Quotulatiousness

September 19, 2025

After the Charlie Kirk assassination, here are three possible futures

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR lays out what he sees are the three most likely short-term futures for the United States after the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

I’m a student of history. Here are three possible futures following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They’re based on historical examples of what happens when a Communist subversion campaign or insurgency overplays its hand and triggers broad popular resistance.

1. Popular revulsion against aboveground leftists celebrating the murder gives the Trump administration political cover to go after Antifa and its shadow funding network hard. Both are smashed.

Communist agents of influence in the mainstream media and academia continue to self-discredit.

Relatively few Communists are arrested, but their millions of aboveground tools become isolated and demoralized.

Propelled by a huge swing in voter registrations that we are already seeing happen, the Democrats get crushed in the 2026 midterms.

The long period of fever, madness, and Left ascendancy that began with the assassination of JFK by a Soviet agent in 1963 ends not with a bang but with a whimper.

This is the best case scenario for everybody, including the Communists who don’t get thrown out of helicopters or shot down in the streets.

If things don’t go this way it will likely be because Democratic lawfare prevents the counter-subversion push from being fully effective. An obvious index of this failure would be another high-profile political assassination or attempt against a conservative target after about 4 months out.

What happens in the event of that failure, especially if the third public attempt to kill Trump succeeds:

2. A period of Caudillismo. A charismatic strongman rides popular anger into power. If this happens, the Left better pray that the strongman is an infuriated JD Vance, because any alternative to him is likely to be worse for them.

The crackdown against the Communist network becomes brutal and routinely uses extra-Constitutional means, possibly thinly covered by a declared state of emergency.

At the harder end of this range of possibilities, right-wing death squads not exactly formed by government but winked at by it go after Communist public figures that are out of reach of the law because they’ve carefully preserved deniability. Many journalists are at the top of this target list.

It is not likely that the Communist network can survive this future. The only way it happens is if they have enough popular support to develop a semi-militarized resistance — in effect making certain parts of the country no go regions for Federal agents.

Going by historical precedents, the index of this failure would be a resurgence of banditry by armed groups, initially with overtly political goals but decaying into general predation.

This would land us at:

3. Low-grade civil war, a la Bosnia or the Irish troubles. Anybody wishing for this has no idea how bloody, ugly, and brutal it would probably be. Especially if the Left succeeds at what it will with absolute certainty try to do, which is racialize the conflict.

I don’t think there is any realistic scenario in which the Communists win any of these confrontations. Not in the U.S., not in the 21st century. The question is how much blood and agony the rest of us will go through before they are finally defeated.

Update, 20 September: 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.

QotD: The sub-generations of Generation X

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

… “Gen X” is actually a misnomer, as there are at least three distinct subgroups. There’s the very earliest Xers, the guys who were in high school in the late 1970s. They often get lumped in with the Baby Boomers, too, though they’re as different from the Boomers as they are from us, the “mid” Xers. Think Wooderson from Dazed and Confused. Brian Niemeier calls them “Generation Jones”, and while I don’t like that tag I don’t know what else to call them (except maybe “Woodersons”), so roll with it.

Then there’s the group that was in high school in the late 1980s. I squeak into this group (barely). We’re the mid-Xers. The real “grunge” generation. If Dazed and Confused is a pretty decent late-90s approximation of late-70s high school kids, then the best description I can give you of a “grunge” kid is the movie Deadpool. Made in 2016, by guys who were born in the mid-1970s. That’s grunge, in a way Kurt Cobain couldn’t even imagine. Fourth wall breaks! Sarcastic asides about the fourth wall breaks! Profanity! Masturbation jokes! And snark, snark, snark — unrelenting snark, about everything, all the time. Every second of that movie screams “I can’t believe you fags are amused by this, but since you obviously do, here’s lots more! Choke on it!!!”

The writers obviously wanted to work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Joss Whedon was too cool for them — imagine the twisted psyche of a person who thinks Joss Whedon is cool — and Sarah Michelle Gellar just laughed at them, so they made Deadpool out of spite.

Then there’s the late Xers. They were in high school in the late 1990s, which is why us oldsters call them “Millennials” (as the term is now used, it seems to mean “those born around 2000”, i.e. the generation just now getting out of college. We took it to mean “those who were just getting out of college around the turn of the century”). Obviously I use the Internet. I’m using it now, but I’m not on the internet, and I’m certainly not an Internet Person. The very late Xers are Internet People. The very first Internet People; they invented the concept of Internet People. Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984) is a late Xer. The people behind Twitter (Jack Dorsey born 1976; Biz Stone 1974; Evan Williams 1972) are mid-Xers; they were ahead of the curve.

Severian, “Addendum to Previous”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.

September 18, 2025

Stop calling it “Turtle Island”

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

At Woke Watch Canada, Igor Stravinsky strenuously objects to calling North America “Turtle Island” and all the other woke shibboleths of the modern progressive cant:

As another school year rolls out, we can hope a more honest and realistic portrait of Canadian history will start to take shape in our schools. Students have been brainwashed into believing that Canada was a racist state bent on the extermination of Indigenous people, who were peaceful and wise, living in harmony with nature and each other. But reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is only possible if we base policy and action on the truth, not fairy tales, hearsay, anecdotes, or ideologies. We need facts, evidence, and reasoned debate. A good start would be for people to stop referring to North America as “Turtle Island”.

Calling it that is essentially to call the current geopolitical organization of the world invalid. If Canada, the United States, and other Western countries are in fact illegitimate, then that means national and international laws are also null and void. So, unless you are the direct descendent of an aboriginal person who was alive before first contact with Europeans, you are just a guest here — a second-class citizen at best. Non-Indigenous Canadians will simply never accept that. Nor should they.

In any case, “Turtle Island” is a nonsensical name on several levels. Firstly, North America is a continent, not an island. It is connected to South America by the Isthmus of Panama, which means it is not even surrounded by water. In any case an island is defined as a land mass surrounded by water that is part of a tectonic plate such as Greenland which is part of the North American Plate, thus is not a continent.

Then there is the fact that Indigenous North Americans were oblivious to the geography of the vast continent on which they lived. Like people everywhere in the distant past, they only knew the area they lived in, which could be substantial in the case of nomads, but was still a tiny fraction of North America’s 20+ million square kilometers. Of course, they knew nothing about the geography of the world with its 7 continents and 5 oceans.

Most importantly, the Turtle Island creation story is a myth believed by a particular cultural group. There is nothing wrong with believing in myths: I personally believe in the myth of human rights, as most Canadians do (pre-contact Indigenous people certainly did not). Myths are powerful: Our common belief in human rights has helped to make the Western world contain the safest and most prosperous societies ever. But when our institutions subscribe to myths not shared by the majority of Canadians, they are choosing to elevate one culture’s belief system above all others.

In the past, the Christian religion was regarded as the one true religion in Canada by most people, and the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous people were often denigrated as primitive superstition. But elevating Indigenous spirituality in our secularized 21st century world by treating it as a knowledge acquisition system equivalent to (or superior to) the scientific method is an attempt to correct for that past ethnocentrism. This is Critical Theory in action: It always strives to alleviate past wrongs with present wrongs, a formula for social disaster if ever there was one.

Broken feedback paths lead to broken organizations … like government

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

Lorenzo Warby on the ever-increasing dysfunction of most western governments due to the deliberate sabotage of what used to be functional feedback paths:

That institutions within Western democracies have deteriorated in recent decades is clear. That the march of progressivism through the institutions is at the heart of this deterioration is also clear.1

This has been progressives acting like progressives, with all the perverse relationship with information that is at the heart of progressivism. A perverse relationship that leads directly to their degradation of institutions.

Progressives use the imagined future as their benchmark of judgement, but there is no information from the future, so there is no reality-test in their benchmark of judgement. The imagined future can, however, be as glorious as one likes.

Conversely, anything actually created by humans will have downsides and even sins attached. This gives progressives a great rhetorical advantage over anyone who attempts to defend anything humans have actually built. All of the painful history of human achievement is rendered as naught, as mute, in the face of the splendours in their head.

Arnold Kling’s Three Languages of Politics model.

If a group is disproportionately successful, that is not an example to emulate but a sign of their oppressor status. If they are comparatively unsuccessful, that is not a warning about what to avoid, but a sign of their oppressed status. This is an outlook deeply hostile to learning from what does, and does not, work.

For using the glorious imagined future as the benchmark of judgement creates the basis for denigrating anything that comes from the past: which is all the information we have about what works and does not. This includes denigrating the embedded learning in institutions. Even fundamental questions about what is required to sustain a social order get written out of acceptable discourse as not fitting with their imagined-future benchmark of judgement, with the splendours in their heads.

Using the imagined future as one’s benchmark of judgement also naturally leads to concluding that one owns morality, as any opposition to the glorious imagined future is clearly immoral. This leads to, at best, comprehensive disengagement with, and at worse, systematic denigration and delegitimisation of, those who disagree. A systematic denigration and delegitimisation that often involves systematic misrepresentation of those who disagree. The consequence of all this is to block feedback about one’s political projects.

The most extreme instance of this has been the UK, where the Blair–Brown Governments of 1997-2010 took power away from elected officials (apart from the PM) and handed it to “experts” in quangoes, to judges via human rights legislation and to the EU. Those with the “correct” understandings could do their thing, insulated from voters. This made the UK a state, a polity, with broken feedbacks.

Modern Western civilisation is a civilisation with broken feedbacks — as I discuss here, here, here, here and here — but the Blair-Brown constitutional vandalism extended that pattern of broken feedbacks systematically to the British state. The consequences have become grimly obvious. Massive waves of unwanted migrants as part of a massively dysfunctional British state.

If you systematically kill feedbacks from voters, you systematically kill accountability. Of course dysfunction will spread across the organs of the state, as it has. (See here for a discussion of aspects of that horrifying dysfunction.)

  1. Feminisation of institutions has also been a corrosive factor, but that is deeply intertwined with the march of progressivism through the institutions.

Update, 19 September: 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.

“The British fleet is strong and at the ready” (1939)

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

British Pathé
Published 12 Nov 2020

GAUMONT BRITISH NEWSREEL (REUTERS)

Comprehensive documentary of the Royal Navy in the lead up to war

Full Description:

SLATE INFORMATION: Britain’s Navy Ready for Any Challenge, The Combined Fleets Filmed by Gaumont-British News

Comprehensive documentary of the British fleet and their preparedness for action including shots of numerous ships at sea and at anchor, sailors on deck, aircraft on deck, ship’s guns, officers in quarters, destroyers, aircraft flying off deck and landing on water

Archive: Reuters
Archive managed by: British Pathé

September 17, 2025

“It would be a grave error to scrap NORAD”

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

J.L. Granatstein makes the case that abandoning NORAD in a fit of pique over the antics of the Bad Orange Man would be worse for Canadian national defence interests and might not even be noticed in Washington DC:

There are beginning murmurings that Canada should get out of the North American Aerospace Defence agreement (NORAD). Given the Trump administration’s hostile tone — its 51st state suggestions, its tariffs, and its growing concerns with Arctic defence — the United States has become a difficult partner and a threat to Canadian sovereignty. But would this be a sensible decision for Ottawa to make?

Not at all. In the first place, NORAD is a joint alliance to defend North America against Russian, Chinese, or other potential attackers. Canada provides aircraft, radars, personnel, and expertise to this role that serves our national interests. It would be a grave error to scrap NORAD and to take on the role of defending our part of North America on our own. It would also be hugely expensive.

The problem, however, is that the Trump administration is right: Canada is, in fact, not doing enough today to defend our portion of North America and protect our sovereignty in the region.

The Royal Canadian Air Force has 1980s vintage CF-18s flying patrols and occasional larger surveillance aircraft monitoring traffic in Arctic waters; there are snowmobile and ATV patrols of Canadian Rangers armed with rifles; and a few army exercises in the north each year. The Royal Canadian Navy has a half dozen new Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessels that have limited utility in Arctic waters and are very lightly armed, and the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) has only one 66-year-old icebreaker capable of clearing thick ice. The CCG is now under the authority of the Department of National Defence, but its members, unlike those in the Canadian Armed Forces, are unionized, and its vessels are unarmed. This could be a problem in a conflict.

Yes, Ottawa has promised to do more. The Trudeau government agreed to the $38.6 billion NORAD Modernization Plan, which includes the new Northern Approaches Surveillance System featuring the Arctic Over-the-Horizon Radar and a Polar Over-the-Horizon Radar, enhancing early warning and threat tracking from the North for air and maritime threats. These systems will not be fully operational until the 2040s.

There’s more, but it’s behind the paywall.

September 16, 2025

No sensible person wants to start a civil war

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

There are always angry folks online who take any current event as a conversational pretext for talking about taking up arms against … whoever they always seem to want to take up arms against. In decades past, you could more easily find tantrums like that among the conspiratorial right but today it seems that the left is leading the charge, so to speak. As a bit of a follow-on to this post, here’s more from Tom Kratman and Harry Kitchener on what might need to be done to start that unwanted-by-all-sensible-folks conflict:

Let’s assume, though, that you people want to kick off what we might call a hard debate – that you plan to use organized and precise violence to combat your enemies and promote your views.

Actually doing it is pretty easy – a patsy with a hunting rifle has a pretty good chance, assuming a bit of talent, to take out any given public figure (assuming no Secret Service protection, that makes things much more difficult). He’ll almost certainly be caught, of course; in a best case, arrested, tried and sentenced to life … or death, in a worst case, killed during the arrest. If you’ve got an inexhaustible supply of these patsies I suppose that’s sustainable – it’s meaningless, of course, as it’ll just bring the other side to the conclusion that if this is the game in future, they’ll happily play along (and they have more guns, more training and probably more immediate support than you do. And they’re starting to really hate you, too).

If you actually *want* to kick off a low-level civil war (I have to say I can’t understand why you would want this, but, hey ho, your call), you need to think in more sustainable terms. Read back on our pieces for some hints on the operational, logistic and security considerations you need to establish a covert, violent organization. Particularly consider the issue of finance – this stuff costs big money to organize and execute and I’m not sure you have access to the sort of volumes of laundered cash you’re going to need.

You’re also going to need to be tough, properly tough in order to cope with the immense pressure you’re going to feel from government and the Right alike, to say nothing of the moral (and morale) impact of inevitable casualties, not just those arrested and sentenced, but also those killed and maimed. Don’t underestimate the impact on one of your “active service units” losing one or two of their members, or of the occasional need just to abandon them in order to get away.

Assuming – and, to be frank, I don’t see this working – but, assuming you do manage to organize some sort of covert violent organization, what would it be *for*? What’s the end state you’re looking to achieve? Proletarian revolution, the righteous rage of the mobilized working class? Not a fucking chance, not in the USA. Every historical example we have of the left trying this kind of thing to raise an oppressive right wing government, to mobilize the masses for the left, shows, instead, massive cheering from those masses for the government that then proceeds to exterminate you.

Cowing the Right through violence? Again, not a hope – the Right (as you call it, a better term might be “the majority of the US population”) tends to be pretty much OK with justified violence, tends to have a larger proportion of people who’ve seen the elephant (this is military slang for “the greatest show on earth”, which is to say, war) and tends to be much better armed than your folks are. On the plus side, you’re in America so becoming better armed is easy. Becoming better armed without leaving a trail pointing straight at you, on the other hand, is hard. And you don’t have the criminal connections to avoid this.

Your base is relatively small and relatively concentrated in certain areas and in certain sectors – soft states, academia, the media, that kind of thing. Don’t believe a word big tech says, they’ll drop you and switch immediately as their share price is adversely affected. And note that the “disciplines” your sort of people tend to undertake in college – gender studies, ethnic studies, gay studies, feminist interpretive dance – are great for motivation to act for the left, but not very good for competence in action.

This makes your base incredibly vulnerable. No matter how effective your “active service units” might be in doing dreadful things to individuals on the Right, you’ll always be outgunned – and every single successful operation you carry out will generate greater support for your opponents. What’s that? Yes, of course it’s unfair and unjust. Deal with it.

What you have, always, to remember is that however important some things are to you, most people are either indifferent to them, or actively hostile to them. No amount of killing is going to change that, probably quite the contrary.

Update, 17 September: 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.

A rare thing … Canada’s Parliament in session

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

On his Substack, Brian Lilley noted on Monday that we’ve had very little chance to see the Canadian Parliament in action so far in 2025:

Parliament returns for the fall sitting today, it’s the first time the House of Commons has met since June 20. What’s remarkable is that in the 257 days that we’ve counted in 2025, the House has only met for 20 of them.

As it stands now, the House has not met in 87 days.

More remarkable, the House didn’t sit between December 17, 2024 and May 2025, all during a time of national crisis. Add to that the fact that between the end of September 2024 and the opening of the new Parliament on May 26, 2025 no government business was conducted due to the green slush fund scandal and the Trudeau government’s refusal to release documents to the House.

To say our democratic institutions haven’t been well served over the last year would be an understatement.

Over the last year, the oversight function of the House of Commons hasn’t been working as it should in our system. We’ve either had inaction by government or for most of this year, government by decree with little to no oversight by the people’s representatives.

Hopefully that changes today with a new sitting.

A change in tone…

One thing we’ve heard lots of chatter about is the need for a new tone, but primarily that’s been aimed at Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. Let me point out that Prime Minister Mark Carney is also new to this and we didn’t get the full measure of the man back in the spring.

The relationship between Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre was acrimonious to say the least.

Trudeau towards the end was despised by Canadians and Poilievre couldn’t hit him hard enough in Question Period. Canadians would cheer as Poilievre would use his formidable Parliamentary skills to skewer Trudeau in the House of Commons.

Of course, Trudeau was part of the demise of the relationship and civility in the House as he showed utter contempt for the opposition, for Parliamentary rules and by extension to millions of Canadians.

Well, it’s a new government, a new leader in Carney and so yes, we can expect a new tone coming from both sides. We’ve already seen it from Poilievre in his many media appearances and news conferences over the past several months.

Poilievre has said that he and his party will oppose the government on issues where they disagree, support them on areas where they agree and offer practical solutions to the problems facing the country. That’s exactly what you want from an opposition party, which should in fact operate as a government in waiting.

September 15, 2025

A few thousand deplorable “gammons” disrupt the peace in London

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

At least, the headline is how I assume most establishment types in Britain would try to describe the Unite the Kingdom march in London over the weekend (all photos by Esmeralda Weatherwax of the New English Review):

As I said earlier I have never seen a crowd like it – the police were overwhelmed with the numbers and I think even the organisers were pleasantly surprised at the turnout.

I gave up all hope early on of getting near enough to a screen to see or hear the speakers. But you can catch them up on line. I’m sure there are already links to Katie Hopkins, Laurence Fox, Tommy himself, Elon Musk by video link and the others.

I decided I was of most use photographing the numbers and variety, talking to people and following events away from the stage.

The march was scheduled to muster at Waterloo on the south bank. Knowing the turn out would be good attendees were advised to leave at Blackfriars Station and cross Blackfriars Bridge to join the march in Stamford Street east of Waterloo Station. The route was to be along the South Bank, over Westminster Bridge and into Whitehall at the south end. Antifa and Stand up to Racism were expected to march from Russell Square and would be rallying in the north end of Whitehall by Trafalgar Square with a long corden sanitaire between. Well that worked well last time.

I went straight to Whitehall and went to greet friends who were involved as marshals. Already the area was filling up fast and there were queues for the portaloos. They had to be provided as Westminster Council had shut and locked the public ones outside Westminster Station and on Westminster Pier. I don’t know why they do this. There will be mess afterwards.

HBO’s Rome – Ep 11 “The Spoils” – History and Story

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

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 23 Apr 2025

This time we look at episode 11 — and only this episode as there is more to talk about when it comes to the historical background. Some of the plot doesn’t fit too well to the actual history, but there are some nice details that crop up and make it worthwhile. In the main, I get excited about a coin and a court.

September 14, 2025

Funny … I saw multiple reports that the accused assassin was an extremist “conservative” …

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

I don’t normally lean on content from the social media site formerly known as Twitter, but there’s more solid information there than in 99% of the legacy media. For instance, here’s ESR on the background of the alleged assassin (I use the word “alleged” because I can’t afford lawyers for nuisance suits):

The Salt Lake City FBI office released these photos of a “person of interest” in the Charlie Kirk assassination.

Two newspapers are now reporting that Tyler Robinson was living with a transsexual who is cooperating with the FBI, so I’m going to consider this confirmed.

Rather than talking about the obvious stuff, I want to focus on the questions I think the FBI will be asking the boyfriend.

Not about the assassination itself. They’ve already got Robinson dead to rights on aggravated murder. Given that he apparently had to be dissuaded from committing suicide when he was caught, he may even plead guilty and confess.

No, the interesting question is his connections. With probability approaching unity, he was Antifa. The question is: explicit Antifa, or stochastic?

I think we can take it as given that Robinson wasn’t given orders to kill Kirk by some supervillain sitting at the top of a command hierarchy. Antifa doesn’t work that way.

Antifa is not a unitary conspiracy, it’s a whole bunch of interlocking directorates with common ideological goals. This trades away some capacity for large-scale organization in order to gain resistance against single-point attacks.

To the extent Antifa as a whole takes orders at all, it’s by paying attention to the targets suggested by above-ground left-wing figures. Yes, including Democratic politicians, who treat Antifa as a conveniently deniable militant wing. The decentralization of its organization helps with the deniability, too.

Robinson may have been part of an Antifa cell that provided him with logistical support, knowing what they were contributing to.

Or, he may have been acting alone in a direction shaped by Antifa propaganda. There’s actually a continuum of possibilities; he might have dropped deniable hints to Antifa associates as a way of gaining status within the group.

I think what the boyfriend is going to get the most serious grilling about is the nature and scope of those connections. That is, if Robinson doesn’t reveal them himself.

They’re going to get his cell, if there is one. They may be able to nail down the entire Antifa chapter it’s part of.

Further connections are going to be tough to prove. It is highly unlikely, for example, that there are direct command links from the Democratic National Committee to Antifa.

It will probably be more productive to follow the money; if they can flip the right people in his chapter they may be able to go after dark-money groups like Arabella, the Tides Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations.

Which, to be fair, probably don’t know they’re funding assassinations? But are probably carefully averting their eyes from the fact that they fund people who fund other people who fund assassinations. The network is carefully designed to preserve deniability in all directions.

The long play in smashing a terror network is always to cut its funding chain. That job got well started with the dismantling of USAID, but there’s a lot more work to do.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination may give us the thread that unravels the whole weave.

Also on former-Twitter, Larry Correia:

    Oilfield Rando @Oilfield_Rando
    Imagine the newsroom editor meetings where they’re trying to figure out some way, any way, to spin the news that the shooter was shacked up with a trooner before they publish articles about it.

    Because make no mistake, they can’t avoid publishing it. They know it.

My bet for the news blitz narrative that’s coming —

It’s the fault of his conservative, religious family, for driving this young man to kill because they couldn’t accept his forbidden love. How tragic. The real bad guys here are those conservative Christian hate mongers who won’t let love be love, and as usual liberals are the real victims. Plus a single shot from a really old deer rifle shows why we need to ban assault weapons. If you grew up with a Republican father that means you are MAGA forever and pay no attention to the millions of militant leftists and rainbow haired pronoun people on TikTok bragging about how much they hate and rebelled against their conservative religious parents, that’s different.

Larry Correia, Twitter, 2025-09-13.

“When must we kill them?”

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

On the social media platform previously known as Twitter, Tom Kratman provides an excerpt from The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad:

Reposting this seems apropos:

The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad, Chapter 32 Copyright © 2025, Tom Kratman, Harry Kitchener

“When must we kill them?”

That question was asked recently by a leftist student, one Nicholas Decker, from George Mason University. It’s a very interesting question, and one that most, and perhaps all, hard leftists in the United States are contemplating. Indeed, we see now, from an NCRI / Rutgers survey, that something over half of leftists believe that assassinating Trump would be justified, and nearly half think the same thing about Musk.

Note, here, that this was of all people identifying as left of center. I would suggest that this means that almost nobody who is slightly left of center would agree with that and nearly everybody who is far left of center agrees with that. And if we needed any more proof, just contemplate the number of would be groupies moistening their panties over murderer Luigi Mangione, as pointed out by former New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz.

Why do they think so or why are they wondering about it? It’s actually more understandable than most on the right and perhaps even many on the left would understand. They’re wondering about it because, with the destruction of the Deep State, with so many billionaires turning against the left and – horrrors! – no longer letting the left wing narrative control online and legacy media political discourse, with no prospect of the kind of money being shunted from the taxpayer, through the Federal Government, to left wing NGOs to help swing elections, they do not really think there is any serious prospect of the left ever winning a national election again or, at least, not in their lifetimes. And they may be right about that.

With James Carville telling the Democrats to give the boot to the gender and woke ideologues, the identity politics losers, the little boy penis choppers and little girl breast destroyers and vagina removers; they see themselves being marginalized, losing their influence, and losing their dream, forever. And this seems fairly likely. With no possibility, once Trump gets finished deporting all the illegals, of turning just enough of those illegals into client voters to swing elections just enough for control, they think that leftism will be hopeless in the United States. And they’re probably right about that. With the Communist factories of higher education being broken to the will of the right, with Gramsci’s / Rudi Dutschke’s “Long March Through the Institutions” being walked back, and quickly, they’re thinking about it and wondering about it because leftism is dead in the United States, a corpse just awaiting burial.

So, though the point of this entire exercise in the Right Wing Death Squad has been to convince the left to chill out, FFS, it seems that certain key point bear repeating.

1. Urban Guerilla movements invariably succeed in creating the kind of oppressive government that they believe will infuriate the people and lead to a general uprising. Those governments then proceed to exterminate the Urban Guerillas and all their supporters, and do so to general popular applause.

2. The armed forces, barring some political generals and morally cowardly colonels, hate you and everything about you. Posse Comitatus is only a law, not something in the constitution that would require going through the difficult process of amendment. Change the law – and do but note who has control of the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court (so that constitutional grounds could not be manufactured to create an objection to getting rid of the law) – and the military would be very happy to round you all up. And you’re completely, incompetently, incapable of resisting this.

3. Moreover, though you have a few people with some military experience and training, the key word there is “few”. Yes, yes, I know that, since Vietnam, the left has been obsessed with the inner city black cannon fodder meme, but it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. Conversely, the white working class and conservative populations at large – to the limited extent these categories may differ – are replete with people with a lot of military training and experience and they hate you, too. They also have most of the guns. Your side has fairly few, in comparison, and little skill in using what you do have, alone or in groups.

4. You also fundamentally misunderstand the difference between your approach to violence – as a rheostat to be turned up or down, to suit – with the right’s – which is an on-off switch marked “peace and good feelings” on the one hand, and “kill every one of them” on the other.

You know all those terrible things you and your pals like to say about right wing, especially but not always white, Americans? Well, we know you don’t really believe those things because if you did you would be afraid ever to leave your mom’s basement. But you really ought to try to grasp this; sometimes those things are true.

Although our purpose with this project has been to try to get you to save yourselves, still, one cannot help but look forward to the prospect of young Mr. Decker finding this out.

So, if you were to succeed in killing the president, you will get Vance. Vance will have a mandate, in that case, to obliterate you. If he fails to carry out that mandate then genuine Right Wing Death Squads will take up the slack. No trial, no due process at all; they will proceed to obliterate you and every safe harbor and supporter you have, and often in creatively disgusting ways.

Amusingly enough, your only safety, in such a case, would be in being sent to some variant on El Salvador’s CECOT. I could see the population of El Salvador roughly doubling in the course of a few years as millions of American leftists find out just how grim a Latin American prison can be.

But, seriously, why would they or anybody waste the money when you could as easily just become an unfortunate statistic? Were I betting on it, I’d bet that few of you see a flight – or even half a flight – to El Salvador, but that many of you would have a long last moment staring down into a ditch you had just been forced to dig while a man with a pistol walks up behind you.

So the answer to young Mr. Decker’s question, “When must we kill them?” is “When you want to die.”

September 13, 2025

“It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now”

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

In the National Post, Carson Jerema identifies the common thread among all of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s efforts since becoming Liberal party leader:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Prime Minister Mark Carney may not be as obnoxiously progressive as Justin Trudeau, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t stubbornly left wing in his own right, though he has managed to convince many critics otherwise.

Over the past decade, the Liberals were particularly self-righteous over climate policy, so much so that the deviations made by Carney since assuming office have been met with praise — or, on the left, with scorn — that he is somehow pro-business and represents the return of the centre-right Liberals. Some even think he’s a conservative. Others have suggested that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is now entirely redundant.

This narrative is just more proof of how utterly captured the media is in this country by the Liberal party. It is true that Carney gives the appearance that he is abandoning many of the government’s environmental policies. He set the carbon tax rate to zero, paused the EV mandate and, on Thursday, he refused to endorse his government’s own carbon-emissions targets.

None of this, however, should be taken as evidence that Carney represents some sort of rightward or pro-business shift in the Liberal party. He is not proposing to let markets determine what infrastructure projects get built. Nor is he proposing to minimize regulations to attract investment.

Instead, Carney wants to command the economy by himself, laying bare the reality that what attracts left-wing politicians to climate policy is not saving the planet from carbon, but using environmental objectives to manage the economy. It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now. For Carney specifically, before he entered politics, “decarbonizing” markets was quite remunerative in his various banking roles.

Noticeably absent from the five infrastructure projects that the prime minister said on Thursday would be fast-tracked under the Major Projects Office was an oil and gas pipeline. Also noticeable was the fact that all five of the projects had already been approved, but the government tried to pass them off as something new anyway.

Even if the projects had been all brand new, the lack of a pipeline would still be of no surprise, as what private investor would be willing to back a pipeline when the Liberals’ Impact Assessment Act, tanker ban and emissions cap all exist to conspire against energy projects of any kind?

One thing that became incredibly obvious early in Justin Trudeau’s premiership was that the prime minister — and his ministers in general — really did seem to believe that talking about doing something was as effective in solving problems as actually doing the thing. Many had hoped that Mark Carney would be different … but as Dan Knight points out, he may actually be worse:

From there, [Poilievre] broadened the attack. He spoke of an entire generation priced out of homeownership, of immigration growing “three times faster than housing and jobs”, of crime rising, and of what he called “the worst economy in the G7”. And then he turned squarely on Carney: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“, citing an 8% increase in government spending, 37% more for consultants, and 62 billion dollars in lost investment — the largest outflow in Canadian history, according to the National Bank.

The message was simple: Liberals talk, Conservatives build. Poilievre painted Carney as a man of speeches and promises, not results. “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“, he said.

It was an opening statement designed less to introduce policy — those details came later — and more to frame the battle. For Poilievre, Carney isn’t just Trudeau’s replacement. He’s Trudeau’s sequel, and in some ways worse.

[…]

Pierre Poilievre didn’t hold back when asked about Mark Carney’s record. His words: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“. That’s not a throwaway line, he backed it with numbers.

According to Poilievre, Carney inherited what he called a “morbidly obese government” from Trudeau and made it worse: 8% bigger overall, 37% more for consultants, and 6% more bureaucracy. He says Carney’s deficit is set to be even larger than Trudeau’s.

Then the jobs number: 86,000 more unemployed people under Carney than under Trudeau. That, Poilievre argued, is the real measure, not the polished speeches Carney gives. His line: “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“.

Lorenzo Warby on the “conspiracy error”

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

Note that this piece was published before the assassination of Charlie Kirk the next day, and it does not directly address issues stemming from that crime.

On Substack, Lorenzo Warby explains why conspiracy theories spring up so readily:

Analysis of events abhors an analytical vacuum. That is, if your mental architecture lacks certain key analytical tools or framing, then you will be driven to mischaracterise — potentially seriously mischaracterise — events.

Given the human propensity for identifying patterns, and awareness of human intentionality, what can very easily fill in an analytical gap is some form of conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory alleges that there are centrally organised people operating in secrecy — usually in a malign way — controlling events.

A conspiracy theorist is someone who advances such an idea. The term can also be used as a term of abuse for anyone who inconveniently notices patterns — such as folk advancing claims and beliefs that suit people like themselves — or simply advances claims that people find inconvenient or awkward.

There are actual conspiracies. We know there are actual conspiracies, because they have been exposed.

The question is whether the claimed level of coordination and control over events, and the required level of continuing secrecy, is what is happening. The more restricted one’s analytical tools, the more conspiracy is likely to seem the default explanation for any coordinated pattern of behaviour.

Something that people do openly is not a conspiracy. Nor is conspiracy the only way for people to coordinate. It is perfectly possible to coordinate via mutual signalling, for instance. This is particularly true if people are engaged in shared status games. It is even more true if networks share common interests, common information sources and are playing shared status games.

Among us Homo sapiens, much of the point of status is to generate currencies of cooperation. We are a very status-driven species because we are very social beings, so prestige (conspicuous competence) and propriety (conspicuous conformity to norms) have been currencies of cooperation for our highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies that developed across hundreds of thousands of years.

In thinking about the dramatic changes brought about by the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, it became clear to me that there were always sexual outliers, there are always folk trying different life strategies. Due to the Pill and legally available abortion, which life strategies worked suddenly changed, so folk shifted to them and the norms that enabled them.

Thinking seriously about the mechanisms by which sexual mores changed leads to considering networks, signalling, life strategies. Once you grasp the power of these social mechanisms, you are in a much better situation to see how much conspiracy theories are a product of a lack of analytical breadth and depth. Conspiracy theories are a mechanism to “explain” events, one that occurs naturally to our pattern-seeking minds aware of human intentionality. They do so, however, in the absence of analytical alternatives, if we do not have better operational mechanisms to explain events — and especially observed social coordination — by.

September 12, 2025

Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs

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

At Acceptable Views, Alexander Brown calls for the end to the Canadian federal temporary immigration scam programs:

It’s not hyperbole to say that Canada has built an entire economy on exploiting cheap, foreign labour through TWFP, as well as the International Mobility Program (IMP). These are two slightly different programs that allow foreign nationals to work in Canada, with most going to Ontario. But contrary to its name, there is nothing “temporary” about the TFWP. Its original purpose was to remedy proven labour shortages while Canadians were hired and trained to eventually do the jobs in question. Meanwhile, the IMP allows international students to work—with or without a proven labour shortage—while they’re studying in Canada.

Between 2019 and 2023, the TFWP increased by 88 percent and the IMP increased 126 percent. They account for close to 1.58 million work permit holders, equal to roughly 7 percent of Canada’s labour force.

Taken together, the results of the TFWP and IMP are deplorable. The TFWP allows foreign nationals to be recruited abroad in vast numbers, brought to Canada, housed in degrading conditions, paid the minimum wage, forced to work long hours, pressured into not joining a union, and required to work for only one employer. Yes, the IMP is more flexible, but it’s more pernicious because it does not even pretend to address labour shortages.

Both schemes are also of course bad for Canadians themselves. The problem is especially grievous for young Canadians trying to get started in the labour market. Canada lost 40,800 jobs this past July, the unemployment rate is now 6.9 percent, and youth unemployment (those between 15 and 24 years old) is now 14.6 percent.

Both the TFWP and IMP are used as business models. Hiring foreign nationals at minimum wage keeps prices low and profits high—most notoriously in the hospitality and trucking sectors, but no industry seems untouched now.

Addicted to cheap foreign labour

The use of the TFWP in the healthcare sector, for example, has grown by an appalling 1,700 percent since 2000. That dramatic rise has no doubt been abetted by the absence of uniform standards and credential recognition among Canadian provinces. If medical personnel could move easily from one province to another, shortages could be filled by Canadians. But historically this has not been possible, and so medical institutions have had to turn to the TFWP. Ontario’s recent determination to solve this problem by speeding up recognition of 50 “in-demand” professions from other provinces is a step in the right direction, and hopefully not too little too late.

Meanwhile, the IMP is a vehicle for outright fraud, ranging from fake acceptance letters from bogus “colleges” to elaborate human-trafficking schemes. Not long ago, nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were working and attempting to settle here, rather than studying at any Canadian university or college. Most were migrants from India, and some were trying to cross the border illegally into the United States. The RCMP is now working with Indian law-enforcement to investigate alleged links between dozens of “colleges” in Canada and two “entities” in India allegedly facilitating passage into the U.S. When we reflect that an astounding 4.9 million temporary visas are set to expire this year, we have reason to believe that this abuse, exploitation, and fraud are on a much larger scale that we understand.

The consequences for young Canadians

Both the TFWP and the IMP serve to keep wages artificially low and profits high, and to price Canadians out of the job market. It wouldn’t be wrong to view these programs as distortionary government subsidies or welfare for unproductive businesses. The effects disproportionately harm younger Canadians who are priced out of the labour market, given that temporary workers overwhelmingly earn less than the median wage. And yet, we’re constantly hectored about labour shortages, Canadians’ “unwillingness” to do certain jobs, and the need for foreign workers.

It shouldn’t take much intellectual effort to see that the use of foreign labour and the difficulties of employing younger Canadians are two sides of the same ugly coin. Foreign workers are more cooperative because they are bound to their employers like serfs. They face normally insurmountable barriers to joining unions and have no attachment to the community in which they’re expected to work. In comparison, the domestic population is generally better educated and rooted in the local community.

Young Canadians can afford to be discriminating and should rightly expect higher wages than foreign nationals. Employers should instead work harder to invest in and reward their domestic workforce. In any other era, this would have been obvious. But now there is little incentive for businesses to look beyond cheap, foreign labour.

To get an idea of the magnitude of our collective failure here, consider the following fact. A 2024 study by RBC Economics revealed that Canadian businesses are sitting on a stockpile of cash worth almost a third of our country’s GDP. In other words, Canadian companies have the means to invest in hiring and training Canadians, but simply refuse to do so. The results of this refusal are stagnant wages, structural unemployment, and a de-skilling of the domestic population.

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