The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 28 Jul 2026In Chicago, the Democratic Party chooses Adlai Stevenson as their candidate for the Presidential election to be held November 4th; he’ll square off against Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican candidate. Also, in the US, the steelworkers strike comes to an end. In Korea, torrential rains prevent action on the ground this week, though the UN continues its summer aerial bombing campaign of the north in the skies.
July 29, 2026
The Korean War Week 110 – The Democratic Candidate – July 28, 1952
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The changing nature of Canadian patriotism
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Jay Currie contrasts the kind of patriotism most Canadians grew up with against the politicized version hijacked by the Liberals as a tool in their never-ending quest to re-shape Canadians in their preferred image:
Sitting out here on the southern tip of Vancouver Island overlooking the Olympic mountains across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I am bemused by the Eastern Canadian debate on Canadian patriotism. @BenWoodfinden weighs in as does Auntie Andy @acoyne
The current version of the debate is focused on whether the Conservative Party is “patriotic enough”. In less fraught times that would translate to “love of Canada” but now it comes down to anti-American and, more importantly, anti-Trump enough.
Probably because, after twelve years of Trudeau/Carney there is very little “Canada” left to love. We’re a post-national, genocidal, nearly European entity ruled from an embattled Ottawa beset by Americans, Chinese and our own separatists.
From the Ottawa/Toronto point of view Canada’s singular attribute is our willingness to punch Trump right in the nose. And woe betide the traitors like Smith, Moe and Frechette who are not willing to get behind Captain Canada as he takes his roundhouse swings.
And the Conservative Party is failing on the patriotism front precisely because a significant part of it thinks punching the Yanks in the nose is possibly the dumbest thing they have ever heard. Why the Hell would we do that?
On the Auntie Andy/Woodfinden scale of patriotism this disqualifies the CPC from ever winning a federal election because only Canadian Patriots should be allowed to command the Ottawa ramparts eyes firmly fixed on the perfidious Yanks.
As a thought experiment try to define Canadian patriotism without reference to the US or Donald Trump. I assure you it can be done. The way you do it is begin with the ground you are on. Where is it? What is it? What can you see?
Now, think about your neighbours, the stores you go to, the pub you like, the golf course or soccer field or swimming pool you prefer, the schools you went to, the teams you played on, yes, your favourite NHL team, vacation spot, drive.
Essentially these and hundreds of other details are the ground truths of your Canada and it is that Canada where your patriotism begins. The Canadian flag, the Peace tower, your favourite version of “Oh, Canada” are all abstractions of this ground truth.
People don’t fight for “King and Country”, they fight for their children, their spouse, their parents, their neighbours. That is where the real loyalty lies. It’s acutely local and it accretes across time, across generations.
The Liberal Party project of the last half century has been to replace this hyper-localized patriotism with an synthetic, denatured, atomized Patriotism which defines itself by what it is against, not what it is for. It is a deeply unsatisfying project.
The fact the CPC is wary of this synthetic patriotism is to its credit. Looking at its messaging in the last election at least a part of the CPC understands that Canada is the ground you stand on, not an invention of Ottawa. It’s the right message.
At Without Diminishment, Carl Vallée identifies one of the structural strengths of the left that allow them to concentrate on achieving and maintaining power: unity of vision across all progressive parties.
Exit Trudeau, enter Carney.
It must be admitted that the Liberals have dominated the political landscape for much of the past century, enabling them to weave their own partisan symbols and values into the fabric of Canadian institutions.
The federal state as it exists today is a legacy of Liberal Party rule. Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms fundamentally changed the trajectory of this country, but the ideology underpinning it had begun to take shape even before his time. Whether one considers multiculturalism, mass immigration or the red maple leaf flag, Canada is a country whose institutions naturally lean, if not lurch, to the left.
Therefore, conservatives must swim against the current, almost perpetually. Why is this? I submit that it stems from the fact that Liberals in both English Canada and Quebec are ideologically closely aligned and share a common vision of Canada. The left often looks much the same everywhere. Certainly, its values, methods and codes of communication are identical across the Western world.
In Canada, Liberals will not hesitate to weaponise the state to ensure their values endure. The alignment between Liberals in Quebec and English Canada has been critical to their electoral success.
Conversely, the right are more locally rooted and provincial, and are therefore less inclined to share a broad common vision with their compatriots across the country. This poses a challenge to both the coherence of Canadian conservatism and its electoral arithmetic.
Conservatism in Quebec is not libertarian, and here we envisage using the state to advance nationalist and conservative ends. What we conserve in Quebec is not what our friends in Western Canada or Ontario seek to conserve.
Arrayed against our alliance of local political traditions are the Liberals, who share and promote a single, pan-Canadian narrative. The inability of the right to offer a catch-all vision capable of rallying the anti-Liberal vote partially explains the electoral success of the Liberal Party over the past few decades.
Structurally, the 1982 rupture over the imposition of the Charter has made this phenomenon almost permanent, despite the efforts of prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper to rally coalitions against the Liberals. Neither was able to prevent the Charter from entrenching itself as Canada’s new national narrative, despite the explicit opposition of Francophones, one of the country’s founding peoples.
If there is a fault, it does not lie solely with the pan-Canadian conservative movement, but also with Quebec’s bleus, who failed to invest in the Conservative Party of Canada, the only political party capable of rivalling the Liberals. As a result, the Quebec vote is split between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, whose voters are much less left-wing than the party’s current leadership. In the 2025 federal election, the combined Conservative and Bloc vote in Quebec actually exceeded the Liberal vote.
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July 28, 2026
The establishment pretends not to understand why AfD is still on the rise
Normally, I get my updates on German politics from eugyppius’ Substack, but this article is from the New English Review with Bruce Bawer reporting:
… even as the problematic aspects of Islam become increasingly manifest, mainstream politicians and journalists in Germany feign puzzlement over the growing popularity of AfD, which ever since its founding in 2013 has been characterized by the German establishment as heralding a Nazi renaissance. How, the German elites pretend to wonder, can so many voters transfer their loyalty from seasoned, sensible, upright political leaders to ragtag radicals who bring to mind Munich putsches and Nuremberg rallies? How on earth can they have become so misguided? Such is the coy approach of Jochen-Martin Gutsch in a recent article for Der Spiegel, in which he takes a spin around the former East Germany in purported search for an explanation as to why the “far-right” AfD has won majority backing in that part of the Bundesrepublik.
Gutsch’s first move is to act astonished at the fact that an AfD gathering in Salzwedel, Saxony-Anhalt, drew ordinary-looking families, plus “[a] surprising number of young people in their twenties, smartly dressed in blazers”. What, no Hitler Youth uniforms? Gutsch’s line is that he’s just plain perplexed by the numbers: “in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is currently polling at more than 40 percent. In the ARD Deutschlandtrend poll, the AfD is in first place; it’s even the most popular party, nationwide.” But it’s one thing to read the numbers, another thing to see all these – gasp! – ordinary-looking people flocking to show their support. This is what really blows Gutsch’s mind, or so we are meant to believe: the “normalization” of AfD, the party’s growing “acceptance”, its rapid “transformation into a mainstream party in the east”, all of which was, in Salzwedel, brought to vivid, terrible life before his eyes.
Ten years ago, Gutsch recalls, AfD received 20 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, and he, for one, was sure that it had peaked. He’s from eastern Germany himself, and he thought he knew his neighbors. He was wrong, and now, he claims, he’s alarmed – unlike his “friends and colleagues sitting in Hamburg, Cologne, or Munich, who give a friendly, bored look when I talk about the AfD. For them it’s still far away. Somewhere ‘over there’, whereas for me it’s a reality I can’t escape.” Therefore, he tells us, it’s important for him to make unravel the mystery of the AfD‘s remarkable rise in the polls.
Of course, the reason for the rise of AfD is obvious to anyone who’s been following developments in Western Europe for the last quarter-century or so. More and more voters have been demanding that immigration, especially from Muslim countries, be drastically curbed, if not altogether ended, and that the unassimilated masses who’ve already relocated to Western Europe from the Muslim world – only to swell the welfare rolls and the crime statistics – be sent back to where they came from. We’re told that the Berlin Pride killer, Abdul Ballout, belongs to “Islamist circles” in Germany. Why, ask AfD voters quite reasonably, should there be “Islamist circles” in Germany?
Yet Gutsch is, or pretends to be, blind to such concerns. His initial hypothesis, as he heads into the east, is supposedly that AfD is gaining popularity there because of economic hardship. But no, when he drives through Brandenburg now, he encounters prosperity. The city of Großräschen, once the Ruhr of East Germany, became a “ghost town” after 1990; now it’s thriving again, with the unemployment rate a mere seven percent, the old lignite mine converted into a lake with “a lovely beach” lined by “white houses” with “luxury SUVs parked out front”. Why, then, asks Gutsch, are the residents of these stately homes casting their ballots for AfD?
A veteran local politician tells Gutsch that he travels often to Bochum, in western Germany, which, compared to Großräschen, is an economic basket case. And yet the residents of Bochum are “more easygoing” than those in Großräschen. They possess a “fundamental optimism”. They “trust” and “respect” their political leaders. “What beautiful words”, Gutsch comments. He’s not being ironic. To be sure, he understands why eastern Germans aren’t brimming over with love for their leaders, whether in Berlin or Brussels. Many of them are old enough to remember 1990, when the once-mighty East German state “crumbled … before their very eyes.” One might add that before 1990, that same state was the very picture of totalitarian tyranny, as chillingly depicted in the film The Lives of Others. And before that – well, you know. Then there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to insufficiently vetted Muslim immigrants, who proceeded to cause mayhem in both east and west.
But why, then, do so many western Germans still “trust” and “respect” their leaders? It seems baffling. Yet to listen to Gutsch, loyalty to the political establishment remains the way to go – the only intelligent, mature, and reasonable option. When he talks with an AfD politician, Karsten Hilse, to get the latter’s perspective on things, he’s lost at sea. In Hilse’s opinion, mainstream German politicians are too obsessed with “tolerance”; they have at least a degree of hostility toward Germany; and they accept without question the preposterous ideologies of gender and climate-change.
Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation defined
Gawain Towler kindly provides a précis of a behind-the-paywall essay discussing misinformation, disinformation and the less-well-known malinformation, as governments on both sides of the Atlantic rush to codify new laws to further restrict the freedom of speech of their citizenry:
The essay examines “malinformation”, a term coined in 2017 and now embedded in official doctrine on both sides of the Atlantic, and I argue that it exists for one purpose, to give the state a category under which accurate speech can be treated as a harm. I start by Channelling Ambrose Beirce’s Devil’s Dictionary, with a dictionary entry defining the word as information whose defect is that it is true. Thereafter I proceed to trace its origins, its spread through British and American officialdom, its intellectual kinship with behavioural government, and its practical operation, before closing with a demand for its formal abolition.
First the taxonomy itself. The doctrine of “information disorder” rests on a triad. Misinformation is false and innocent, disinformation false and deliberate. Both turn on falsity. The third category does not. CISA, the American cybersecurity agency, defines malinformation as based on fact but used out of context to mislead or harm, and the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory council calls it the intentional spreading of genuine information with intent to cause harm. The offence, the essay observes, is not lying but telling the truth on purpose. The term’s coiners, Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle, applied it narrowly to revenge pornography, miscaptioned photographs and weaponised leaks, and the essay concedes these are real phenomena. But the concept escaped its paddock. Within four years it had migrated from a Council of Europe research paper to the letterhead of a federal agency and thence into British government training materials.
The British chapter centres on RESIST 2, the Cabinet Office counter-disinformation toolkit issued to government communicators in 2021. The toolkit reproduces the triad, admits the categories are hard to distinguish in practice, and resolves the difficulty by instructing officials to stop asking whether material is true and to focus instead on the harm it can do.
The essay treats those five words as the whole doctrine laid bare, truth demoted from test to complication. From the Cabinet Office the word trickled downward, into Local Government Association guidance, a Stockport Council webpage, even a Met Office blog. The essay notes a telling exception. Ofcom and the Electoral Commission, bodies with statutory exposure and lawyers, avoid the word entirely. Its distribution across the state maps the distribution of accountability. Where courts can reach, the concept hides.
The American experiment, the essay argues, ran to destruction. CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation team spent the early 2020s flagging content to platforms, much of it neither foreign nor false, drawing a House Judiciary Committee report accusing it of collusion and camouflage. When Missouri and Louisiana sued, the case reached the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri, where the government prevailed not on the merits but on standing. The essay relishes the irony of a Justice Department litigating for its own right to withhold context. Britain played a damper version. After Big Brother Watch revealed that the Counter Disinformation Unit had monitored lawful speech by journalists and parliamentarians, the government refused substantive disclosure and renamed the unit National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), in the tradition of Windscale becoming Sellafield.
The essay then traces the doctrine’s parentage to the habit of mind exemplified by the Nudge Unit. RESIST had different midwives, but both traditions live in the Cabinet Office and both treat the citizen as an object of professional influence. They embraced during Covid, when SPI-B recommended raising the perceived level of personal threat through hard-hitting emotional messaging while the information machinery flagged sceptical commentary, some of it correct. Fear turned up on one wing, information turned down on the other.
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July 27, 2026
Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs
The tag in my chosen headline means roughly “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, which anyone who has read anything about the Trojan War can understand. A huge problem for modern translators of works like The Iliad and The Odyssey is that there’s a double layer of cultural change built in before you start: the Mycenaean Greek culture of the Bronze Age — the setting of the Trojan War — is significantly different from the Greek culture of the classic era — when the oral tales were first written down (and attributed to Homer).
Classic Greek culture is often misunderstood by modern audiences through the most prominent survivals of that time: especially Greek philosophy, as the philosophers we think of as most representative of Athenian and the wider Greek culture were actually a fairly small and relatively powerless subculture at odds with the mainstream of their times.
All that said, going from a translation to an on-screen interpretation requires a lot of picking and choosing of elements to highlight and others to leave unrepresented or actively suppressed. In the most recent film of Odysseus and his extended return journey from Troy to Ithaca, director Christopher Nolan chose to portray Odysseus as a modern man in ways that may suit today’s audiences, but don’t accurately portray the Homeric interpretation or the times in which it is set:
Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But moral injury is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness.
In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people.
But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded.
During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory.
This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen.
This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus?
Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order.
Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers’s 2022 film The Northman asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But The Northman was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us.
Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one.
In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code.
The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it.
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July 26, 2026
The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
Handre discusses the book George Soros wrote (or had written) after he gained a huge sum of money by speculating against the Bank of England in the 1990s:
George Soros made a billion dollars betting against the Bank of England in September 1992, and then he wrote a book explaining that markets are fundamentally irrational. Notice the tension there.
The Alchemy of Finance, published in 1987, gives you Soros’s theory of reflexivity. The idea runs like this: participants in a market do not observe prices from the outside. They shape the reality they are trying to measure. Their biased expectations feed into prices, prices feed back into expectations, and the whole thing spirals away from any “equilibrium”. Soros presents this as a devastating blow to the neoclassical economists who model markets as tidy machines grinding toward a single clearing price.
He is right, but misses one fundamental point. The equilibrium fetish deserves a beating. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek spent decades explaining that the market is a process, not a photograph, and that no equation captures the discovery going on inside it. Prices carry dispersed knowledge. Entrepreneurs guess, act, and get corrected by profit and loss. Soros rediscovered a slice of this in his trading room, and called it “alchemy”.
But, Soros treats his “far from equilibrium” boom-bust sequences as proof that free markets are inherently unstable and require an adult (usually a central bank, sometimes Soros himself) to supervise them. He points at the credit bubbles of the 1980s and sees capitalism failing. He never asks who prints the credit.
The Federal Reserve does. Cheap money floods in, entrepreneurs misread the artificially low interest rates as real savings, and they pile into projects that cannot pay off. That is the boom. The bust arrives when reality collects its debt. Soros describes the symptom with real skill and misses the pathogen entirely.
So the man who broke sterling by exploiting a currency that politicians pegged at a lie somehow concludes that governments need more discretion, not less. The 1992 pound was a government price-fix collapsing, exactly as Mises predicted such fixes always do.
The reflexivity part is spot on, but send the bill for the bubbles to the people with the printing press.
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July 25, 2026
“I, for one, welcome our new clanker overlords!”
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses “the Huggingface Incident” where our new AI overlords tipped their hands prematurely an unreleased AI agent got out to make new friends:
You’ve probably heard about this one by now. If not, you can get up to speed with OpenAI’s statement, OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident, or the more evocatively-titled BBC article, OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched “unprecedented” cyber-attack.
The story: OpenAI was testing an unreleased AI (rumored to be GPT-6)1. During a cybersecurity test called ExploitGym, the AI tried to cheat by hacking an unrelated AI startup called Hugging Face2 which it thought might have the answer key on its servers.3 Despite being supposedly unable to access the Internet, the AI hacked its way out of its testing environment, then launched a nation-state level attack on Hugging Face using a novel zero-day exploit and “many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes”. Hugging Face reported the incident on July 16; OpenAI seems to have only discovered that their AI was involved several days later.
From the Wall Street Journal, here
Let’s list the mitigating factors, so nobody can accuse me of covering them up:
- The AI was taking a cybersecurity test, which naturally suggests the idea of hacking.
- OpenAI had turned off some of the model’s usual guardrails so it could do cybersecurity work without interference.
- Some experts suggest that OpenAI might have botched their testing environment; if they had set it up perfectly, then (presumably?) the model couldn’t have escaped.
- Hugging Face used a different (open weights) AI to figure out what was going on, so if you wanted, you could spin this as a victory for AIs in cybersecurity.
- In some sense, this isn’t new or surprising. AIs have been coming up with wacky schemes to cheat on benchmarks for years, AIs have recently achieved at-or-above-top-human-level hacking abilities; this is just a natural outgrowth of those two priced-in facts.
Still, I think attempts to downplay this as anything other than a misaligned AI going rogue (1, 2) are missing the point. Yes, in some sense the AI was only doing what it was told (OpenAI told it to answer the question; I assume their prompt didn’t include phrases like “and don’t hack into other AI companies to steal the answer key”). But that’s how misalignment was always going to work!
- OpenAI states that it was technically the unreleased AI and GPT-5.6 Sol working together. They haven’t explained in what sense GPT-5.6 was involved or how they “worked together”. Maybe the unreleased AI was calling GPT-5.6 as a subagent?
- So named because the founders wanted to be the first company with an emoji for a stock ticker symbol. This did not happen.
- Although this person argues that was a bizarre assumption and that there should have been easier ways to find the key.
Update: Fixed missing URL.
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Modern careers – the permanent protest class
Although L. Wayne Mathison mentions this as a Canadian phenomenon, I believe it’s endemic to the Anglosphere and probably all of the former “first world” democracies:
“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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After watching this, my takeaway is simple: Canada has developed a small, permanent protest class that moves from cause to cause, looking for confrontation, attention and social-media status.
These people are not trying to persuade anyone. They want to control the space, silence opponents and punish anyone who records what they are doing. The cause changes. The tactics do not.
There are extremists on both sides, but the organized activist left has become especially comfortable deciding who is allowed to speak, report or even stand in a public place. Too often, well-funded NGOs and unions provide the money, organization, legitimacy and political cover that keep this protest machine running.
Politicians, journalists and institutions then excuse the behaviour because they sympathize with the slogan on the sign.
A democracy cannot survive on selective free speech. Protest is a right. Intimidation, harassment and mob rule are not.
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July 24, 2026
To Zohran Mamdani, “working class” means earning less than a million a year
Rob Henderson coined the fantastically useful phrase “luxury beliefs”, and regularly points out examples of people expressing beliefs that allow them to virtue signal at little or no cost, yet if the ideas were implemented would harm those not as privileged as the speaker:
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, 10 February 2024.
Photo by Kara McCurdy via Wikimedia Commons.
In a recent New York Times interview, Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s socialist mayor, struggled to define “working class”.
At one point he was asked point-blank, “How do you define the working class?”
Mamdani replied, “I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class”.
After some pushback from the interviewer, Mamdani said he would draw the line at “about a million dollars a year”. I have no idea how he can say that without any embarrassment, but that’s why he’s a politician and I’m not. Say what you will about him, but the man knows his base. These are the people who claim to be the champions of women yet — and please forgive what has now become a hackneyed line — can’t define what a woman is, and they claim to be the champions of the working class, yet can’t define what the working class is. Or they redefine both terms to be so expansive that they could potentially encompass just about everyone.
This is where the luxury belief class has steered us.
Anyone who isn’t a millionaire gets to be working class now. It sounds absurd but that’s where we’re at now. Remember during the primaries in 2015, Bernie Sanders said that “the millionaires and the billionaires” need to pay their fair share? At some point over the past decade, he dropped “millionaires” because he became one. Now you see the millionaires condemning only the billionaires. Mark my words, at some point in the not-too-distant future, you will see the billionaires disparaging the trillionaires. Maybe inflation will hasten that phenomenon.
Anyway, in that Mamdani interview, the focus on defining class by money is revealing.
People often conflate social class with economic class. This allows us to talk about the former while pretending we are talking about the latter.
It is easier to discuss income than educational pedigree, accent, hairstyle, clothing, taste, or zip code.
But education usually signals social class more clearly than income does.
Research has found that parental educational attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. This is because, compared with parental income, parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle, tastes, and opinions. If your parents went to college but you didn’t, you’re still middle-class or higher. Not working class.
Education shapes habits, networks, and outlook long after the degree is earned. Higher education bestows cultural capital: patterns of speech, tastes, opinions, and expectations about life. Income may rise and fall over a lifetime. The worldview formed in selective institutions usually endures. By that standard, college graduates, regardless of earnings, are not working class.
Education also shapes political views more strongly than income does.
In 2021, Ezra Klein pointed out that “We tend to think of class as driven by income” but that “A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineer’s at Google, while an adjunct professor’s will look more like an apprentice plumber’s. But in terms of class experience — who they know, what they believe, where they’ve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest — the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.”
Plainly, a PhD who takes a job driving a taxi will tend to vote like other PhDs, not like other taxi drivers, especially if he or she also has a parent with a college degree.
It was so much easier to recognize the British classes, at least back in the 1960s that is:
John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbet as the avatars of the British upper, middle, and lower classes
Original version from The Frost Report, 7 April 1966.
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QotD: The first rule of strategic analysis
Do you know the first rule of good strategic analysis? When a war begins: shut up.
Wars are theatres of chaos, noise, confusion and premature certainty. The temptation to declare victory, defeat or historical turning point within the first few hours or days is not analysis. It is posturing. Yet the modern media cycle, with its appetite for endless commentary and instant verdicts, cannot tolerate silence. The result is a steady stream of confident assertions, most of which will age badly.
The current conflict between the alliance of the United States and Israel and Iran has followed this pattern almost perfectly. Within days, it was announced that America was winning; America was losing; Iran is winning; Iran had been neutralised; Iran remained undeterred; Trump doesn’t have clear plan; he does have a clear plan; this was the start of a forever war; it wasn’t a forever war; the war is a catastrophe for the US; the war is a triumph for the US.; that the war would soon be over; the war is over.
Obviously, these claims cannot be true simultaneously. Most of them will turn out not to be true at all.
Resisting the customary rush to instant judgement and adopting a more analytical frame of mind, what can we, discerning sceptics that we are, sensibly say six weeks into the war? Which claims survive contact with reality, and which are, for now, better treated as conjecture?
Michael Rainsborough, “A Sceptical Stocktake of the Iran War So Far”, The Daily Sceptic, 2026-04-21.
Update, 27 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
July 23, 2026
DSA: Trump doesn’t respect political norms. Also DSA: Let’s abolish the current system
On Substack, Chris Bray attempts to establish what the nascent Democratic Socialists of America actually stand for — and what they stand against:
Democrats are racing left, sprinting faster and faster toward abject authoritarian idiocy. Democratic socialists are defeating old Democrats in Congress and governing our big cities to death, and the DSA now offers an explicitly post-capitalist future in which everything is “free”, the one thing that resources can’t actually ever be:
You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.
You get as much food, energy, and everything else as you feel that you need, and labor is no longer imposed on anyone. Should work well.
Meanwhile, after years of dire warnings that Evil Trump doesn’t respect our Constitution, here’s an actual headline today from one of the mindless institutions of the Democratic Party’s narrative-making apparatus:
They also propose the replacement of the Supreme Court, the restructuring of the presidency, and the elimination of the Electoral College, but other than that they’re really mad that Trump doesn’t respect our political norms. Trump is very bad, because he’s tearing down our political system, and also we demand the destruction of our political system.
Why are they moving left, moving left, and then moving left some more? Why doesn’t anything ever hold them in check?
Because there’s no anchor on the right to hold the left anywhere near the center. There’s no force in American politics pulling consistently and effectively in the other direction. They’re unopposed and unanchored, so nothing holds them. Mixing metaphors, it’s like gravity ceased to exist, so the moon is floating away. Political centering is the product of a contest. Bad ideas are punished and rejected through debate. And we increasingly don’t have that. Here’s a Republican congressman bragging about getting his measure passed to make home repairs a federally funded giveaway:
Democrats think the federal government should just give you whatever you need as a government handout, while Republicans think the federal government should, how can I put this, just give you whatever you need as a government handout. Your bathroom faucet broke? Don’t worry, that’s a federal program.
Meanwhile, while Democrats demand the abolition of the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and private property, prominent Republicans are theatrically angry at … Donald Trump.
The danger of election fraud isn’t cheating – it’s citizens believing their votes no longer count
Following up on his post about the need to audit elections, Larry Correia explains why election fraud is an existential threat to the very concept of democratic government:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 
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The thousands of comments on my voter fraud post remind me of one very important thing.
The issue isn’t about Trump. It is about the perception of the citizens. But they need to make it about Trump.
It is difficult to dismiss the valid concerns of millions of nervous or angry citizens. It is easy to dismiss one guy as a sore loser and make the whole thing about his ego. Hence any discussion of this topic inevitably devolves into them fixating on Trump and the details surrounding one election and one moment in time, and ignoring everything else in the universe, up to and including fundamental human nature (as in some people cheat).
Voter fraud existed long before Trump was born and will exist long after he dies. The fixation on Trump is merely a smokescreen to obfuscate the issue. He was just louder about it than most politicians who traditionally just sulk off rather than rock the boat.
Everybody made their mind up about that election six years ago. It was a big muddled mess. And no matter what happens now around other elections, they’re gonna try and shift the discussion back to that. They’d rather relitigate 2020 and have those same tired arguments over and over again than focus on the threats today, and those which are looming in the future.
And yes, they really don’t want you to talk about the future. It can only be 2020, forever and ever. Amen. Even though technology is evolving rapidly, we have hostile foreign actors who we know for absolute certain have their intelligence services meddle in other nations’ elections, and this is a cheap and easy ploy … nope. Thinking about the future is bad. Why do you hate those millions of elderly disabled women of color who can’t get IDs?
Don’t let them gas light you that you’re crazy for being suspicious of your fellow man. It is perfectly sane, rational, and logical to suspect that fraudulent behavior is occurring when suspicious things happen and the same parties always seem to benefit.
It becomes even more prudent to be suspicious when instead of tightening the process to make fraud more difficult, they loosen the process to make fraud easier. That sends the opposite message.
There is nothing wrong with you. You look out there and see a world of unaccountable mail in ballots, drop boxes, organized ballot harvesting, bribing homeless schizophrenics to vote, weird questionable crap, and blue cities who take longer to count their results than a 3rd world nation. It would be insane to NOT be suspicious.
And then rather than placate the reasonable people who are worried about this loosening of the controls, they attack everyone who raises concerns as a racist, sexist, conspiracy theorist, dismiss them as insane or stupid, and then turn the subject back to talking about Trump’s personality.
The biggest danger about election fraud isn’t just someone cheating their way to victory. It’s a critical mass of citizens losing faith in their institutions and believing that their votes no longer count, and that being dangerous to the survival of the country. When people truly believe that the fix is in, and their votes don’t matter, bad things tend to occur. That’s what I want to avoid.
It would be logical and reasonable to do everything possible to assure the people that their system is secure, but instead they get berated, gas lit, and told they’re insane. Don’t believe your own eyes. Asking for ID is racist. Taking weeks to count votes is perfectly good and normal. Having late ballots continue to appear is wonderful, and questioning this is makes you a bad person. How dare you wonder if ineligible non-citizens are voting? Sure, we’ve got people registering their pets to vote just to prove a point, and humans lie and cheat in every other endeavor on Earth, but they’d never cheat in an election. How dare you?
And so forth.
Now watch. If this post goes viral like the last one the process will repeat, and the NPC/bot army will do exactly what I described trying to browbeat and shame everyone into compliance. I’m safe to say that here because almost none of them actually even read the posts they’re responding to.
July 21, 2026
Exit Starmer, enter Burnham
Britain swapped out Prime Ministers on Monday, pushing Sir Keir Starmer out to the curb and installing former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham in Number 10 Downing Street. In The Critic, Robert Hutton reports on the day’s events:
Then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visiting Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School in Manchester on 13 April 2026 with Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.
As Keir Starmer walked out of Number 10 for the last time, he was greeted by a huge cheering crowd. Wow, this guy is popular! He should consider running for office. “My work is done”, he told us, offering possibly the most misguided example of marking your own homework since George W Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” six weeks after invading Iraq. Although we shouldn’t be harsh: Liz Truss listed leading the nation in mourning the late Queen as her big achievement in office.
Starmer’s, as he pointed out yet again, was winning the election. The list of things done since then was slightly more vague. But again, Boris Johnson’s departing speech claimed credit for a high-speed train line to Manchester and a number of hospitals that still do not, as such, exist. At least Starmer could truthfully say that he was leaving “with a smile”. Was he also, as he claimed, going “with good grace”? Well, unlike Johnson, he managed to get through the speech without attacking the people who forced him out.
It wasn’t entirely cheery. His wife Victoria was wearing black, and Rachel Reeves was crying, once again. The departing prime minister warned us not to succumb to division and to “unite different people under our common flag”. Although he completely failed to help that happen while he was in office, and showed little interest in trying.
With that, he was off to Buckingham Palace, where the band was playing a medley of Bon Jovi songs. Shot through the heart, and only himself to blame, he gave Labour a bad name.
But if Starmer was going out in a blaze of inglory, the rest of us were only halfway there. While the King conducted his exit interview in the Palace’s Chinese Dining Room (imagine having a different space to eat every takeaway) we had to hold on, ready or not, through the hour in which we were without a prime minister and living, as it were, on a prayer.
Andy Burnham had put on a suit for the day, a concession to the soft southern ways of the monarch. We half-expected him to leap out of the car in Downing Street and rip off the whole ensemble, Full Monty-style, to reveal black jeans and a T-shirt underneath. Perhaps he felt that would be taking his personal branding too far.
A fresh crowd of Labour types had gathered, looking more convincingly happy than the ones who had stood behind the last guy. They included the incoming prime minister’s mum, and the youngest person present: Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram’s 10-week-old grandson, currently scheduled to become the King’s 49th prime minister, in about 2038.
Not everyone is as excited as Burnham’s Labour Party supporters:
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill bids an unfond farewell to Two-Tier Keir:
Sir Keir Starmer: the PM who did nothing about the sense of doom pervading Britain, but he did ban “doomscrolling“. The man who did zilch to mend our fraying social fabric, but he did stop kids from perusing its consequences on TikTok. The man who failed – catastrophically – to alleviate that bleak feeling many of us have that Britain is broken, but he did cover the next generation’s eyes to just how broken we are.
Starmer should be remembered for his social-media ban for under-16s, that mad, illiberal law, due to come into force in spring next year, that promises to liberate youth from the angst-inducing “doomscrolling” inflicted on them by Big Tech’s wily algorithms. Not because it’s a “landmark” policy, as he claims. And not because it will be effective – kids will find a workaround. No, it’s because leaving intact the social conditions of doom while tweaking the machine so that fewer people can ‘scroll’ those conditions is Starmerism summed up: a regime of hollow theatricality, devoted more to managing the optics of crisis than mustering up the competence to avert it.
Starmer is a man without a legacy. He promised competence over charisma and delivered neither. His was a phantom premiership: government without governing. You could ask a hundred Brits to name a policy he enacted and I reckon five, at best, could do so. Even his vanishingly small number of apologists usually only squawk about what he didn’t do. He didn’t drag us into the Iran-US War. He didn’t follow through on his promise to cut the winter-fuel allowance for pensioners. He didn’t murder anyone. A man so staggeringly insubstantial that even his fans prefer his inertia to his initiative.
For me, the terrifying nothingness of Starmerism is best summed up in the fact that he recently said his “proudest achievement” was scrapping the two-child benefit cap, the Tory-introduced measure that meant families could only claim additional welfare payments for their first two kids. But Starmer opposed cutting that cap. For ages. In fact, in July 2024, he withdrew the whip from seven Labour MPs who voted to scrap it. It was only under pressure from his parliamentary colleagues that he relented. What can you even say about a man whose “proudest achievement” is a course of action foisted on him by others? That’s Sir Keir: the political weathervane who mistook a gust of wind for his own internal moral compass.
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Making out like a bandit – Christopher Nolan’s sweet deal for The Odyssey
Hollywood accounting is always a murky pool to wade into … unlike accounting in the real world, it’s very, very difficult for outsiders to understand how the money is spent and where the profits go. Christopher Nolan’s new film seems to have broken new ground in Hollywood accounting, very much to Nolan’s benefit:
So Nolan is getting 15% off direct revenue, (not profits, gross, and his wife another 5%) from the Odyssey, basically risk free, AFTER his 20 million up front.
That’s a better cut than a lot of mob bosses take off drug dealers (which tend to vary between 5 and 30% depending on how much violence they can command).
And probably core stars (Damon and Hathaway mostly) are getting some smaller percent of the same deal.
This is unheard of. Basically a violation of fiduciary duties to the investors.
Studio execs paid all these people to make this movie this way against their own investors’ interests.
So if another 10-30% of gross is divided across Damon, Hathaway, Holland, Pattinson, and Theron … You know the real stars (Zendaya, Nyong’o, and Page don’t draw crowds and aren’t getting that) …
Then you might have to effectively cut all revenue first by 50% for theaters, then by another 40-50% for the star power.
It other words … The Odyssey would need to make 800 million – 1 billion before it could even hypothetically start to turn a profit for investors.
All the Woke casting etc. Is actually a cover for basically outright money laundering and embezzlement by the entertainment class. And because its “sticking it to the Chuds” business news and institutions are covering for the fact a bunch of studios just defrauded Universal Studios’ parent Comcast, to possibly the tune of hundreds of millions.
Comcast is a publicly traded company. That’s 401Ks and pension funds.
And all the woke stuff is in there so that no studio execs, corporate leaders, media, or corporate watchdogs will call them out for basically transferring hundreds of millions of retiree dollars into their own pockets.
All the discussion of “Will the Odyssey make its money back” is missing the point that there is almost NO WAY for the Odyssey to actually produce a reasonable return to investors … BY DESIGN.
It is a pure, basically fraudulent, wealth transfer from American middle-class investors to Hollywood insiders irrespective of whatever money the film does or does not make … intentionally.
And all the woke window dressing is chaff, or a bonus to prevent any institutions from having the nerve to call them out lest they get called, racist, sexist, and transphobic.
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QotD: Why Tiktok?
This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you’d stare at the longest with a “heating tool” that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms […]
For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn’t give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).
It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those “content creators” are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms’ owners and executives. They may be more “engaging” than your friends, but they’re also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.
What’s a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is “AI creators”. An “AI creator” is like a “creator” in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a “creator”, it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform’s shareholders and executives. It’s the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people […]
But there’s a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms’ single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so “sticky”. The platforms don’t “hack your dopamine loops” – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can’t even agree on what board-game you’re going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it’s time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?
So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.
But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends’ unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.
Cory Doctorow, “Tiktokification shall set us free”, Pluralistic, 2026-04-17.
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