Quotulatiousness

June 21, 2024

Fractal dissidence

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

Fortissax notes some historic parallels between the many, many factions in Spain leading up to the catastrophe of the Spanish Civil War and the many, many factions of the dissident right in the Anglosphere and the rest of the diminishing western world today:

The Spanish Civil War, approximate Nationalist (pink) and Republican (blue) areas of control in September, 1936.
Map by NordNordWest with modifications by “Sting” via Wikimedia Commons.

We have serious issues on our hands. We must each contribute through our respective projects and instigate real-world change by pen, sword, or ploughshare. We don’t have time to split, fracture, insult, belittle, destroy each other’s reputations, or engage in character assassination. I liken the factionalism of the (terminally) online right to that of the factions in the Spanish Civil War. The online right is important because the internet is the new “public square”. As influential or more, as mass-action in living, breathing cities. The influence of discourse, media, and content on the internet is insurmountable. While small locally, the impact of each content maker, producer, writer, poet, and videographer is huge. We are part of a civilizational, some would even say global, culture, yet not of it. I will provide examples of some similarities I notice while reading through Peter Kemp’s “Mine Were of Trouble”.

In the buildup to the Spanish Civil War, you had conservative patriots (populists, anti-woke patriot-normies), traditionalist Christian monarchists (who parallel Christ-Is-King people), and the Falangist (who parallel the Vitalists, secular-right). This roughly, parallels the groupings of the Dissident Right today. I believe this is a good case study. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. All of them had a lot more in common than they opposed. For example, consider the following points:

  • Anti-Communism: Both the Falangists and the Requetés were strongly anti-communist and opposed the Spanish Republic, which they associated with communism, liberalism, and anarchism. They viewed the leftist factions as threats to Spanish traditions, religion, and social order. Today, the Managerial Elite of every single western country has weaponized the New-Left of decades past to use as shock troops against the good people of each nation. We all agree the mass psychosis of capital backed DEI civic cult, their nihilistic, suicidal anti-life acolytes are the most destructive group the human species has ever seen.
  • Support for Strong Leaders: Both groups eventually supported General Francisco Franco’s leadership, despite some initial differences in ideology and goals. Franco’s ability to unify the Nationalist forces was crucial to their eventual victory. In many Western countries today, people are rallying behind Trump, Bardella, Farage, Bernier to name a few. They are not perfect, but they are increasingly influenced by Dissident Right ideas, and culture.
  • Nationalism: The Falangists and the Requetés were deeply nationalist, believing in the unity and greatness of Spain. They were committed to preserving Spain as a single, undivided nation-state. Today, Dissidents of all stripes support nationalism an civilizational cooperation against outside threats like China, the emerging Republic of India, and the Islamic world, who seek to make excursions in Europe.
  • Militarism: Both factions believed in the application of force when necessary to achieve their goals and restore order in Spain. They were heavily involved in the Nationalist military efforts during the civil war. Both the religious right, and the secular Vitalists ostensibly believe a strong body, mind and soul are necessary to enact change. Both hold excellence as a core value, although perhaps one more than the other.
  • Benevolent Authoritarianism: Both the Falangists and the Requetés supported authoritarian forms of government. While the Falangists leaned towards a Nietzsche inspired model, the Requetés, rooted in traditional Christian monarchism, were also supportive of strong, centralized authority to maintain order and uphold traditional values.
  • Natural Social Order: Both groups believed in a natural social order or organic hierarchy. This concept held that society should be structured according to natural, hierarchical lines, which they saw as inherent and beneficial for maintaining stability and harmony. Do the religious right, and the Vitalists not believe this? That the strong, the beautiful, healthy, are fit to lead? That the most capable should be given the opportunity to advance socially?
  • Community Over Individual: While recognizing and respecting the Western man’s innate streak of liberty and individualism, both groups prioritized the needs and values of the community over the individual. They believed that individuals found their true purpose and identity within the larger community and that communal values should guide social and political life. When everyone is doing their part, all prosper.

“Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens”

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

Tim Worstall responds to a recent Medium essay by Julia Steinberger which illustrates that “neoliberal” has joined “fascist” as a generic term to indicate strong disapproval of a person, organization, or idea:

The idea that an adult woman can believe these things is just amazeballs. But here we are. A tweet from Julia Steinberger leads to her Medium essay about what’s wrong with the world.

An upheaval in 10 chapters:

    1. The cause. We know the climate crisis is brought to us by highly unequal and undemocratic economic systems.

Err, no? Emissions are emissions. 100 people emitting one tonne each is exactly the same as 1 person emitting 100 tonnes. Sure, it’s true that a more unequal society will have more people emitting those 100 tonne personal amounts. But a more equal society will have more people able to emit another 1 tonne each. For, more equality is by definition the movement of some of those assets of the richer to those poorer — the economic assets which either allow or do the emitting. Sure, Jim Ratcliffe’s £50,000 private jet flight emits more than my £100 Easyjet one. But if we take the £50k off Jim and give it to 500 folk like me then all 500 of us might spend the marginal income on an Easyjet flight each — which would be more emissions than Jim’s spending of the money.

It simply is not true that economic inequality is the heart, the core or the cause of climate change. It’s idiocy to think it is too.

Of course, we know what’s happening here. Climate Change is Bad, M’Kay? Which it is, obviously. Economic inequality is Bad, M’Kay? Well, there the evidence is a great deal more mixed but whatever. But in the minds of the stupid all bad things have the same cause. So, if inequality is bad, climate change is bad, then they must be the same thing because they’re Bad, M’Kay?

    2. The rise. The recent history of these economic systems, in the Americas and Eurasia, is dominated by the ascendance of neoliberal ideology.

Oh, that is good. Given that I am a neoliberal — a fully paid up one, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and all — that’s very good. Given HS2, looming wealth taxation, the increased bite of idiot regulation and all that I can’t say that I see neoliberalism as winning right now but that might depend upon your starting point. If you’re a socialist — or an idiot but I repeat myself — you might well regard the plenitude of bananas in the supermarket as neoliberal. After all, that is something that socialism never did achieve.

    3. The threat. Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens.

And, well, you know, bollocks. The very beating heart of neoliberalism is that corporations need to be controlled and they’re best controlled by the citizens. In the form of free markets rather than voting on which bureaucrats get the gold plated pension, true. But neoliberals are between indifferent and actually against capitalist power. The whole nub of the idea is that markets do the job of controlling capitalists better than bureaucrats, politicians or, obviously, capitalists.

There’s not really any way for her thesis to survive after getting so much of the basics wrong, is there?

But just one more tidbit:

    Hayek and his neoliberal colleagues now needed another, antidemocratic way, to organise society. They didn’t want democracy, but they wanted some kind of self-maintaining organisation — by which they meant hierarchy. Organisation was supposed to be supplied by the market, and hierarchy by competition within markets. (It’s worth noting that neoliberals in the 1950s did not, although they should have, predict that unfettered markets lead to concentrations in monopolies or cartels. They would arguably disapprove of the vast corporations running our current economies, even though their market-above-democracy policies predictably brought them into being.)

Well, that wasn’t actually the last tidbit. But the idea that Friedman, Mises, Menger, Hayek and the rest didn’t worry about monopolies? Jesu C is really bouncin’ on that pogo stick right now. And then the idea that democracy will be better bulwark against monopolies than markets? Can you actually do backflips on a pogo stick?

June 20, 2024

The “Idiot Nephew Theory” of show business management

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

Ted Gioia recalls his hopes of getting into the entertainment industry after graduation:

The story of how I became a strategy consultant is shameful.

I was a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and needed a job after graduation. I wanted to work in the music or entertainment industries — but I soon learned this was an impossible dream.

They didn’t want me. And they didn’t want my classmates either.

Hundreds of companies came to our business school to recruit talent, and they included most of the leading US corporations. So I talked with everybody — Coca Cola, Morgan Stanley, Atari, Procter & Gamble, you name it.

But no record label or movie studio ever showed up. They didn’t even send job listings.

Can you guess why?

I asked around on campus and was told the following (off the record):

    Come on, Ted. You will never see the entertainment business recruit here. Those folks are not looking for business talent.

    They give the choice jobs to their family members — the idiot nephew gets hired, not an MBA. Even better if it’s an idiot son.

    And if there are other openings? Well … You’ve heard about the casting couch, haven’t you? Let me give you a hint — that couch isn’t just for auditioning the cast.

    But you wouldn’t want a job there even if they gave you one. When time comes for a promotion, the drooling idiot nephew moves up — not you.

I’ve never shared that story before — because I know how people inside the music business hate hearing it.

And maybe it’s not a fair story.

All I can say is that I found this advice very helpful. I stopped planning on a career in the music business. And I also developed a very useful theory to explain why record labels are so bad at making strategic decisions.

I call it the “Idiot Nephew Theory”:

    THE IDIOT NEPHEW THEORY: Whenever a record label makes a strategic decision, it picks the option that the boss’s idiot nephew thinks is best.

And what does the idiot nephew decide? That’s easy — they always do whatever the company lawyer recommends.

Maybe this theory is wrong. All I can say is that it helps me predict events in the entertainment industry with a surprising degree of accuracy.

I always operate on the assumption that there’s no business strategy in the music or movie business — only legal maneuvering.

Years later, when the music business got totally reamed by tech companies — a phase we’re still living through, by the way — I wasn’t surprised in the least. The record labels respond to every new music technology by litigating, but whenever they encounter a company with more legal clout than them (Apple or Google/YouTube, for example), they simply gave up.

In the future, you can test this theory yourself. You will see that it possesses great explanatory power.

June 18, 2024

“If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are economic parasites … then you have primed them for mass murder”

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

Lorenzo Warby on the malign influence of Karl Marx:

Despite — in some ways because of — all his Theorising about “capitalism”, Marx made no serious attempt to understand the actual dynamics of commerce, creating a (false) theory of economic parasitism (“surplus value”) that — both predictably, and in practice — motivated mass murder. If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are economic parasites — and you and your society is better off without them — then you have primed them for mass murder. Hence, Marx’s theory was used to justify actual Marxist mass-murders, starting with Lenin’s infamous hanging order.

Marx’s economistic systematising created a pretence of being social scientist — to himself and even more to Engels — that many people have maintained ever since. Hence a pre-Darwinian metaphysician is even now regularly treated as if he was a social scientist. This despite being wrong about more or less everything — class, commerce, surplus, immiseration, the state, patterns of history, commodification, division of labour, foraging societies …

As I have noted elsewhere:

    To have a state, farming niches have to be sustainable after taxes are extracted. That means resources are extracted before they turn into extra babies. This means that states create surplus (income above subsistence): indeed, they dominate the creation and extraction of surplus.

The perennial dominance of the state in extraction of surplus — and hence the creation of class structures — is nowhere more obvious than in Marxist states.

Philosopher Charles Taylor pointed out the tension between the claim to being science — and the causal determinism that goes with that — and the messianic vision that motivates Marx’s and Marxist activism. In any tension between the two, the latter wins because it is so powerfully motivating. This includes with Marx himself, which is why his “science” is so profoundly wrong in fact. It exists to justify the messianic vision.

No political (or religious) movement has killed and tyrannised more people than revolutionary Marxism. A Marxist is someone for whom no amount tyranny and mass murder will stop them worshipping the splendour in their head. This testifies to the power of the messianic vision.

Marx was the original launderer of ideas. Over decades of wrestling with the economics of Smith and Ricardo, he laundered — via economic reasoning — the metaphysical conclusions he reached in the 1840s to create a system that would “scientifically” generate and justify those conclusions. That those conclusions went mostly unpublished in his lifetime — with the most dramatic exception being The Communist Manifesto (1848) — does not belie this. Marx himself insisted on the centrality of this period of “self-clarification”.

Nothing he published later significantly contradicted those conclusions. Marx is the archetypal activist scholar, whose activism drives, and so degrades, his scholarship and analysis. He is the key formulator of the Dialectical Faith, that has generated various disastrous spin-offs, from his own economism to Lenin’s Jacobinising of Marxism to the Cultural Marxism of Lukacs and Gramsci, Critical Theory, and all forms of Critical Social Justice.

No form or derivative of the Dialectical Faith have ever generated a net positive contribution to human flourishing, or understanding, compared to available alternatives.

Ibn Khaldun was a far more acute analyst of the role of the state in the economy, and patterns within history, than Marx. Ibn Khaldun sought systematically to understand what he observed, participated in and read about. He was not laundering ideas, not justifying pre-set conclusions, nor judging evidence by his Theory.

Ibn Khaldun was a social scientist (arguably the first). Marx was not, he was pretending to be one (including to himself).

The Dialectical Faith holds that history is driven by dialectical process that transforms society from an oppressive past to a future liberated from constraints, if the oppressive elements of society are suppressed or abolished. As Marx tells us, our productive capacity will be so great, that we will so humanise the world, that division of labour will end for:

    In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Marx was not engaged in scientific enquiry but pseudo-scientific, or scientistic — the form of science without the substance — justification of already reached conclusions. He regularly judges and chooses evidence based on Theory, a pattern that has become endemic within all forms of Marxism and its spinoffs (such as Critical Theory). Marx exemplifies the activist principle that “what I can imagine — however self-contradictory — is so much better than what others have struggled to achieve”.

Marx’s picture of the evils of division of labour is metaphysical twaddle flatly contradicted by any serious study of the role of division of labour — and, for that matter, commodification — in production at scale. How can division of labour be such an alienating evil when it is built into sexual reproduction, into every eusocial species, even into the cells of every single complex organism?

The answer is via a ludicrous quasi-theological metaphysical inflation of human consciousness and creativity. Marx collectivises — through his notion of species-being — the Romantic notion of human fulfilment through self-expression.

Freddie deBoer contra J.J. McCullough on Conspiracy Theories

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

I saw JJ’s latest video pop up on my YouTube subscriptions page, read the headline and winced slightly. I generally like JJ’s videos even when I disagree with his presentation or interpretation and from the title, I thought “No, ‘many conspiracy theories’ did NOT ‘turn out to be true'” would require a fair bit of, uh, curation of the theories that get discussed. Freddie deBoer — who I disagree with much more than I do with McCullough — had a similar reaction:

The latest video from conservative Canadian YouTuber JJ McCullough displays many of the attributes that make his perspective unique — he’s genuinely a right-wing figure but an arch institutionalist, a gay Millennial with the kind of vague social libertinism common to a lot of libertarian-leaning conservatives but something of a scold, a Canadian patriot who relentlessly defends the United States from the kinds of criticism of Americanah that you might associate with Europe or, well, Canada — critiques of our provincialism, our consumerism, our boorish tendency to shove the rest of the world around. McCullough likes all of that stuff, more or less, while living a cosmopolitan and vaguely-arty lifestyle in groovy Vancouver. He’s perhaps best known for his war with Montreal, Francophone Canadians, and the entire province of Quebec, which fits his general esteem for a certain kind of capital-R Reasonable Anglophilia.

He reminds me, strangely, of a certain kind of secular anti-atheist, the type who still gets mad about the New Atheists despite the complete collapse of that subculture and whose own lack of belief doesn’t prevent them from waxing poetic about the glories of religion. I have a friend from grad school who grew up in an extremely repressive Christian community when she was young, and who describes leaving as an “escape”. (The kind of community where she and her sisters wore wrist-to-ankle dresses every day of their lives no matter the Oklahoma heat, weren’t allowed TV or radio, absorbed lots of corporal punishment, that sort of thing.) She has very, very little patience for people who are so annoyed by internet atheists that they become in effect advocates for religion; as she says, this kind of vague fondness for religion among the irreligious could only occur to someone who never had to live the way she did. I sort of see the same thing in McCullough — he idealizes certain aspects of America’s ethos because he has never had to live with the consequences of being surrounded by people who believe in it, who consciously or unconsciously demand that everyone else believe in it.

Anyhow, this new video is about conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are a good topic for understanding McCullough’s very particular ideological makeup. Conspiracy theories are famously a cross-ideological phenomenon, with both left conspiracy theories and right conspiracy theories but also conspiracy theories that don’t fit neatly into either, like 9/11 trutherism. As I said, McCullough is an institutionalist, a small-but-good government sort of guy (or so I take it) who places a great deal of value in official claims, institutions, and experts, and so he’s naturally distrustful of conspiracy theories. And he demonstrates that antipathy in this video through poking holes in a few clickbaity articles listing conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. This all amounts to feasting on a banquet of low-hanging fruit, but it’s not an illegitimate way to approach the question. I just don’t like his conclusions.

The key to McCullough’s bit here is that he doesn’t dispute that the named conspiracy theories (or “conspiracy theories”) that are asserted to be true are true. Rather, he operates by insisting that every identified conspiracy theory is in fact not a conspiracy theory according to his preferred definition. It’s not sufficient for a conspiracy theory to be broadly thought of as a conspiracy theory; it has to comport to specific rules he has devised for what a conspiracy theory entails. Effectively, that means that a conspiracy theory is only a conspiracy theory if it satisfies criteria endorsed by no one but JJ McCullough. I can’t decide if this is an isolated demand for rigor or a No True Scotsman, but either way, McCullough is here insisting on an unusually stringent definition of a conspiracy theory for the purpose of dismissing the idea that any conspiracy theories are true. And there’s a version of this that isn’t entirely wrong; there’s a tautological sense in which all conspiracy theories are false because being false is part of that definition of a conspiracy theory. But McCullough isn’t using that definition, just a particularly odd one that makes his task easier.

So the fact that cigarette manufacturers knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health but conspired to hide this fact from the public is not a conspiracy theory, according to McCullough, because other people of that era suspected that cigarettes caused lung cancer. (Actually proving that took a very long time, at least according to modern standards of causality.) I find this argument powerfully strange! You had a group of powerful people, they indisputably knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health, they indisputably conspired to suppress that information, they were fairly effective at that task. The fact that some early whistleblowers tried to raise the alarm is simply irrelevant. Check out my own proprietary formula.

Group of Powerful or Influential People + Nefarious Intent + Secrecy + Active Conspiring + Negative Consequences, Real or Potential = Conspiracy Theory

That’s a conspiracy, brother, and the tobacco company bad behavior fits. Long before information about their coverups became public knowledge, people were talking about the possibility that the tobacco companies were up to that exact bad behavior. Theorizing, you might say.

June 17, 2024

For want of a security clearance, the (potential) traitors escaped scot-free

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

In the free-to-cheapskates section of this week’s Dispatch from The Line, we get a summary of the state of brain-freeze in Parliament over the NSICOP (National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians) report, that in a functioning state would have triggered much more action than it has in the dysfunctional Dominion:

The cover of the NSICOP special report on foreign interference (PDF – https://nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf )

The lead story this week, clearly, was the continuing fallout from the NSICOP report last week. Because of this report, even though there is much that we do not know, there are absolutely some things that are clearly established. Let’s run through some of the key points that are uncontested and draw some very modest and safe conclusions from them.

Here are facts.

  • There are multiple parliamentarians, meaning members of the House of Commons and the Senate, who have been deemed by eight of their colleagues to be engaged in activities with hostile foreign powers on either a witting or semi-witting basis.
  • The prime minister and the PMO have been aware of who these individuals are for at least a month, if not longer. That is when NSICOP filed its unredacted report to them for review, as required.

The above facts are unchallenged. Now let’s draw a few conclusions.

The phrasing of the NSICOP report, as well as both Elizabeth May’s and Jagmeet Singh’s press conferences this week, led us to believe some of these individuals are still sitting in both the House of Commons and the Senate. We acknowledge that Elizabeth May and Jagmeet Singh differ considerably on the severity of what these individuals are alleged to have done, but both seem to agree that the relevant parties, in at least some cases, remain in Parliament.

The prime minister, as the person responsible for the administrative and legal apparatus of government, could call the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Director of CSIS, the minister of public safety and others as necessary into his office today, and inform them that he would be making the names public, and that it would be the responsibility of those individuals to figure out how that could be accomplished while protecting intelligence sources and methods. At this time, there is no indication that he has done so, or has any interest in doing so.

So we got the grotesque theatre that was the House of Commons this week. The government has spent the last week and change challenging various opposition leaders to obtain security clearances so that they could view information that the prime minister has had for at least a month, and perhaps longer, even though both the Security of Information Act and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act (depending on the auspices under which their security clearances were issued) prevents them from disclosing what they read.

And, therefore, doing anything about it. Because to remove a caucus member would be to reveal it, and if a leader has no caucus members that are implicated, there is no urgency to their reading the report.

Protecting the national security of Canada, and the democratic institution of parliament itself, is the prime minister’s job before it is anyone else’s. And the prime minister has had this information for at least a month.

It’s worth repeating that because we want you to envision something. Imagine there are three U.S. Senators accused of aiding and abetting a foreign power, and Joe Biden knew about it for a month.

When do you think impeachment proceedings would start?

Boris Johnson was unceremoniously dumped by his party for lying about throwing a party during COVID lockdowns (and we have no problem with that). Our prime minister has known that there are people currently sitting in parliament that have turned themselves into intelligence assets for hostile foreign powers for a month, and …

… the government would like you to know that it thinks Pierre Poilievre should get a security clearance so that he can read the documents.

We think Poilievre should, too. Because here’s the thing. The Security of Information Act says right there in Section 24 “No prosecution shall be commenced for an offence against this Act without the consent of the Attorney General”.

That reads to us like so: Pierre Poilievre can read those documents, release the names, and then dare Justin Trudeau to prosecute him. Indeed, anyone with the names could.

Your Line editors have raised this before on the podcast, but it bears repeating. Canada’s international reputation has taken a lot of hits lately. So imagine if you would, gentle reader, a situation where Justin Trudeau’s Attorney General signs off on having his political opponent arrested for revealing that hostile foreign powers have coerced sitting MPs into becoming intelligence assets … especially if one or more of those MPs is revealed to be a Liberal.

That’s a front page international news story. We’d look like a banana republic. Our international reputation would take decades to recover.

Spoiler: we already do look like a banana republic and our international reputation is lower than it has ever been. Trudeau isn’t a dummy: he figures that our reputation literally can’t get much worse no matter what he does, so he’s choosing to protect … someone … and what’s Poilievre going to do? He proved during the lockdowns that he’s not willing to get arrested on a matter of principle (unlike Maxime Bernier), so he’s likely to just posture endlessly until something new pops up in the silly season news rotation.

5 Foods that Changed Fast Food Forever (ft. @mythicalkitchen)

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Mar 8, 2024

The Mythical Kitchen Cookbook by Josh Scherer: https://amzn.to/49Se1qZ

Recipe at https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes
(more…)

June 15, 2024

In Germany, it can be dangerous to “participat[e] in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembl[e] one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources”

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

German government control over what people can say online seems like something Justin Trudeau would love to have (and, in fact, is working toward) here in Canada:

Almost two years ago, on 26 July 2022, a German Twitter user known only as MicLiberal posted a thread that culminated in his criminal trial this week. His is but the latest in a long line of such prosecutions – the tactic our rulers increasingly favour to intimidate and harass those who use their freedom of expression in inconvenient ways.

MicLiberal committed his alleged offence as Germany was still awakening from months of hypervaccination insanity. Science authorities and politicians had spent the winter decrying the “tyranny of the unvaccinated“, demanding that “we have to take care of the unvaccinated, and … make vaccination compulsory“, firing people who protested institutional vaccine mandates on social media and denouncing the unvaccinated for ongoing virus restrictions and Covid deaths. Our neighbour, Austria, even went so far as to impose a specific lockdown on those who refused the Covid vaccines. Culturally and politically, those were the darkest months I have ever lived through; they changed my life forever and I will never forget them.

MicLiberal’s thread aimed only to memorialise some of the crazy things the vaccinators had said. It opened with this tweet:

    We were complicit!

    We marginalised, defamed, discredited, insulted and cancelled people. On behalf of science!

    By popular demand, this brief thread with statements that should not be forgotten:

There ensued nothing but a series of citations, most of them wholly typical samples of vintage 2021/22 vaccinator rhetoric, much of it not even that remarkable. For example, MicLiberal included this statement from Andreas Berholz, deputy editor-in-chief of the widely read blog Der Volksverpetzer:

    Fact-check: The unvaccinated remain the main drivers of the pandemic.

[…]

You might be wondering what crime MicLiberal can possibly have committed by drawing attention to these already-public statements. The most honest answer is that his thread achieved millions of views in a matter of days, and at a very awkward moment – precisely when everyone was beginning to regret all the illiberal and wildly intemperate things they had said in the depths of the virus craze. He had embarrassed some very vain and powerful people with their own incredibly stupid words, and today many are of the opinion that that ought to be a crime in and of itself.

Alas, things have not yet deteriorated that far. Thus the police and prosecutors were left to scour our dense thicket of laws for a more plausible offence. They decided that their best chance lay with a novel provision of the German Criminal Code (Paragraph 126a). This provision makes it a crime to “disseminate the personal data of another person in a matter that is … intended to expose this person … to the risk of a criminal offence directed against them“. On 28 July, two days after MicLiberal posted his 25 tweets, Cologne police filed a criminal complaint against him, and afterwards the Cologne prosecutor’s office brought charges, arguing that MicLiberal had suggested that the people he cited were “perpetrators” and therefore associated them with “fascism”. The district court declined to approve the charges, but the prosecutors appealed to the regional court, where the judges saw things differently. They believed that a prosecution was warranted because of the “heated social debate” surrounding Covid measures, and because MicLiberal’s audience was composed of “homogeneous” like-minded people, who (in the summary of the Berliner Zeitung) “could either form groups or encourage individual members to commit acts of violence”. MicLiberal had furthermore assembled his citations from a website that the judges deemed guilty of an “anti-government orientation”.

We must take a moment to ponder this truly amazing argumentation, which would seem to criminalise such things as participating in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembling one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources. In each of these cases, of course, it is the prosecutors and the judges eager to apply Paragraph 126a to their political opponents who get to decide what is “wrong”.

The good news in all of this is that the court acquitted him of these creative charges, but the prosecution has given notice that they intend to appeal.

The Ford Foundation and the far left

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

N.S. Lyons looks at the vast amount of money the “philanthropic” Ford Foundation donates to organizations pushing far left agendas:

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution”. Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people”, she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city”, surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power”.

It’s May 2023, and protesters have stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to demand that lawmakers not accept spending cuts during negotiations to lift the debt ceiling. Many are so disruptive that the police arrest them and drag them out. These are activists of the Center for Popular Democracy, an extreme left-wing organization that has collected $35.2 million from the Ford Foundation since 2012. Four months later, they will be imitated by 150 youth activists from the “climate revolution” group the Sunrise Movement, 18 of whom will be arrested after occupying the Speaker of the House’s office. The Sunrise Movement also receives Ford Foundation money—$650,000 for “training and organizing”.

It’s April 2023, and, a world away, the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a think tank set up and directed by the Chinese state, is hosting a conference in Beijing to discuss how to “promote the formation of an internationally accepted ESG system with Chinese characteristics”, including through China’s globe-spanning influence and infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. But this effort by America’s top geopolitical adversary isn’t too far afield for the Ford Foundation to fund; it has given CDRF $600,000 to help realize its ambitions.

These examples from just the last year — collected via a semi-random tour of the Ford Foundation’s vast Grants Database — represent a tiny fraction of the nearly $1 billion that the foundation gives away yearly, on average. Almost a century old and sitting on a mountainous $16.4 billion endowment in 2022, the foundation is a “philanthropic” giant — one of the five largest in the U.S. If it were a for-profit firm, its market capitalization would rank it among the Fortune 500. Instead, “guided by a vision of social justice”, as its mission statement puts it, the Ford Foundation’s enormous flood of untaxed money flows annually to an immense ecosystem of overwhelmingly left-wing — and often outright revolutionary — causes.

Yet the foundation’s activities remain largely below the public’s radar, the extent of its malign history mostly unknown. This should change. America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress”. Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.

In 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a “racial reckoning” swept the United States, kindling fiery riots across the nation, abrupt moves by municipalities to defund police departments, and the near-wholesale capitulation of public institutions — from universities to government agencies to major corporations — to a culturally revolutionary ideology of identitarian grievance and racial separatism. To some, this came as a shock. To the Ford Foundation, it marked the fulfillment of decades of effort.

The foundation has long seen itself as uniquely dedicated to progress and social justice, its stated mission from as early as the 1950s being the “general purpose of advancing human welfare” and to “eradicate the causes of suffering” worldwide. But after current president Darren Walker took the helm in 2013, it began more fully to embrace a public identity as a “social justice foundation” and reoriented its mission to “disrupt the drivers of inequality” in every sphere of life and across the globe.

QotD: Is there more craziness these days or is it just the volume turned up to 11?

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

… Is there, in fact, more lunacy in the Current Year, or is it just louder? He argued that there’s more. I argue that there’s not. Victorians, for instance, were world-class eccentrics. Just to stick with the breakfast cereal theme, consider that Kellogg’s corn flakes were based on some weird theory of digestion that was designed to combat the scourge of masturbation. No, really — the Sylvester Graham referenced in that article is the guy behind graham crackers, which were designed for similar reasons. See also “Fletcherism”, which counted Thomas Edison among its adherents. And that’s just food! Water, electricity, magnetism, you name it, there’s some weird Victorian health fad attached to it. Throw in the peccadilloes, sexual and otherwise, of just the widespread missionary movements, and you’ve got all the crazy you can handle, and then some.

Contrast this to the Current Year, where, much like breakfast food, what seems to be a bewildering variety of lunacy can be boiled down to just a few basic types. “Wokeness” is a madlib with just two variables: ____ is either racist or sexist, pick one. (I suppose you can combine them, but you’ll notice that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d predict, because the blacks hate the gays and the feminists hate everyone, so going full retard ends up getting you in a lot of trouble with your coreligionists).

Severian, “Mail Bag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-11.

June 14, 2024

Britain’s anti-gay hate crime epidemic

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

Andrew Doyle suggests you take the recent reports of burgeoning hate crime in Britain with a fair bit of salt, because the hate crime statistics are far from trustworthy:

When things like this can be reported as “hate crimes”, and the definition depends on the reporter’s assumption of hateful intent, you’re going to see a lot more “hate crimes”.

We all know by now that the Metro is an activist publication masquerading as a newspaper. And so we ought to approach with some caution its article this week claiming that the UK has seen a surge in hate crime against gay people. There’s even a handy rainbow-coloured map which pinpoints the most homophobic locations in the country. Thankfully St Ives isn’t on the list, so I won’t have to cancel my holiday.

What are we to make of the article’s claim that there has been a 462% increase in homophobic hate crime and a 1,426% increase in transphobic hate crime since 2012? The source for these remarkable figures is the House of Commons Hate Crime Statistics report. If true, it would seem to confirm activists’ claims that we are living in an anti-LGBTQIA+ hellhole.

The truth is not so melodramatic. The supposed escalation of hate crimes in the UK can be accounted for by the way in which they are now recorded. Police actively trawl for complaints, inviting citizens to report offensive comments or any action – criminal or otherwise – that the “victim” perceives to have been motivated by prejudice. No evidence of “hate” is required for it to be recorded as such, other than the assumption of the complainant. With such methodology in place, it is inevitable that the statistics will rise.

And perhaps that’s the whole point. The police in the UK are just one of the many major institutions that has been captured by intersectional ideology. Police are regularly seen dancing at Pride parades, driving rainbow-coloured cars, and harassing gender-critical women for wrongthink. In February 2021 in Merseyside – a county that tops the Metro‘s list of homophobic hate spots – police were photographed next to a digital advertisement which read “Being offensive is an offence”. This belief-system can only be sustained by the narrative of widespread hate, and so we should not be surprised to see that police practice has been modified to ensure this outcome.

In fact, the College of Policing had made it clear that a fall in hate crime statistics would not be acceptable. Its operational guidance says that “targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate”. And by the Home Office’s own admission, “increases in police-recorded hate crime in recent years have been driven by improvements in crime recording and a better identification of what constitutes a hate crime”. In other words, there is no hate crime epidemic at all. It’s simply that the definitions have expanded.

Rather than rely on the Home Office statistics, we would be better turning to a source that hasn’t been corrupted by ideology. The Crime Survey for England and Wales hasn’t adopted the new police methods of recording, and shows that hate crime has been consistently dropping. Between 2008 and 2020, the number of hate crimes fell by 38%, and all the while records of hate crime kept by the police kept on rising. The disparity between the reality and the narrative couldn’t be more stark.

When propaganda wins over historical facts, Ontario public schools edition

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

To someone of my generation (late boomer/early GenX), the history of the Residential School system was taught, at least superficially, in middle school. Along with the early settlement of what is now Canada by the French and later the English (with a very brief nod to the Vikings, of course), we got a cursory introduction to the relationships among the European settlers and explorers and the various First Nations groups they encountered. It wasn’t in great depth — what is taught in great depth in middle school? — but we got a rough outline. In my case, details about the Residential School system came more from a “young adult” novel about a young First Nations student running away from his school and trying to find his way back to his home and family. My best friend in school had First Nations ancestry, so I felt a strong desire to understand the book and the system and culture portrayed in it.

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

If, in the early 1970s, the Ontario school system taught at least a bit about the history of the First Nations peoples, how is it possible that they stopped doing so and my son’s generation were utterly blindsided by the sensationalist treatment of the students at a particular Residential School in British Columbia? And as a result, were far more credulous and willing to believe the worst that the “anticolonialist” propagandists could come up with.

“Igor Stravinsky” is a teacher in the Ontario school system who writes under a pseudonym for fairly obvious reasons, as he’s not a believer in the modern narrative about the history of First Nations children in the Residential School system:

This will be my last instalment of this series. I have attempted to shed light on the poor quality of information students are receiving in Ontario schools with regard to Indigenous history and current issues. It is important to note that this is being done intentionally. It is to the advantage of the leaders of the Indigenous Grievance Industry to characterise Canada and the pre-Canadian colonies of this land as genocidal oppressors, and our politicians have exploited this situation for crass political gain. This was perhaps epitomised by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s photo op of himself holding a teddy bear in the proximity of a soil disturbance in a field at the site of a former residential school in Cowessess First Nation, Saskatchewan on Tuesday, July 6, 2021:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear in Cowessess First Nation, Saskatchewan.
July 6, 2021.

Are there actually human remains there? If so, of whom? Is this evidence of any kind of foul play? These are questions he was not about to bother to ask. Why would he, when such a golden opportunity to score political points presented itself?

We now know all this murdered Indigenous children stuff was a big hoax but don’t hold your breath waiting for Trudeau to issue an apology for staining the international reputation of Canada and triggering a knee-jerk vote by our Parliament declaring Canada a genocidal state and adopting the The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (more on that below). Undoing all this damage will be a herculean task.

Just as students are fed simplistic, misleading, and false information about the past with regard to Indigenous people (the focus being the Indian Residential Schools) they are being presented with the point of view that human rights violations against the Indigenous people are ongoing, and are the reason for the poor quality of life in which such a disproportionate number of Indigenous people find themselves.

The claim of generational trauma

On Apr. 27, 2010, speaking as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and for the people of Canada, Sinclair told the Ninth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues: “For roughly seven generations nearly every Indigenous child in Canada was sent to a residential school. They were taken from their families, tribes and communities, and forced to live in those institutions of assimilation.”

This lie is promoted in the schools. It is the foundation of the generational trauma claim but in fact, during the IRS era, perhaps 30% of Status Indians (you can cut that figure in half if you include all people who identify as Indigenous) ever attended, and for an average of 4.5 years.

Even if it were true that most Indigenous people who attended the IRS suffered trauma, there is no evidence or logical reason to believe that trauma could be transferred down the generations. If generational trauma is a thing, why have the descendants of the victims of the holocaust been doing so well?

If there is generational trauma, the culprit is alcohol. Alcohol abuse has been a major problem in Indigenous communities since first contact but rarely comes up these days, certainly not in schools. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), which occurs when a mother consumes alcohol during pregnancy, is also a major problem and the children born with it suffer from mental and emotional challenges throughout their lives. It impacts their social life, education and work. Girls who suffer from the condition all too often end up drinking during pregnancy themselves and the cycle continues.

June 12, 2024

“Treason never prospers” … except in Canadian politics, apparently

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

Justin Trudeau and his unindicted co-conspirators in Canada’s federal parliament don’t think the names of Members of Parliament who have been acting as enablers or actual agents of foreign powers — that is, possible traitors — should be made public. The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) Even the least cynical may be forgiven for thinking that this isn’t what a mature country would do in similar circumstances:

The cover of the NSICOP special report on foreign interference (PDF here)

… MPs have an obligation to protect the institution that is the House of Commons. Every MP is required as a condition of taking their seats, to swear the following oath: “I, [name], do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles the Third, King of Canada, his heirs and successors. So help me God.”

The violation of that oath, or the suspected violation of that oath, is absolutely arguably contempt against the House of Commons. We don’t have a ton of precedent for that, because MPs who have been alleged to have collaborated, even unwittingly, with a foreign power in the past usually have the good sense to resign. But MPs should absolutely be allowed to pass judgment on the actions of their colleagues, with the express intent of expelling from the House any members who have transgressed against their oath to King and Country. This isn’t just their duty, it is a duty that they are uniquely positioned and obligated to perform. Until we know exactly which parliamentarians we’re talking about, a spectre hangs over all 400-plus of them. That very much compromises the public’s opinion of Parliament and has a demonstrable impact on their ability to do their jobs as parliamentarians.

Once upon a time, children, ministers of the Crown would offer their resignations for mistakes made by members of the civil service in the ministry for which he or she held responsibility, never mind mistakes of their own. In modern times, of course, it’s rare to find a minister resigning voluntarily until the RCMP is literally knocking on the door, and sometimes not even then.

Second, we are a large and multicultural country. MPs are expected to represent members of any diaspora community which may exist in their constituency. If you’re a Tibetan or Uyghur activist, how can you be represented by an MP who’s demonstrated a willingness to collaborate with the government of the People’s Republic of China? If you’re an Iranian democracy and reform activist, how can you be represented by an MP who has close ties to Iran’s diplomatic and intelligence operation?

The answer, of course, is that you can’t be. The government has a greater responsibility to the democratic rights of those Canadians than it does to protecting the identity of any single unscrupulous or otherwise compromised parliamentarian. With every day that passes, Ottawa looks more like it has an interest in partisan butt-covering than it does in maintaining the long-term faith that democracy requires for our institutions to survive.

A good Member of Parliament recognizes the responsibility to the constituents — whether they voted for that particular MP or not — and would keep that responsibility as faithfully as possible. On that reckoning, we have fewer good MPs than we should have … and if the intelligence turns out to be fully supported upon full investigation, there should be a lot of open seats to run by-elections for (even if no formal charges of treason are ever laid).

Finally, I accept that intelligence is not evidence. I also accept, as noted in the Globe by Philippe Lagassé and Stephanie Carvin, that we must be cautious to not compromise intelligence sources and methods, or compromise ongoing investigations. Parliamentarians should not replace the criminal justice system or undercut our defence, but they what they are capable of doing, and indeed are required to do because no one else can do it for them, is broadly defining what the acceptable behaviour for parliamentarians should be. If an MP or a senator has engaged with a foreign power’s diplomatic or security services and they do not believe they have crossed the line for what we deem to be acceptable behaviour, they will be more than welcome to go on Power and Politics, or take to social media, or show up at what I’m sure will be many committee hearings, and make their case.

It is not a hardship to ask them do so. They are not being hard done by. The question here is not whether what they’ve done is criminal. It wasn’t criminal when Bev Oda billed the taxpayers for her juice. It wasn’t criminal when Bill Morneau forgot to leave a cabinet meeting where a decision was made that was a perceived conflict of interest. But both of those parliamentarians were forced to accept that their behaviour had failed the people they were sworn to represent. They resigned.

And the idea that orange juice crosses the line, but aiding a foreign intelligence service — even “semi-wittingly” — does not, will fail to pass the smell test with a very large number of Canadians. And that is entirely correct. The public is well ahead of the politicians on understanding this.

Public trust in politicians has been ebbing for quite some time and was fading even before the pandemic exposed so many of them as would-be dictators, poltroons, and idiots. There is no deep reservoir of respect for politicians that can be drawn on at this point. Swift action is the only thing that Parliament can do and by “swift”, I don’t mean setting up a Royal Commission with a multi-year remit to bury the issue until after the next federal election.

June 11, 2024

We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hellworld where Jeremy Clarkson can be described as an “unlikely national treasure”

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

In The Critic, Kara Kennedy considers the possibility that Jeremy Clarkson, the petrolhead’s petrolhead, might actually have a soul:

Screencap from Jeremy Clarkson’s banned Hawkstone Lager ad

The last truly poignant thing I watched on television was a show about a grumpy farmer raising piglets. He’s a city gentleman new to farming, but what may have started out as a gimmick has, over three growing seasons, transformed into a real calling. Or a passion, even. And one that, in some moments, sees him battle with life and death. Unfortunately, for a lot of the little piglets, it was death. After watching their births — their first moments and last, after their delinquent pig mothers smothered them without a care in the world — I cried. My husband cried. The friends who we harangued to watch the season again with us cried. And Jeremy Clarkson cried.

Yes, I am talking about Jeremy Clarkson on Clarkson’s Farm, streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Clarkson, over the last few decades, has made a career for himself in part by being easy to hate. It is uncomfortable for everybody, himself included, that the miserable boomer has turned into an unlikely national treasure, and all it took was some honest work.

Clarkson is cultural marmite. After 35 years on the BBC’s Top Gear, he is revered in the petrolhead community as a god. Newspapers love him because he’s impolite and will sell some prime “you can’t say anything anymore” content. Meghan Markle hates him after he once wrote he was “dreaming of the day” that British crowds threw lumps of shit at her. Feminists hate him for mostly that same reason. Leftists hate him for writing once that striking workers should be “shot in front of their families”. As for the denizens of the countryside, he has maintained a multi-decade fight in his newspaper column with ramblers.

Basically, the answer to whether you like Clarkson relies really on whether you take what a funny old guy says seriously. But there are some legitimate grievances towards the presenter too. When he was finally bounced from the Beeb, it was because he punched a producer. And as annoying as the people who had long had it in for Clarkson had always been, it is not some new Gen Z norm or innovation of “cancel culture” to say you can’t physically assault your colleague. That said, the producer in question did sue him for racial injury, which is a bit closer. (He called him Irish, for God’s sake!) The crux of it, anyway, is that Clarkson is badly behaved and probably too inconsistent to be trusted by any major TV network. He wound up on Amazon Prime’s The Grand Tour, a just-changed-enough-to-be-legal Top Gear clone, once again drawing a massive and mostly male audience that loves to memorise the 0-60 times of cars only oligarchs can ever afford.

But, once The Grand Tour began winding down — it now returns just for the occasional travel special — the old presenters went off to make spinoffs for Amazon. And Clarkson decided to make his, and to rejigger his Times column, around his 1000 acre country farm in the Cotswolds. And that is where, through epiphany, necessity, human nature, act of God, or sheer growing up, Clarkson was reborn as someone who not just the lovers of edgy humour and high horsepower figures can admire.

EUquake 2024

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Although the European elites have managed to move as much as they can out of the reach of democratic institutions, they still have to allow the illusion that the few things ordinary people can vote for still kinda, sorta matter. Ordinary people seem to have noticed this:

“I cannot act as if nothing has happened”, said a weary, dejected Emmanuel Macron, in an unplanned address to his nation last night. The French president, bruised by an unprecedented showing for the right-wing populist National Rally (RN) on Sunday’s European Parliament elections, immediately dissolved the French parliament and announced snap legislative elections. The first round will take place in just three weeks’ time.

When Macron was elected president in 2017, he promised the French people that they will “no longer have a single reason to vote for the extremes”. Pro-EU centrists hailed his apparent defeat of nationalist, populist forces. Seven years later, RN is on course to achieve its best-ever result in an EU election. Marine Le Pen’s party is projected to win double the vote share of the president’s liberal, centrist Renaissance group. Clearly, the French feel that they have more reasons than ever to revolt against the mainstream.

The French are not alone in this. The hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite two of its leading MEP candidates being dogged by major scandals, came second behind the centre-right CDU. Crucially, it beat all three of the parties in Germany’s governing coalition. The Social Democrats (SPD), led by chancellor Olaf Scholz, suffered its worst result of any nationwide election since the 1940s. According to one pollster, around a million people who supported the left-leaning parties in the “traffic light” coalition have since defected to the AfD. Pressure is now mounting on Scholz to call his own snap election. In Italy, meanwhile, Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy topped the European polls, exceeding the vote share that swept her into power in 2022’s national elections. Populist, right-wing and hard-right parties, therefore, came in first or second place in all three of the major EU nations.

Even Belgium, at the epicentre of the EU empire, has been struck by the populist earthquake. Prime minister Alexander de Croo announced his resignation last night as his party was beaten to below 10 per cent in Sunday’s federal parliamentary elections and to around five per cent in the European elections – squeezed by Flemish separatist parties. Hard-right parties also came first in Austria and second in the Netherlands.

While Macron has been forced to react to the scale of his defeat, acknowledging euphemistically that these elections were “not a good result for the parties that defend Europe”, others in the Brussels oligarchy have tried to bury their heads in the sand. On Sunday evening, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declared – delusionally – that “the centre is holding”.

She is right in one, very narrow, sense. The centre-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the liberal Renew group have likely gained enough seats between them for business as usual to resume in the European Parliament. The two groupings to their right – the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID) – have not made enough gains, even when combined, to start throwing their weight around in Brussels. Von der Leyen’s own position as Commission president is likely secure, not least because her EPP is the single largest grouping in parliament. The new populist MEPs will likely be shut out of key decisions, including the vetting of new EU commissioners. The EU has never allowed the democratic wishes of the public to intrude on its affairs before, so it is unlikely to start now.

But Brussels cannot hide from reality forever. These elections clearly show that the EU and its boosters are failing to contain the public’s anger. European elites have pulled every trick in the book to try to put the brakes on the populist surge, seemingly to little avail.

How bad was the rejection of the kakistocrats in France? This bad:

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