizes, having already formally done so twice, with countless statements of regret.

No bodies are found. No evidence. No excavation. One inconclusive radar scan and a theory.

And still: nothing.

But the narrative’s already set. When Frances Widdowson says, when she suggests maybe we need evidence before enshrining national guilt into law, she’s hounded. Not with counter-arguments. Not with facts.

With a toddler’s unhinged rage.

The women who confronted Widdowson aren’t showing the understandable, righteous anger mature people show in response to obvious injustice. No. What we have is full-grown girl-children who aren’t getting their way throwing their emotional and psychological scat in her face. Why? Simply for disagreeing with them.

In February 2023, invited to speak at the University of Lethbridge, Widdowson faced similar militant protest. The lecture was shut down. Protesters, mostly female, banged on walls, wailed through the halls, and demanded she be de-platformed. One group called her a “residential school denier”. Another called her “unsafe”. Some students cried in interviews, claiming trauma.

Trauma? From a talk you didn’t even attend?

That’s the playbook now. You don’t have to hear the words. Just say you were harmed. The more you feel, the more you’re right. Welcome to emotional absolutism where logic is violence and hysteria is virtue.

Can modern women handle the responsibility their suffrage and freedom demands? Judging their own behavior, the answer is a resounding no.

Crossing the line between “justice” and “persecution”

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

At The Intrepid Viking, Roxanne Halverson notes just how determined the Canadian justice system was to inflict the most pre-trial punishment as possible on Tamara Lich and Chris Barber for their leadership role in the Freedom Convoy:

Tamara Lich and Chris Barber
Photos from The Intrepid Viking

The convoy leaders, Lich and Barber, […] finally learned their fate in an Ottawa courtroom on October 7th, 2025, almost four years since the trucks first rolled into the capital, and over two years since their trial began on September 5, 2023. Rather than the unwarranted and what can only be described as vindictive prison terms sought by the Crown, Justice Heather Perkins-McVey instead sentenced them both to conditional non-custodial sentences of 18 months. A decision, one can be sure, the Crown is not pleased with and one that is nothing short of humiliating given it falls farther short from the seven and eight year terms they argued for than they could have possibly imagined.

[…]

But Lich and Barber have indeed suffered. Both have been put through the legal grist mill of what now serves as Canada’s justice system since they day they were put into handcuffs and arrested on February 17/18, 2022. Barber was released on a bail bond of $100,000 after a night in jail with his wife acting as surety, meaning she would forfeit that amount if he breached his bail conditions. Under those conditions he was required to leave Ottawa within 24 hours of his release and depart Ontario in 72 hours, no longer support the Freedom Convoy and cease contact with fellow organizers. Breach of these conditions could also have landed him back in jail. His business and personal finances were also frozen for three months as part of the government’s illegal actions under the Emergencies Act. And now, to further try and impair and punish him financially the Crown prosecutors on this case are still attempting to seize and destroy his truck and livelihood, Big Red, which became a symbol of the Freedom Convoy. That matter is expected to be settled by Justice Perkins-McVey in court in November of 2025.

Lich, after her arrest spent a total of 49 days in jail before she was even convicted of any offence. Denied bail after her initial arrest in February, she spent 19 days in remand custody in an Ottawa jail because a judge deemed it was “necessary for the protection and safety of the public“. She was finally released on March 7, 2022 after an Ontario Superior Court Justice overturned the lower court’s outlandish ruling.

The vindictive nature of the first Crown prosecutor on their case, Moiz Karimjee, soon came to light when Lich was announced the winner of the George Jonas Freedom Award in May of 2022. He petitioned to have her bail revoked, arguing that being a recipient of the award was a breach of her bail conditions. Justice Kevin Phillips disagreed and amended provisions of her bail to allow her to attend the award dinner in Toronto, but still prohibited her from communicating with “certain” individuals at the dinner unless in the presence of legal counsel.

Karimjee, seemingly obsessed with seeing her back in jail, accused Lich of another alleged bail breach after she attended the award dinner when video evidence later surfaced of her having a brief congratulatory interaction with Tom Marazzo a Freedom Convoy organizer she was prohibited from interacting with. As a result, on June 27 Karimjee dispatched two Ottawa homicide detectives, yes homicide detectives, to her home in Medicine Hat to put the diminutive grandmother in shackles and fly her back to Ottawa and throw her back in jail. She was finally released following another bail hearing, in which Karimjee made every effort to keep her behind bars, but justice prevailed and she was released from custody on July 27, 2022.

Lich’s lawyer Lawrence Greenspon was highly critical of Karimjee’s actions stating, “This is the third time the crown has tried to incarcerate Ms. Lich, this time for a three-second interaction, and a photo. The prosecutorial response to this far exceeds the severity of the alleged breach“. Further remarking on the situation, Greenspon added, “Had there been a proper investigation before Tamara Lich was arrested, shackled, hauled halfway across the country and then kept in jail for 30 days, they would have realized that her then-counsel were present at the time and therefore these charges should never have been laid“.

And like Barber, and many other convoy protesters, Lich’s bank accounts were also frozen by the government under the Emergencies Act for a period of three weeks.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Chipiuk posted:

Read it and weep, snowflakes. The lies are exposed, the facts don’t lie, and people across the world can see the truth.

The question remains: when will you stop lying to yourself and others, and start thanking your fellow citizens for fighting for your freedom?

“Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, organizers of the most successful protest in Canadian history, kept their cool, kept the peace and brought national unity, patriotism and common sense back to Canada after the pandemic – this, despite the sustained efforts of the most aggressively controlling, divisive government the nation has ever had. They achieved this under intense pressure and at great personal cost.

They’re national heroes, and the persecution waged against them is destroying trust in the Canadian judicial system, though the judge involved does not seem to realize it. Justice Perkins-McVey said in court that if she discharged the defendants, it would “undermine confidence in the administration of justice”.

But it’s quite the opposite …

There was another ironic moment at the sentencing. The judge announced, “Politics has no place inside this courtroom” – yet the trial has been widely viewed as nothing more than the political vengeance of Doug Ford and the Ontario government.

If it weren’t for politics, Lich and Barber would never have been arrested, let alone put through jail time, solitary confinement, loss of employment, years of drawn-out, costly legal proceedings, onerous bail conditions and emotional strain …

This means the public is paying twice – once as taxpayers, with money intended to pursue real criminals wasted on a political vendetta – and once again, voluntarily, to support the brave people who stood up to ask for an end to lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

This is the same public that already gave $24 million to the truckers to help them go to Ottawa and protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns: $24 million that never reached them, because politicians colluded with fundraising sites and banks to freeze the money, debank the protestors and doxx the donors, all without a court order. No criminal charges have been laid in Canada, to this writer’s knowledge, against the perpetrators of these deeds, though they damaged national institutions far more than any protest ever could.

Justice Perkins-McVey is right to be concerned about confidence in the administration of justice. Many Canadians share her concern. Sadly, her handling of this case has done little to dispel their fears.”

Antifa declared a foreign terrorist organization

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR claims a win from his earlier analysis posts on Antifa in the United States:

For those of you who have been tracking my intelligence analysis posts about Antifa, I now get to claim a correct prediction.

The President of the United States has declared Antifa a foreign terrorist organization.

Providing aid to an FTO is a crime (18 U.S.C. § 2339B). This declaration unlocks the legal tools required to go after Antifa’s funding network and allies, both foreign and domestic.

Those of you who are watching as USAID was unmasked as a left-wing slush fund won’t have any trouble understanding how the funding network functions. Allies of revolutionary Communism and nihilism at large charitable foundations direct money to smaller foundations which act as pass-throughs to others. After enough layers of this to maintain deniability (because the federal statute specifies “knowingly”), direct enablers of terrorism collect the money and use to fund things like a bullet ripping through Charlie Kirk’s neck.

There’s some rake-off along the way, of course. Can’t have all those elite failsons and faildaughters going without sinecures, after all. They have expensive habits to maintain.

Following the FTO declaration, the government can now gin up a case for seizing the assets of anybody in the funding chain, all the way back to the initial donors. The usual doctrine that “knowingly” extends to those who should have known, and who willfully failed to perform due diligence in order to avoid criminal exposure, applies here. Precedent for this was well established by organized-crime prosecutions 50 years ago; it’s why we have RICO laws.

It remains to be seen how much political will there is to actually bring down this hammer. In the maximal scenario,

(1) Trump issues a loud public warning to all charitable donors that they’d better cut ties to any organization that doesn’t provide them with full transparency about where the money is going.

(2) Left-wing dark money outfits like Arabella and the Tides Foundation get sent formal spoliation-of-evidence warnings, followed swiftly with audits by people with zero sense of humor.

I wish I were confident that all of this is going to happen. There’s going to be a lot of obstruction from Democrats and screaming by the media — the people who keep telling you that Antifa doesn’t exist because they want to keep their army of brownshirts intact. The administration could lose its nerve.

But at least it’s possible now. The political conditions for it are better than they have been in my entire lifetime.

Update: Fixed messed-up URL.

QotD: Riot control tips

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

1. The press is not only the enemy; they must be presumed to be an utterly unprincipled and dishonest enemy. Anything and everything the riot control force does will be filmed and, if necessary, edited, to present it in the worst possible light. Therefore, they must have their own camera teams recording everything to both clear themselves of wrongdoing or spurious charges of indiscipline, as well as to discredit the press which will have edited the truth heavily. NB: There is no real limit to how dishonest the modern press can be and will be in support of the leftist agenda. There is no placating them. There is no degree of righteous conduct they will not twist into wrongdoing. There is thus no sense in trying to placate them, in trying to be nice, in tightly limiting violence, etc.; because they will lie about you and all those who want to believe their lies will.

2. Riot Control Women. They’re rather preposterous, in the main, if employed on the riot control line. It’s one of the reasons why MPs have for long been useless at riot control; they’re simply too heavily laden with women, who almost universally lack the size, strength, and aggressiveness for hand to hand combat with stone age weapons. Indeed, while the infantry and other combat and combat support unit in the old 193rd were excellent at riot control, the MPs – yes, I have seen it – were useless. Worse, riot control is a perfect environment to cause what the Israeli’s found out when they mixed men and women in the same units in their War of Independence; men will abandon the mission to succor one of their own women. This is the fault of the men, by the way, and not of the women, but it is even more the fault of the dogmatic shitheads of the left who refuse to see men and women for what they are.

3. Rioting women. I don’t care if you have a warrant for their arrest for murder, arson, mayhem, and massacre, plus cellulite and bad makeup, do not arrest or detain them at the scene. Shoot them if their conduct (to include dress) warrants it, but otherwise just push them away or wound them slightly and push them away. Why? Because, though ill-disciplined rabble, for the most part, the rioters are also mostly male and will also rush to the defense of “their” women. There is no better substitute for the cohesion and moral fiber a mob usually lacks than going after the women in the mob. They can turn ferocious very quickly, indeed, if you do.

And that’s all good and maybe it will get us through the summer, should it turn out as badly as it might, but, America, I suspect that you and the president are ultimately still going to need a dedicated, well trained, highly mobile, professional force for riot suppression.

Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-06-11.

Update, 12 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

October 10, 2025

We have to destroy European democracy to save European democracy

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

Every week it seems like the undemocratic powers-that-be in Europe have had to pull legalistic strings to ensure that the popular will is not translated into political power in nation after nation. Unsurprisingly, the candidates and parties subject to these serial interferences are almost all populist and right-wing. On his Substack, Frank Furedi explains “the EU’s quest to monopolize the doctrine of the Truth”:

Army of Fact Checkers – Roots & Wings with Frank Furedi

In recent years globalist institutions – including the European Union Commission have become obsessed with the circulation of disinformation. In particular, they point the finger of blame on outside external actors whose fake news supposedly threatens the very existence of democracy. According to the EU Commission “Foreign information manipulation and interference is a serious threat to” European values. It claims that “it can undermine democratic institutions and processes by preventing people from making informed decisions or discouraging them from voting1.

The narrative of foreign misinformation is invariably used to discredit political parties and electoral results that are not to the liking of the centrist technocratic elites that run the EU as well as numerous western governments. Foreign information manipulation served as an excuse to bar a populist candidate from running for the post of the President of Romania. Since by all accounts he was the likely winner of this contest his elimination from the race could be interpreted as a soft coup d’etat. Similar objections were made about foreign interference during the referendum for Brexit as well as during the recent elections in Moldavia and Czechia.

Alarmist accounts of the threat posed by foreign information manipulation rest on the claim that the circulation of so much unreliable information makes it impossible for people to make an informed choice. Yet the electorate has always faced the challenge of having to distinguish factually accurate claims from false ones. Public life was always forced to confront the problem of who to believe and whose words are trustworthy. Throughout history different actors and technologies were blamed for misleading people with false information and dangerous ideas. In ancient Greece it was the smooth-tongued demagogue who could effortlessly and purposefully transmit lies to capture the attention of the public, who served as the personification of misinformation. During the centuries to follow the finger of blame has been pointed at books, mass-publication newspapers, radio, television and now the Internet

Since information manipulation has played an important role in the political life of western societies since the 18th century, it is far from evident why the contemporary public should no longer be able to make “informed choices” and why they should feel discouraged from voting? Despite the recent EU Commission induced panic about information manipulation, the percentage of people voting in the 2024 EU elections was 51 percent, the highest rate of turnout since 1994, when it was 56 percent.

People have always had to contend with fake news and propaganda. So why should they be more likely to be fooled by it today than in the past? The standard argument used to justify this EU elite promoted panic is that new technologies “have made it possible for hostile actors to operate and spread disinformation at a scale and with a speed never seen before”.2 It is worth remembering that the same arguments were used to warn against new information technologies since the 19th century. Even in the late 20th century the media was blamed by politicians for their electoral failures.

Kirsten Drotner has used the term media panic – that is a panic about the media -to highlight the recurrent tendency for change and innovation of the media to incite anxiety and fear.3 Such reactions were a response to the expansion of both publishing and the reading public in the 18th century. The expansion of the media and its commercialization created an environment where competing views and opinions helped foster a climate where the question of which sources could be trusted were raised time and again.

  1. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/countering-information-manipulation_en
  2. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/countering-information-manipulation_en
  3. Drotner, K.(1999) “Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity”, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 35:3, 593-619.

A POSWID analysis of the contention that “Canada is broken”

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

It’s my strong opinion that Canada is indeed “broken”, and much but not all the blame for that goes to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and increasingly to current PM Mark Carney. It hasn’t all been the direct action or deliberate inaction of the Liberal party and their bureaucratic minions in the civil service, but their fingerprints are on a lot of the damage. Eberhard Englebrecht analyzes Canada using POSWID framing and concludes that “the Purpose Of Canada is What It Does”:

Now, one of the core criticisms made of POSWID by its opponents is that it leans heavily on a consequentialist interpretation of events, completely discarding the roles human intention, error, and agency play in how things transpire.

However, these critiques only hold validity if you take POSWID and make it your singular mode of analysis — something that I don’t encourage, nor intend on doing myself. Rather, POSWID should be understood and used as a specific tool with a specific purpose — that is, to peel back the noxious platitudes, gaslighting, and wishful thinking that envelop our politics, and hinder our ability to view our present situation with clarity and honesty.

And, unfortunately for the citizenry of Canada, Canadian politics is — and has been for some time — a domain chock full of the misguided idealism and obfuscation that POSWID seeks to erase.

It is why many Canadians — despite their country having experienced a precipitous decline in both general prosperity and the integrity of the common social fabric — remain willfully blind to such an absurd degree.

POSWID, as I will be applying it, can tackle many of the polite pleasantries and mindless incantations that have become embedded in Canada’s “consensus” of acceptable political discourse, exposing them as misaligned with reality. This will take one of two forms: the first is to demonstrate that a common belief in the trope in question has led to results contrary to the intentions of those who originally pushed the trope; the second is that the trope was always purely abstract and aspirational, never described reality, and any attempts to align reality with said trope have failed miserably.

Many of these tropes are sacred cows of Canada’s political establishment — ideas that they would insist define “what it means to be Canadian” or are things that “we all believe”. Going against them, or merely questioning their validity or suitability, would be considered “UnCanadian”. These tropes have, in many cases, dictated the direction of Canadian society since the 1960s and created the foundations for the paradigms that currently define Canadian politics. Therefore, the deconstruction of these tropes constitutes the deconstruction of these paradigms — something that would have cascading ramifications for our country.

It is worth noting, however, that my intention in writing this piece is not to make granular policy prescriptions. My job is merely to provide a clear-eyed account of how three of the values and policy programmes of Canada’s chattering class (you could substitute “chattering class” with “professional-managerial class” or “Laurentian Elite”) are out of step with how this country actually exists — a reality felt and experienced at an intuitive level by many, but rarely articulated in public.

October 9, 2025

Freedom Convoy 2022 – “… proving once again the Liberal mastery of combining high drama with low farce”

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

In the National Post, Michael Higgins states the obvious fact that Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, and the rest of the Freedom Convoy protesters were never insurrectionists. Trudeau had decided in advance that the convoy was a maple-flavoured January 6th attempt to overthrow the government — if not an attempt to re-stage the storming of the Winter Palace — and merely waited for the violence to break out and/or the Parliament buildings to be stormed. But nobody other than a few particularly glowy federal provocateurs was interested … because they were there to protest government policy not to start a revolution:

Marco Mendicino, the public safety minister of the day, portrayed them as extremists intent on overthrowing the government.

“This so-called ‘freedom convoy’ called for the overthrow of the government. They called for the Governor General to unilaterally remove the Prime Minister from office,” Mendicino told a Commons parliamentary committee.

Indeed, the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General was inundated with calls and emails by protesters demanding then prime minister Justin Trudeau be fired.

But since the Governor General can’t just decide to sack a prime minister, these email-writing anarchists were particularly inept as well as being constitutionally illiterate.

It was Shakespearean farce, but Liberals like Mendicino were happy to play politics and paint the convoy protesters as lawless subversives bent on destroying democracy.

Although, to be fair, Trudeau only said they were a “small fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” — more retrogrades than revolutionaries.

Meanwhile, Ottawa’s Keystone Kops had all the laws, rules and regulations needed to disband the convoy, they just lacked the leadership.

Days into the occupation, Ottawa Police Services chief, Peter Sloly, appeared to have thrown up his hands in resignation, stating, “There may not be a policing solution” to the crisis. Two weeks later, he quit.

In his report, the public inquiry commissioner Paul Rouleau would later criticize the “serious dysfunction within the OPS’s leadership”.

The government theatrics escalated with the imposition of the Emergencies Act, proving once again the Liberal mastery of combining high drama with low farce. Within days, police had cleared the convoy and several other blockades without incident.

This was less the power of the Emergencies Act and more to do with getting the police to just act.

Britain is only a few steps further than Canada in the war on free speech

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

In The Line, Peter Menzies looks at the worsening situation for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in Britain, noting that what’s happening over in Blighty is our immediate future with current Liberal bills before Parliament to give government bureaucrats more power to silence us:

Everyone may know, for instance, that Kimmel got suspended by ABC for a week following statements made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But not a lot of people consuming Canadian media know that in the U.K., comedians weren’t just getting one-week suspensions. Nope. Last month they were getting arrested.

Right-wing icon Katie Hopkins, best known for her Batshit Bonkers Britain clips and Silly Cow tour, hadn’t been charged at the time of writing, but was arrested and, as they say in Blighty, “interviewed under caution”. Previously, Graham Linehan was arrested upon his return from the United States by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport. At issue were posts he had made on X in April.

“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,” one Linehan post declared, “he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Currently on bail, Linehan returns to court on Oct. 29. The charges are harassment, criminal damage and suspicion of inciting hatred.

The merits of the cases can be debated, but my point today is that when it comes to digital policy and policing you, and the internet, Canadians and their media should be paying a lot more attention to the U.K.

Because it is there that the true illiberalism of modern Western so-called liberalism is most menacingly embraced. Even prior to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act coming into effect, pre-existing British legislation had been used to, for instance, convict six retired police officers for making comments “deemed to be offensive” within their private WhatsApp chat group. Following the Southport mass stabbing murders of little girls, at least two women with no prior history with police were given prison sentences — one for 15 months for a Facebook post calling for a mosque to be blown up, another 31 months for a tweet calling for hotels full of migrants to be burned. While their comments were certainly worthy of vigorous condemnation, the intervention of the state into private, closed conversations and the involvement of police, courts and the penal system has taken matters in the U.K. to a level inconsistent with liberal traditions.

Now that the Online Safety Act has supplemented those laws, hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens so far convicted for social media posts. The government calls the act a “new set of laws that protect children and adults online” in much the same way Justin Trudeau explained Canada’s own Online Harms Act. It’s all about “safety”.

Online Harms may have died when Parliament was prorogued last winter, but a successor is anticipated and, given Prime Minister Mark Carney’s obvious Anglophilia, it’s easy to speculate — fear is a better word — that he is taking inspiration from the Brits. After all, up until a few months ago, he was one of them.

Fighting back in the U.K. is, among others, Lord Toby Young, the Conservative peer, associate editor of The Spectator and founder of the Free Speech Union, which now has a Canadian branch featuring, among others, journalist Jonathan Kay. Young has protested that criminalizing disinformation hands governments the power to determine truth. Nevertheless, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has muttered that maybe the police have more important things to do, he shows — despite the meteoric rise in the polls of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — no inclination to order a digital retreat.

In fact, Starmer just doubled down with the introduction of legislation imposing mandatory digital IDs. A petition opposing it and the potential to enable mass surveillance and state control has already gathered close to three million signatures.

There’s a good chance the Canadian Free Speech Union will be similarly engaged in the years ahead. The Trudeau government’s instincts when it came to digital legislation were not as extreme as Britain’s. And there are very real differences in the legal structure of free-speech rights in Canada and the U.K. — we have the Charter, and the British don’t. So our laws would be enacted and enforced differently here than they can be the the U.K.

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