Feral Historian
Published 23 Jan 2026Elysium is one of those films I like more for the world it presents than the story it tells. It’s a tale of two worlds, a wealthy break-away civilization in orbit and a slowly dying civilization on Earth. On the surface it’s simplistic, preachy even, but underneath it posits some important questions both by what it tries to do and what it doesn’t even attempt to address.
00:00 Intro
01:18 Healing Magic and Healthcare Access
03:22 Overpopulation and Automation
04:18 Technology in Layers
07:50 Easy Answers to Hard Problems🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
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Ninti’s Gate – the prologue to Stellar Drift, coming later this year.
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June 15, 2026
Elysium: Greed and the Crab Trap
June 14, 2026
The “Dissolution of the Universities” draws ever closer
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Steve McGuire reacts to more news about the conscious dumbing-down of modern university programs:
A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35.
Another “said the earliest version of the … course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts”.
“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught”, the first one said.
To which John Carter responds:
The academic death spiral is something to behold.
Demographics are steadily reducing the size of the student body, squeezing finances and driving bankruptcies.
At the same time, standards collapse is destroying the quality of the students the universities admit.
We’re already at the point where it’s common knowledge that a degree signals essentially nothing about intellectual ability. AI is exacerbating this, since cheating is so easy now.
Kids are already starting to forgo university, since they don’t think the cost of the credential is justified. That cuts even more deeply into the number of students universities can attract.
Universities respond by reducing standards even further (thereby accelerating brand destruction), by reducing tuition (which cuts even more deeply into budgets), and by firing professors in low-enrollment majors (reducing program variety, especially in the small seminars that are generally the most rewarding experiences for students).
[…]
“How can this be reversed?”
It can’t. There are pathways for individual institutions to revive themselves, even to prosper, but the sector as a whole is cooked. The death spiral is driven by prestige collapse as well as the demographic cliff, and intellectual prestige is inversely correlated to the size of the student body. More students means lower standards. That is especially true with a demographic cliff.
The only way to survive this crisis is ruthless elitism. Stop trying to edutain the fat middle of the bell curve, and refocus on the right tail. Become a place where the smartest people gather, and from which anyone who isn’t a 2-sigma outlier is excluded. This makes the school an arena in which intellectual iron can sharpen against iron. Elitism restored, prestige follows.
Next, eliminate the 500 person intro lectures. Admin loves these, since the high student:teacher ratio makes them cash cows. But they’re functionally no better than watching YouTube videos. Refocus on small seminars. This offers value that the Internet can’t.
Schools that take this path will restore or build reputations that will enable them to survive. However, they won’t be large. There is no future in which huge institutions keep tens of thousands of professors and administrators on payroll.
Update, 15 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
June 13, 2026
The intellectual dangers of “nostalgia economics”
Mani Basharzad explains that although resurgent socialist beliefs are a bad sign, there’s actually a worse danger to modern economies that isn’t a coherent ideology but all the more potent because of it:
Custom image by FEE
If someone asked me what the most dangerous economic ideology is, many would expect an Austrian to give a typical answer: Marxism, socialism, or Modern Monetary Theory. Yet I believe there is another way of thinking that is even more pervasive. It is not a coherent body of ideas like those ideologies. Rather, it is a sentiment so widespread and socially accepted that it threatens not merely economic freedom, but our very understanding of progress itself. I call it “nostalgia economics”.
Recently, the singer Sting suggested that the rise of toxic masculinity is partly the result of the “loss of manual jobs”, claiming that because many men no longer use their hands and physical strength in their daily work, unhealthy masculine traits are on the rise. Like many commentators on the political left, he also blamed Margaret Thatcher for Britain’s economic transformation. “Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards”, Sting said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”
This is nostalgia economics in action. A global celebrity whose music can be streamed instantly on another continent, who earns income through digital platforms, and whose career depends on modern communications and services, criticizes the very service economy that makes his success possible.
A person in thrall to nostalgia economics will take the blessings of progress for granted while romanticizing a past that never truly existed. Imagine living in the world of Charles Dickens: you would not have had access to a typewriter for much of your life, if at all, since it was only commercialized in the late 19th century. More importantly, you would not have had access to electricity. The conveniences we now consider basic would have been unimaginable luxuries.
The economic historian Norman Stone illustrated the extraordinary pace of modern progress through the experience of the novelist Henry James:
In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a cinematograph. Within very few years, he could have had a Freudian analysis, travelled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even of space-travel.
Had Sting been alive in 1890, a world tour would have looked very different. A journey from London to New York would have taken more than a week rather than a few hours. International audiences, instant communication, and global entertainment markets would have been beyond imagination.
The glorification of manual labor is one of the most overrated ideas in modern political discourse. This tendency is not confined to the left. Ambitions to revive manufacturing employment through government policy often draw on the same nostalgic impulse. But what exactly are we trying to return to?
Perhaps literature offers a more honest answer than politics. Oscar Wilde observed that “all unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour” involved unpleasant conditions. He went even further, commenting that “there is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading”.
The reality of industrial labor was far harsher than many modern observers imagine. In Britain, workplace fatalities have fallen dramatically over the last century: fatal injuries to employees dropped from around 4,400 a year early in the 20th century to around 200 a year by the end of the century. Coal mining, one of the occupations most frequently romanticized today and the first industry Sting evoked, exposed workers to constant danger and disease. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (“black lung”) claimed well over a thousand lives annually. What would a laborer enduring dangerous conditions, long hours, and chronic health risks have given for an air-conditioned office job?
One thing Sting did identify is that men generally do need more physical activity in their lives both for general physical health but also for mental health.
Hating on Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire
It shouldn’t be surprising that so many people are doing what they can to raise resentment against the very rich in general, and Elon Musk in particular. Stoking resentment of the better off has always been a viable short-term political play, and it’s not every day we see wealth of this scale:
Reddit meme
For all these dumbasses claiming if they had Elon’s money they’d end world hunger, cause world peace, educate everyone, or whatever, blah blah blah … No you wouldn’t. You’re full of shit and everyone knows it, because that’s not how the world works.
Throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it. The entire history of government demonstrates that. Saying vapid nonsense just makes weak, unimaginative people with a childlike grasp on reality feel better about themselves for caring harder, while accomplishing nothing.
Meanwhile, the guy you hate revolutionized EVs and self driving cars, brought affordable reliable internet to every corner of the Earth, and is making the dream of colonizing space real. And the process of doing all that has given hundreds of thousands of people jobs.
While you posture about how you’d give everybody an imaginary unicorn, he’s done stuff that’s actually changed the world for the better.
And you don’t get it. You can’t get it. Because you’re just too fucking small.
And even the Globe and Mail, which used to consider itself the most respectable and influential newspaper in Canada goes for the “hate the rich” market:
But some people just can’t help themselves and ginning up the hate and envy is all they can do:
For the left, it’s important that you do more than view billionaires with skepticism. You have to actually hate them. You have to blame them for every ill that befalls you, and you must actively resent their wealth.
One way that the left accomplishes this is by framing their gains as somehow your losses.
Congressman Greg Cesar (D-TX) decided to try that on X Tuesday with this banger.
Now, it’s interesting that he talks about their wealth being three times what it was 15 years ago, but doesn’t account for what the rest of us are dealing with. Instead, he engages in an apples-and-oranges comparison.
For starters, the increase in net worth for billionaires has nothing at all to do with whether your life is three times better than it was back then. There are too many variables. Someone who was unemployed and homeless and got a job, built a life back up, and then started a successful business is a lot more than three times better off, right?
Plus, it doesn’t account for differences in the cost of living or anything else.
Instead, a better metric is whether the median household net worth in America has increased a similar amount. So, I went to Google, then got its AI to generate a graph for me showing what’s happened over that timeframe.
While that’s not three times, it is 2.5 times the median net worth 15 years ago, and since this caps at 2022, it may well have increased even more.
In other words, the net worth of ordinary Americans seems to be mostly keeping up with that of the billionaires.
Cesar’s question, though, is disengenuous because the cost of living has gone up about 53 percent over that timeframe. So while net worth has increased, so has the cost of living. Not enough to completely drain away the gains in net worth, but enough that people aren’t living three times better than they were.
But that’s the point, isn’t it?
It’s not enough that, on average, Americans are much richer than they were 15 years ago, and by about the same amount as the billionaires, because that won’t foster the necessary resentment the left needs to push through their policies. You have to resent their wealth, and that’s less likely if you realize you’ve gained as much as they have by percentages. You have to feel like their wealth has been taken from yours, otherwise you’re less likely to look at wealth redistribution as a good thing.
And wealth redistribution is what it’s always about.
The Laurentian Elite
The people who actually rule Canada — including but not limited to Liberal Party members — don’t mind “populists” who want to “spread awareness”, because it’s about as ineffective as can be and dissipates some of the energy that might otherwise be used to oppose the Laurentian Elite’s preferred outcomes:
Homesteaders, agrarians, and populists relying on “spreading awareness”, protesting, or Americanisms like “we the people” and “the silent majority” aren’t nearly as effective or influential as people think they are.
A deeply unpopular Laurentian liberal elite minority, one that increasingly LARPs as blue-state Americans and takes its cues from them, managed to transform the country against the popular will.
Over a roughly twenty-year period between the 1940s and 1960s, they spent decades scheming behind the scenes. They changed the flag, lured French Canadians into supporting them through the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism by promising greater national recognition of Canada’s French heritage, then dropped the whole thing almost immediately. They pulled the rug out from under them and basically said, “SYKE, you thought. Here’s infinite immigrants instead.”
In 1971 they pushed multiculturalism and the cultural mosaic, abolished assimilation while polling showed around 80% of Canadians opposed increased immigration. They later entrenched their ideology through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, stacked and empowered a judiciary that would future-proof it, formalized the project through the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, and gradually consolidated influence over the media, education system, and cultural institutions.
The result was a decades-long effort to indoctrinate Canadians into viewing their country as a post-national economic zone built on stolen land called Turtle Island, where Canadians don’t exist, but foreigners are just as Canadian as you and me, borders are morally questionable, and none is illegal on stolen land.
This isn’t going to be reversed through awareness campaigns, symbolic protests, or endlessly posting facts online. Political systems are ultimately shaped by elites and counter-elites. The only way this order gets replaced is if a rival elite, or a political force capable of becoming one, displaces the existing ruling class and takes its place.
That process will almost certainly involve some degree of populism, but populism by itself is not enough. You need people who can actually build institutions, wield power, and replace the current establishment rather than just complain about it or bug off into the woods, or try to balkanize the country.
June 12, 2026
The mystical powers of climate change, is there anything it can’t do?
In Canada, all problems are now blamed on US President Donald Trump. It’s a fantastic get-out-of-trouble move for politicans like Prime Minister Mark Carney, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and even mayors of towns and cities across the Demented Dominion. But even the malign powers of the Bad Orange Man seem puny in comparison to the amazing powers of — gasp! — CLIMATE CHANGE:
Every now and then I suspect there is a game played by bored elites to see which of them can get away with the most asinine “climate change” claim. There have been some doozies: lack of UFOs, “climate change” anxiety, increased sugar consumption, engineering short people. On and on and on ad infinitum.
Today we meet what could be the winner in the contest. Experts are claiming World Cup matches could be slower. Now instead of ninety-plus minutes running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts, we’ll get ninety-plus minutes of somewhat slower running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts. Because “climate change”.
Seems to me, though, that if we really wanted to save time, we could have all matches begin at the shootouts. The whole tournament could be over in a day. Take that, “climate change”!
Here’s the claim, appropriately announced on a PR site, a site whose specialty is juicing dull and dubious headlines: “Climate Central finds climate change has increased the likelihood of heat that could slow players for 97 of the 104 matches, threatening game speed and fan safety.”
What will happen to the other 7 matches they don’t say. Probably they will end in shootouts.
Details:
Previous research shows temperatures above 82.4°F can reduce sprint frequency, total distance covered, and recovery time, impacting not only player performance and safety, but also match tempo, tactics, and overall style of play.
Previous researchers discovered — and stay with me, here — that when it’s hot outside people outside in the heat act like people act when it’s hot out.
Where would we be without previous researchers?
[…]
As you have surmised, we don’t have to believe any of this: the scenarios are all silly, proving that the stunning new research is purely performative, a way to signal the vices and predilections of the researchers. As proof, we oblige the PR site which asks us to quote this:
As global temperatures continue to rise, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the 2026 World Cup could become another example of how climate change can disrupt sports and traditions people cherish, forcing a reevaluation of how the game is played.
This is all ridiculous, and only saved by the charge of falsity by adding that “could.” Meaning might, which also means might not.
They also provide this quote they ask us to re-quote:
Alex Jacobs, professional player formerly with the Jamaican Premier League:
Heat is not new. But extreme heat — made more likely by heat-trapping pollution driving climate change — might just be a difference maker in this summer’s edition of the biggest sporting event on the planet.Way these quotes work is that either the PR firm, or the organization employing the PR firm, write them for victims, who are sought out and asked to sign on. The people allowing their names to be used are, of course, fully responsible for the words used, and even often believe them. But there’s no mistaking that stilted prose of the manufactured quote. Nobody talks like this. This prose is not conclusive, but whenever you see it, it’s a darn good reason to dismiss the claims made.
Of course, using a highly visible public event to advance the climate change agenda is nothing new, they’ve literally been doing it for decades now. Media outlets have always had a bias toward the most dramatic outcome, if only for marketing purposes — “if it bleeds, it leads” — but even the more skeptical outlets have drifted in the climate hysteria direction over time:
We have complained many times that the public is presented with a picture of climate science systematically biased towards alarmism. And it’s not just our anecdotal impression. We have data, in the form of a new study from the US National Bureau of Economic Research saying the government delegates who write the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) overstate the science in the underlying report, and then the media further overstates what’s in the SPM. The study authors used multiple AI systems to extract key scientific statements in every IPCC Assessment Report since 1990, track how they were summarized and what the accompanying media coverage said. Using a statistical model they measured the way the statements get changed or twisted at each stage. There were some surprising results and some unsurprising. Unsurprisingly the data showed the UK Guardian has by far the most climate coverage of all major media outlets and is also the most biased. Another unsurprising result is that the overall media bias regarding the severity of climate change has been consistent over time. A surprising result (to many, but not to us) is that the only major media outlet exhibiting precisely zero bias was Fox News. Otherwise most right-leaning outlets adopted the left-leaning outlets’ alarmist bias as of 2007, again unsurprising to us. And there’s much more.
The authors identified three forms of bias: severity, in which a summary picks the upper end of a range of claims, uncertainty, in which a summary downplays caveats and qualifiers, and scenario in which worst-case scenarios get foregrounded. They used a numerical scale from -2 to +2 that captured bias in either direction: a positive number indicated that the summary was biased towards alarmism and a negative number indicated a bias in the opposite direction. Then they averaged the bias measures together and measured them at two stages in the game of telephone. The “TS-to-SPM” stage compared statements in the author-written Technical Summary to how they were worded in the government-written Summary for Policymakers. The “SPM-to-media” stage looked at how statements in the SPM were then reported in the press. The authors examined the TS-to-SPM stage for every IPCC Assessment Report from 1990 to 2023. They only looked at the SPM-to-media stage from the 2001 Third Assessment Report (AR3) because that’s as far back as their media library went.
[…]
That’s right, folks. Even the right-leaning outlets have also gone in for alarmist bias, at least since 2007. Indeed, the media’s bias converged in size and direction over time, as shown in this chart:
For the AR3 in 2001, right-leaning outlets on average understated the climate findings while left-leaning outlets overstated them. But thereafter both sides shared the alarmist bias. Which reflects the success of alarmist activists in the post-An Inconvenient Truth era (2006) driving skeptical voices out of the media. That campaign didn’t eliminate bias, it only replaced one form by another, with the result that the overall media landscape became entirely one-sided.
The uniformity of the bias can also be seen in this chart:
The right-leaning outlets in red are about as bad as the lefties in blue, except for Fox News which is the only outlet with no measurable bias and the Wall Street Journal which had an overall negative (anti-alarmist) bias.
Protests and riots send different messages to the PTB
While this is specifically related to the situation in Belfast, it applies to protests and riots generally:
The message of a protest is “we don’t like this”.
The message of a riot is “we don’t like this, and we’re able to do something about it”.
People who unconditionally call for peace and calm, regardless of the provocation, don’t fundamentally understand how politics works in the real world.
They do understand that the purpose of politics is to provide an alternative to violence, but that’s as far as their understanding goes. They don’t think through the implications, usually because they are quite comfortable with things as they are.
If politics is an alternative to violence, then politics is a proxy for violence.
And that means you have to dole out power in proportion to capacity for violence. Or someone’s going to figure out they can do better by flipping the table.
Monarchy wasn’t replaced by democracy because of fine-sounding philosophical ideals and eloquent documents declaring this or that.
Democracy happened because if you added rifling to the flintlock firearm, suddenly a individual farmer with a tube was the pinnacle of military technology, and now you had to keep all the farmers with tubes happy by giving them political power.
(Ancient Greek democracy had a similar relationship with the hoplite warrior.)
When political systems work well, for a while, the violence they represent becomes further and further from people’s minds, and those who can’t effectively commit or direct violence worm their way into power, and begin to take it away from those who can.
And they’ll defend their position by saying that violence is unthinkable, barbaric, always bad, must be disavowed at all costs, etc.
This isn’t some sort of high-minded principle on their part. It simply means one of two things. Either “the status quo works for me, so I don’t want you to upset it”, or “I suck at violence, and I don’t want to have to fight”.
They want young men demoralized, so that their artificial meritocracy of spreadsheets, or their non-meritocracy of patronage networks, can be protected from the natural meritocracy of conflict.
This means that riots aren’t actually for achieving any specific material aim. They are for reminding the comfortable that judges and bureaucrats and policemen have home addresses and families. And that violence is always on the table.
A protest would only send the message that the Irish don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. But the bureaucrats and judges and lawyers already know that. They just don’t care.
A riot reminds them that they have to care, because the Irish have a long tradition of doing something about it.
QotD: George Bernard Shaw
My own feelings about George Bernard Shaw are equivocal. He was a high-profile, publicity-seeking crank who espoused many bad causes, and in general preferred a bon mot or notoriety to the truth. He called Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister frauds, and to the end of his life did not believe in the germ theory of disease. He likened marriage to legalized prostitution and said many other destructive things to draw attention to himself. How far he believed in his worst pronouncements and expected anyone to be influenced by them is moot.
On the other hand, he was one of the few playwrights in English whose plays can still be performed for the pleasure of an audience a century later. One or two of them might even, without absurdity, be called great. He was undoubtedly very witty, and if he was unbearably opinionated, his prose was always vigorous and quite often elegant. I learned to write from him. Many of his bons mots are still nearly as funny as those of Oscar Wilde.
It was as a playwright — one whose fame stretched around the world — not as a thinker or guide to policy that he is commemorated in the name of the theatre [at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]. His plays have been in print ever since they were written. His achievements in the theatre can hardly be denied. He is virtually the founder of the modern drama in English. I can extract at least 20 of his plays from the vaults of my mind.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Man and Underman at RADA”, City Journal, 2020-09-17.
June 11, 2026
Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act
As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:
The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.
Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.
I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.
The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly
The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.
[…]
The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s
The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]
The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition
The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]
The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties
The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.
“Thoughts and prayers” in a Two-Tier Keir accent
Sir Keir Starmer posted to X in response to the attempted beheading of a Belfast man a few days ago:
It drew some angry responses like this:
And a longer response from Jim Chimirie:
.@Keir_Starmer, your statement says you have absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets.
With respect, tolerance is not the issue. Nobody tolerates a near beheading on a residential street in Belfast. The question your statement carefully avoids is prevention. And prevention requires honesty about a pattern your government has consistently refused to name.
A man in his thirties, a Somali national, pinned a man to the ground on a residential street and stabbed him repeatedly in the face and neck. Members of the public intervened with a hurling stick. A woman required hospital treatment for the stress of witnessing it. This happened in Northern Ireland, a place that has known more than its share of violence, and even there residents said they had never seen anything like it.
Your government has presided over record small boat crossings. It has failed to proscribe the IRGC despite repeated promises. It has blocked the grooming gang inquiry for a year before being forced to concede it. It has spent £10 billion on asylum accommodation contracts. It has actively resisted measures that would have reduced the number of unvetted individuals entering and remaining in this country.
The victims of these attacks are not statistics. They are British people, going about their lives on their own streets, who were failed before the attack happened. Failed at the border. Failed by a system that prioritises the rights of those who arrive illegally over the safety of those who were already here.
Your thoughts are with the victim. So are ours. The difference is that thoughts are not policy. Thoughts do not secure borders. Thoughts do not remove individuals with no right to be here. Thoughts do not protect the next victim, whose name we do not yet know, on a street we cannot yet identify, from an attack that has not yet happened.
How many more before the thoughts become action?
The family of the victim talked to the media and it in no way seems to have been pre-scripted by the government and was clearly uncoerced and of their free will and is in no way any kind of hostage statement:
Northern Ireland has seen a lot over the last few decades, but I doubt anybody expected to see the two opposing sides of “The Troubles” joining forces:
Between them, the Ulster Protestant paramilitaries and the IRA operatives have a lot of hard-won skills at avoiding the authorities and committing direct violence. At The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian notes that he predicted this earlier:
In June of last year I penned an essay titled “Popular Misconceptions” in which I opined that if the “good men and true” of an area get “fed up with lawlessness” they tend to take matters into their own hands.
We are now seeing this play out in real time in Northern Ireland.
For those of you not paying attention to the news, a refugee from the Sudan attempted to saw off the head of an Irish man in Belfast on Monday, 08 JUN 26. He was on a public street when he did so, and several locals rushed to stop his assault. His victim has lost an eye from the attack, and is in critical care at a local hospital.
If you read my previous essay, I postulated that when the vigilance committees show up, a lot of collateral damage come with them — so nobody should be shocked to understand that a whole bunch of immigrant homes and businesses are currently on fire in Northern Ireland.
I will now expound upon that previous essay. I will even go so far as to issue a warning that the people who should heed said warning are going to ignore:
If the “good men and true” get the perception that the government and officialdom are not only facilitating what has them all riled up, but just might be a source of what has them all riled up … well, history has shown that the “good men and true” have very little problem with expanding the “extra-judicial punishments” to include Minions of the Law and Government.
And for those folks who pish-tosh any sort of threat from the British “subjects” — this is Northern-bloody-Ireland. The time and area where the locals refined the “Vehicle-Borne Improved Explosive Device” to the point a popular cocktail was named after the practice.
This is the area where there are more SLRs, Sterlings, and Browning Hi-Powers buried around that little island than any three countries in Africa.
Hell, the Irish made the AR-18 famous.
I speak to the government and officials of Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom: Listen to me — you won’t, but listen to me … You’d better — at the very least — pay some sort of lip service towards a credible perception that you give a tinker’s damn about what has the people all lathered up, and make the people believe that you’re doing something about it.
If you don’t — and you won’t — don’t come whinging to me when your dance card abruptly becomes filled with such exhilarating numbers as: the Hemp Fandango, the Beatdown Boogie, and the Arson Waltz.
You have failed the people. You have failed them utterly, completely, and totally. They’re about to rectify that situation. You might want to get ahead of that power curve before you find yourself watching folks get loaded onto cattle cars alongside you.
John Ringo on X:
One more post on the subject of the Irish getting their dander up.
The Irish Troubles (a continuous low level insurgency) lasted from the 1960s to 1998. But they were the continuation of “Troubles” stretching back to the 1800s.
1998, that’s a bit over 25 years ago.
Both sides in the Troubles, the Catholics and the Protestants, are one generation away from a civil war that lasted for TWO GENERATIONS.
The Gen Z men of today were raised on the stories of the heroism and patriotism of their fathers and grandfathers and THEY HAVE HAD NO SIMILAR OUTLET.
The IRA did not invent the vehicle borne IED. The Vietnamese used it before them.
They just invented a cocktail from their name as well as a drinking song.
“Former” IRA weapons dealers are still some of the top illegal weapons dealers in the world.
1/10th of “British” SAS come from Ulster. A significant fraction of the British infantry as well.
Many of them served in GWOT so they have a recent master’s class in insurgency.
And now Keir Bloody Starmer and the Irish Government have given BOTH SIDES a reason to start again, but this time UNITED.
We may be about to get a glimpse of what a civil war in the US looks like up against a massive surveillance state.
Take notes.
Update, 12 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
June 10, 2026
To protect under-16s from harmful content, everyone will now need to show their ID online
Australia’s attempt to ban under-16s from accessing social media and other online sites blew up rather quickly. Britain and Canada, seeing what happened down under, chorused “Hold our beers!“:
“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The government is expected to table the Digital Safety Act on Wednesday with reports that it will include a ban on social media for those under 16, framed as a “temporary” measure that platforms can exit once a new digital regulator certifies their safety standards. I have been writing about these issues, from the original Online Harms Act to mandated age verification and website blocking and now the kids’ ban, for several years. This FAQ gathers the analysis in one place, with links throughout to the longer pieces for anyone who wants to go deeper. The key takeaway is that a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements. The policy fails to address the underlying concerns with social media and the prospect of a “temporary” ban makes little sense since the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are permanent.
What is the government reportedly about to introduce?
According to the Globe and Mail, the forthcoming bill would bar anyone under 16 from social media. The government will indicate that this is a temporary safeguard with an opt-back-in once a regulator certifies safety standards. The government will frame this as “temporary” measure, but I argue that once established, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube given that the policy will require a regulator and proof of age from everyone.
Didn’t this start with Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act? What happened to it?
Bill C-63 was the government’s 2024 online harms bill, and from my first-day take I described it as effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of provisions focused on platforms that featured a duty to act responsibly, more contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act provisions, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission modelled on the CRTC to be funded by the tech companies. My view was that the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions should have been dropped or incorporated into a separate piece of legislation. Bill C-63 itself died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election, but the duty-to-act-responsibly model is likely to survive as part of the forthcoming bill.
Why is a kids’ social media ban bad policy?
I set out at least six reasons in this post on the issue. The most important is the first: the harms people associate with social media, such as algorithmic manipulation, addictive engagement design, weak content moderation, inconsistent enforcement, inadequate transparency, and privacy risks, affect users of every age. Treating them as a children’s problem misidentifies both the source of the harm and the right target of regulation. By focusing legislative attention on who is permitted to use social media rather than on how the platforms operate, an age-based ban lets legislators and the companies off the hook from more effective broad-based regulation. The other reasons identified in the post include the absence of evidence that bans work, the privacy harms they create, and the constitutional rights of the children they claim to protect.
Does the ban actually work?
The evidence to date says no. Australia’s under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, and the eSafety Commissioner’s first compliance report found that roughly 70 per cent of children who had accounts before the ban retained access to at least one platform three months later, with no discernible reduction in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints from under-16 users. Children route around age gates through VPNs, borrowed accounts, and false birthdates, and the most at-risk users are the most likely to circumvent them. Professor Lisa Given laid out much of this on a Law Bytes episode before most of the data was even in. Canadian politicians now citing the Australian approach with approval are pointing to a model whose own regulator’s data suggests has thus far proven ineffective. At a recent Canada 2020 event in Ottawa, Australian professor Amanda Third confirmed that kids are actively circumventing the ban and indicated that parents are concerned that their children are now less safe.
Doesn’t polling show overwhelming public support for a ban?
The headline number is real but misleading. The March 2026 Angus Reid Institute survey found that three-quarters of respondents support a full ban on social media for those under 16, and politicians have cited it repeatedly. But as McGill’s Sara Grimes documented on this Law Bytes podcast episode, the less-quoted numbers in the same survey complicate the picture: 72 per cent said parents, not governments, should be primarily responsible for regulating teens’ social media use, only 32 per cent picked 16 as the right threshold, and the survey did not ask respondents anything about the mechanism any ban would actually require. Simply put, public support for “protect kids from harm” is not the same as public support for “every Canadian must submit ID to a third-party provider in order to use the internet”.
Hasn’t social media been proven harmful to kids?
The data on social media harms to kids is far more mixed than is often portrayed in the media and in Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book that has fuelled much of the legislative panic. Grimes has produced a very accessible explainer on the issue that walks through the science. As she notes in Panic First, Evidence Later, “there is a serious problem. Researchers who have spent their entire careers studying adolescent mental health, children’s digital media, developmental science, and media psychology – the people who actually built the evidence base Haidt draws on – have raised sustained, substantive objections to his core claims.”
Read all of Michael Geist’s FAQ here.
June 9, 2026
“… prior opportunities for mental health evaluations were missed”
So shocking a crime, yet the reaction of the elites really does seem to boil down to “black on white violence is just something we have to put up with” or, even worse, “it’s the fault of systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., etc. …”. This was originally posted last year, but nothing significant has changed:
In the 6 weeks since the gruesome murder of Iryna Zarutska, we’ve had time to learn what politicians and the courts and the media think her death means.
And that’s this: Nobody is responsible. Brutal black-on-white violence is either a depersonalized fact of nature, like bad weather, or it’s a sort of just retribution by the oppressed against a racist society. We’re to avert our eyes, to forget the psychotic mumbling “I got that white girl! I got that white girl!” He’s just crazy. The mumbles don’t mean anything, and if they mean something it means that white people deserved it.
But it does mean something very definite. It means that white girls like Iryna can no longer trust that society will make any systematic effort to deter Black psychotics from murdering them.
An LLM, asked to summarize, says “prior opportunities for mental health evaluations were missed”. That agentless, passive language is perfect; no one did anything. No one is responsible, and no one, not even the murderer, can be held accountable.
The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of our justice system is to allow grisly murders to happen, as long as the victim sorts into an oppressor class and the perpetrator to sort into an oppressed one. If Iryna’s death hadn’t been caught live on video all our institutions would have colluded to make us forget it.
Institutions like the Community Relations Service. Which for 60 years until President Trump just defunded it, strongarmed white victims of racial hate crimes into keeping silent or uttering anodyne denials that race hatred could be a factor.
Blacks, 13% of the population, commit at least 60% of serious index crimes, murder and rape and felony assault. The actual percentage is probably higher, since there’s increasing evidence that Black crime is underreported by police and officials as a way of managing racial tensions downwards. In a fair system, this would predict that a solid majority of the state and federal prison population is Black. The actual percentage is about 33%
Blacks are privileged. They’re under-arrested, under-indicted, under-imprisoned, and (despite popular mythology) less likely to be killed during a police stop than a white person is.
It’s exactly by treating Blacks as a privileged class, licensed to act from racial hatred and mumble “I got that white girl!”, that we got to the point where. Iryna Zarutka bled to death on live video.
The grimmest fact about her murder other than the horrific death itself is that six weeks later, nobody is talking about black privilege.
It’s time to start having that conversation, and it’s time to start using the term “black privilege” for the combination of systematic averaion and viciousness that led to Iryna Zarutska dying, innocent and alone and abandoned by the system that should have protected her.
Stop buying stadiums for billionaires!
ReasonTV
Published 6 Feb 2026Sports subsidies suck.
If sports is a trillion dollar industry, with billionaire team owners and millionaire players, and hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic fans, and weird pervert mascot creatures, why is the government giving them your money?
June 6, 2026
Lies “in a good cause” are still frickin’ lies
This was posted in late May, but only came to my attention today, so apologies if you’ve already waded through the details here:
The problem with this meme is … well, just read the article.
This meme keeps entering my feed and it bugs me every time I see it. For search engines and the visually impaired: it shows, on the left, a large McDonald’s French fry priced at $1.99. On the right, it shows a delectable fruit cup, including mixed berries, cubed melon, and prominent slices of starfruit priced at $5.99. The caption above both declares, “The Problem With Our Food System”.
Invariably, this meme is met with earnest rejoinders, often in thread 🧵 form, explaining the complexities of food distribution. One particularly clever one that I just saw introduces the concept of “Malicious Design” as a sort of secular creationism where the limitations imposed by nature are imagined as human systems intentionally engineered to harm the masses. Threads like these usually go on to describe how potatoes are cheap, hardy, and practically preserve themselves, while berries are delicate, seasonal, and expensive to ship. They argue that the price difference is simply the natural consequence of supply chains, not the machinations of a capitalist oligarchy trying to keep the proletariat down.
All of that might be true.
But it doesn’t matter.
Because the entire discussion rests on a premise that is demonstrably false.
Not the stuff about potatoes or berries or supply chains. Not even the stuff about the oligarchs insofar as, if they are trying to poison us, they are doing a middling job at best. The problem is that everyone accepts the meme’s starting point as if it were genuine. They never check the most basic fact: the prices themselves!!!
Let’s start with the French fries, because they are on the left and because I have the McDonald’s app on my phone. I can tell you without looking that $1.99 is the wrong price for a large fry because I am a fast-food proletarian myself.
Behold: in my market — Omaha — the price is $4.39. According to the Interwebs, this is a pretty representative price nationwide outside of larger cities. The reason we are considering a large fry instead of a small, which still comes in at a whopping $3.99, is because the meme uses a picture of a large.
Already, the price of the fruit cup and the French fries are much more comparable. Ah, but those crafty capitalists know that the stupid masses will steer toward the cheaper option, regardless of the health risks, even if it is only to save a penny. That’s how the fast-food-to-pharma pipeline gets you! By tricking you into passing on the much healthier and obviously more delicious fruit cup. (Never mind last week’s newsletter about all the poisonous chemicals they’re spraying on the fruit.)
So, I will check on the fruit cup now. The first wrinkle is that the image of the fruit cup does not come from the McDonald’s app. That’s because McDonald’s doesn’t sell a fruit cup in most — if any — markets. If they did, it would arrive to the store frozen and the kid who was supposed to move it from the freezer to the refrigerator last night will have forgotten to do so, meaning that what you will receive is a cup of brightly colored ice cubes that you can pretend to enjoy in a couple of hours. (source: 5+ years personally serving in the McTrenches coinciding with the deployment of the Fruit ‘n Yogurt Parfaitâ„¢.) In other word, you will not see these two items side-by-side on the menu.
And this is where it gets tricky. Because I can’t actually find that particular fruit cup. Reverse image search turns up a big fat nada. Not on any fast food site, online grocery store, stock photo outlet, food blog, or news page.
Read the whole thing, I believe is the term d’art for this. H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.
Brave browser users and X’s latest algorithm changes
While I use the Brave web browser, I don’t access the social media site formerly known as Twitter with it, so I haven’t seen the described behaviour, thank goodness:
Recent algorithm changes on X may be unfairly hammering Brave users. And there’s a larger issue here about bad interactions between robots and privacy measures.
@nikitabier
@braveMy friend Jay Maynard, who some of you may know as Tron Guy, just got permabanned off X for “inauthentic behavior”. His appeal was swiftly denied.
Jay is not a spammer, scammer or engagement farmer; he is, in fact, exactly the kind of good citizen X says it wants. Jay asked Gemini for analysis, and now thinks he knows what happened.
Brave, as a privacy measure, randomly changes the identity presented to sites in order to avoid tracking by the ad vampires. Gemini suggested that some code at X interpreted this as spammy behavior using multiple browsers. If so – and this does seem plausible – everybody trying to protect their privacy with Brave is at risk.
This is a general problem, not just an X glitch or a Brave issue. Social media sites are increasingly relying for security on forms of heuristic AI that are prone to unacceptably high false-positive rates.
More specifically, platforms are increasingly treating a user’s refusal to be tracked, fingerprinted, and categorized as a hostile act. When a site makes it impossible to connect via a privacy-focused user agent without getting flagged as a malicious bot, it stops being “security” and effectively becomes a retaliatory lockout for protecting oneself.
Worse yet, such system architecture provides no circuit breaker – humans are only rarely and exceptionally asked review for errors. Jay’s appeal denial came back so fast that it was obvious no meat-brain ever saw it. He has filed complaints within the Minnesota Attorney General and the Better Business Bureau, because what else can he do? The robots have locked him out.
Badly designed robots and zeal to squeeze human oversight out of the system forces regular citizens to rely on state law enforcement or consumer protection bureaus.
Allow me to gently suggest to the people running X that unless you want politicians poking their noses into your business and imposing constraints on you that you are not going to like, you need to fix your security and appeal processes so running to the law isn’t necessary.
