Quotulatiousness

March 22, 2026

QotD: The treason of the scientists

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

    Luca Barbato @lu_zero_
    Research is not taking money and then creative-write whatever fits the political faction you align with.

    And that’s why there are at least some people, that value science a lot, that consider burning down or starve “institutions” the correct first step to amend course.

One of those people is me.

I can still keenly remember my first feelings of crushing disappointment back in the 1980s when I started reading the “scientific” literature on gun policy and realized how utterly fraudulent much of it was.

I had grown up loving The Science, thinking of research scientists as the best of humanity, carrying us forward into a better future with honesty and courage. Discovering that there were people who would violate this sacred trust to push a political agenda hurt me.

But it only started with the gun policy literature. Sociology, psychology, political “science”, climatology. Learning how far the rot had spread was deeply dispiriting to me.

And the worst of it wasn’t even the hacks and partisans. The worst was noticing the cowardice of the people who failed to oppose them. Because that part isn’t just an indictment of the successful activists and manipulators, it’s an indictment of almost all scientists, everywhere.

Which is why I now contemplate rude, ignorant populists proposing to burn down large swathes of research funding and find myself rooting for the populists, not the scientists.

Because the lesson needs to be learned. It’s not just about driving out the hacks and partisans. Scientists, as a culture, need to learn the hard way that cowardice has a price — that if you don’t call out politicization when it’s happening, you don’t deserve the trust of the rest of our society, or the funding and privileges that come with it.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-21.

Update, 23 March: 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.

March 20, 2026

When pursuit of knowledge shifts to sharing of feelings instead

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

Institutes of higher learning were once places where academic careers involved research, analysis, and logical pursuits to advance human knowledge (in theory, at least, and mostly in practice). Today’s groves of academe are apparently much more about “the feels” than the facts:

An expected and obvious consequence of the Great Effeminization of the Academy is that a great deal of academic output is now about the feelings of academics.

From the peer-reviewed paper “What’s Racial About Matter? A Conversation on Race and ‘New’ Materialism Past, Present, and Future” in Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. (They mean matter in the same sense as a physicist, only they are much vaguer.) My emphasis:

    What follows is an informal, at times undisciplined, conversation about Asian American racial matters between interlocutors who have been in generative dialogue for several years now. This roundtable is the constellation of many other discussions from conference panels to shared meals, reflecting the relational nature of our inquiry. We hope this roundtable can open entry points for those exploring intersections of feminist new materialisms, STS, and studies of race — from its genealogies to its animating new directions. How did we get here, and where do we go from here?

The text itself reads like it was produced by one of those postmodern text generators that were passed around as jokes in the late 1990s.

From the Abstract of “After Hybridity: The Biological Life of the Mixed Race Child” (same journal):

    I argue that renderings of the mixed race child as a metaphor for assimilation and multicultural progress obscure how racial science continues to shape the very definition of mixed raceness. Instead, I frame the mixed race Asian American child as hybrid matter to explore the slippages between their figuration and other abnormally reproduced objects: the genetically modified food organism and cancer.

From the Abstract of “Racial Atmospherics: Greenhouses, Terrariums, and Empire’s Pneumatics” (same journal):

    What happens when we understand air as racial matter? This paper takes up this question by tracking the political, architectural, and artistic genealogies of Cold War phytotrons, or computer-controlled climatic laboratories.

From the Abstract of “Disrupting the Whitened Lemur: Reading Black Trans* Considerations in Feminist Primatology” (same journal):

    In this article, I trace the evolution of female dominance studies in lemurs to explore how logics of cis-heterosexuality and whiteness are embedded in the study of the nonhuman … Following recent theories of trans* and the nonhuman, this essay argues that such critiques illustrate the trans* potential of the nonhuman, which was prefigured by decades of critique in feminist primatology. However, by engaging with recent Black trans scholarship, this essay suggests that such trans* critiques of the nonhuman have stopped short by ignoring the racialized nature of the dyad as a social unit. I thus propose a feminist science studies that attends to Black trans* theory to work against colonial taxonomies and the forced assimilation of the nonhuman world into rigid ontologies for material gain — or what I refer to as whitening processes.

The punchline is that not only are these all from the same journal, but they are all from the same issue of that organ. And that this is only one of many such diaries (the proper word) — funded largely by you via our great benevolent government.

It’s okay to hate …

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

On his Substack, Frank Furedi defends the right to hate:

In recent decades hate has become thoroughly politicised to the point that the mere mention of the word serves as a prelude to discrediting, delegitimating and criminalizing its target. In public life the charge of practising the politics of hate is frequently deployed by leftist promoters of identity ideology against their opponents. The claim promoted by The Guardian that states that “a Tory party that stokes hatred is the real threat to our democracy” is illustrative of the attempt to associate conservatives and other critics of identity ideology with the politics of hate.1

The project of transforming hate into a malevolent ideological standpoint is underpinned by the assumption that all displays of the emotion hate are potentially malevolent. In effect the very human emotion of hate is now frequently demonised as a pathology.

In recent decades hate has been transformed into a stand-alone cultural stigma. According to dominant cultural conventions it is sufficient to use the word hate without any reference to the object of this emotion. It is now common to use the word, Haters. It is not necessary to indicate who the Haters hate. The term Hater serves as a negative identity. As one study acknowledged, “persons branded as ‘haters’ are effectively excommunicated from the polity”.2 The use of the term hater morally contaminates its target.

According to the cultural script that prevails in the West, hate serves as a secular form of moral evil. One expression that captures this evil is that of “The Hate”. By placing a definitive article in front of hate a permanent threat to society is invented. This reified public threat demands vigilance and willingness to mobilise to defeat its manifestations. For example, this is the approach of the campaigning group Stop The Hate.3 The content of The Hate is deliberately left vague so that it can serve as the target of a variety of different campaigns.

The politically motivated designation of hate to describe the behaviour of an individual or a group is not simply an act of description but also a boundary-setting manoeuvre. It basically works as a warning that signals the claim that The Hater cannot be included within the confines of a democratically governed public space. The Hater exists on the wrong sides of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate politics. This sentiment is frequently communicated by the slogan “Hope Not Hate”, which establishes a moral boundary between legitimate and illegitimate politics. From this perspective hate serves as a diagnostic label for illegitimate public life. Imposing a moral quarantine on those branded as haters is regarded is necessary for the maintenance of a just democratic society.

The frequent use of the slogan “Hope not Hate” smuggles a moralising ethos into public discourse. Through the drawing of a moral contrast between the secular evil of hate, hope emerges as a progressive political virtue. The transformation of hate into a morally toxic antithesis of hope assists the political polarisation that afflicts society. Since haters are regarded as beyond redemption dialogue with them is pointless. The only appropriate response to their words is to criminalise it. Hence the proliferation of rules and laws criminalising Hate Speech.

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/04/a-tory-party-that-stokes-hatred-is-the-real-threat-to-our-democracy
  2. Post, Robert, “Concluding Thoughts: The Legality and Politics of Hatred”, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Epilogue, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Hate, Politics, Law: Critical Perspectives on Combating Hate, Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy (New York, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 June 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190465544.003.0013, accessed 12 Mar. 2026.
  3. https://www.stopthehate.uk

Update, 21 March: 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.

The BBC is cheerleading Britain’s “baby bust”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Conservative Woman, Dr. Tony Rucinski reports on a recent BBC programme that clearly takes a dim view of parenting:

ON March 13 – the Friday before Mother’s Day – the Centre for Social Justice published Baby Bust, a report projecting that 600,000 British women alive today may miss out on motherhood they actually wanted. Nine in ten young women still hope to become mothers. The ONS confirms the total fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.41 in 2024. The CSJ calculates a “birth gap” of 30 per cent, with 831,000 people turning 50 in 2024 but only 595,000 babies born.

You probably did not hear about it. No identifiable standalone BBC News website article or feature covering the report has appeared. Our national broadcaster had other priorities. Namely a 1,500-word feature headlined “Like a trap you can’t escape: The women who regret being mothers“. It promoted the piece on social media, where it drew hundreds of critical replies. Instead of covering a demographic crisis, the BBC gave prominent space to a piece whose own evidence undermines its thesis – and thus revealed something important about the role it plays in the very crisis it should be reporting.

Its maternal regret article relies on a 2023 study conducted in Poland which estimates some 5 to 14 per cent of parents regret their decision to have children, a review article which synthesises several methodologically incomparable surveys – different countries, different age groups, different question wordings.

The more important point is its arithmetic. If 5 to 14 per cent of parents experience some regret, then 86 to 95 per cent do not. But the BBC devoted a feature-length article to the minority experience and ignored the majority one entirely. The lead case study featured is of a pseudonymous woman, Carmen, who came from a background of violence and dysfunction. But further data unsurprisingly finds the regret rates to be higher among single parents than married ones: 27.3 per cent versus 9.8 per cent. And that adverse childhood experiences, depression, and anxiety were also strongly associated with parental regret.

The BBC’s article however did not mention marriage once. Even the therapists quoted made the case against the BBC’s framing without apparently realising it. They repeatedly stated that regret often reflects “isolation, exhaustion, or lost identity” – failures of support, not failures of motherhood as a vocation.

The far larger and more painful form of regret that the BBC also ignored is the regret of women who wanted children and never had them, the highest figures among those who experienced fertility treatment failure. Or the similar regret found among couples whose fertility treatment did not result in a child. Or that involuntarily childless women’s regret intensifies with age.

The CSJ’s huge figure of 600,000 “missing mothers” just did not fit the narrative the BBC wants to tell.

Nor is this an isolated editorial misjudgment. Between 2023 and 2026, the BBC published a series of prominent features sympathetic to negative experiences of motherhood or to child-free lifestyles, among them: “I felt like a freak because I didn’t want children” (April 2024). “The adults celebrating child-free lives” (February 2023). “True cost of becoming a mum highlighted in new data on pay” (October 2025).

In the same period, not a single piece of the BBC’s coverage of Miriam Cates – the most prominent parliamentary advocate for pro-natalist policy – featured conversion therapy, smartphones and the trans debate, or substantially addressed her work on demographics or declining birth rates.

March 19, 2026

District 9 and the Story of “Race”

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

Feral Historian
Published 14 Nov 2025

Modern society has become a bit obsessed with the idea of race. District 9 subverts some of these assumptions and points at some of the ways that the entire concept of race is a product of the modern era. This one meanders a bit, but I suppose there’s no way around that.

00:00 Intro
02:45 Meet Wikus
05:42 Subverting Race
08:35 Bacon’s Rebellion and Trans-Racial Wikus
12:32 Let’s Talk About Rhodesia
14:48 Perspectives and Narratives
(more…)

March 18, 2026

Viewing-with-alarm “the highly lucrative, hyper-masculine ecosystem of online ‘red pill’ influencers”

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

I first heard of Louis Theroux and his Inside the Manosphere documentary through it being mentioned a few times on a recent podcast, but I’m hardly the one to provide any insight into contemporary political culture, so this is probably not very surprising. To provide some context, I found Celina’s summary to be quite useful:

When the liberal establishment is suddenly forced to confront the grotesque downstream consequences of its own social engineering, its first and most reliable instinct is to pathologise the individual rather than to interrogate the civilisation that produced him. This predictable dynamic is perfectly encapsulated in the critical reaction to the March 2026 release of the Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere.1 The feature-length film, which follows the veteran British broadcaster as he immerses himself in the highly lucrative, hyper-masculine ecosystem of online “red pill” influencers, has been received by the chattering classes as a horrifying, alien glimpse into a shadowy digital underworld of unbridled misogyny, toxic behaviour, and financial grift.2 Commentators, critics, and worried parents have wrung their hands over the crude language, the explicit hostility directed toward women, and the ruthless exploitation of vulnerable, disaffected young boys who flock to these figures for guidance.3 They will undoubtedly draw the conclusion that these internet personalities are a bizarre aberration, a reactionary glitch in the otherwise progressive march of modern Western society that must be heavily censored, de-platformed, or psychologically rehabilitated.

This conclusion is not only incomplete, it is entirely, fundamentally wrong. The true significance of Theroux’s latest documentary is not that it uncovers an isolated network of digital deviants operating on the fringes of acceptable discourse. Rather, the film unintentionally functions as a bleak, unrelenting autopsy of late-stage Western cultural decline. The figures profiled by Theroux, men who monetise male grievance, openly commodify female sexuality, and preach a gospel of ruthless, transactional dominance are in no way rebels against the modern liberal order. They are, in fact, its purest, most distilled, and most logical products.

Through its exploration of this digital underworld, from the sun-drenched hedonism of Miami to the expatriate enclaves of Marbella, the documentary inadvertently exposes a significant and terrifying civilisational breakdown. It reveals a society suffering from the total collapse of traditional gender norms, the complete disappearance of honour, duty, and social trust, and the total ascendancy of a vulgar materialism where attention and capital are the only remaining arbiters of human value. The manosphere is not an alternative to modern Western ideology, it is the inevitable, putrid consequence of a culture that has spent the last half-century systematically dismantling its own moral, religious, and social infrastructure. To understand the phenomenon captured by Theroux, one must look past the superficial liberal moral outrage and recognise the manosphere for what it truly is: a favela culture operating seamlessly inside a wealthy Western economy.

[…]

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is undeniably a compelling piece of television, featuring moments of sharp journalistic insight and necessary confrontation with deeply unsavoury characters. But as a piece of cultural criticism, it ultimately fails because it refuses to look beyond the immediate vulgarity of its subjects. Theroux, and the liberal audiences who will consume his documentary, will walk away from the film comforted by their own moral superiority, convinced that the problem lies entirely with a few toxic men in Marbella and Miami who simply need to be censored, de-platformed, or re-educated.

They will draw entirely the wrong lesson. The manosphere influencers are not an invading force corrupting a healthy society; they are the native flora of the wasteland we have purposefully created. They are the warlords of the digital favela, thriving in the ruins of a civilisation that has actively, joyfully destroyed its own moral and social foundations. The documentary unintentionally captures the catastrophic, unavoidable consequences of modern Western ideology: a low-trust, hyper-materialistic culture where honour is dead, transactional exploitation is the accepted norm, and the relations between men and women have devolved into a state of algorithmic trench warfare.

Until the West is willing to confront the structural causes of this decay, the destructive failures of modern feminism, the atomisation inherent in mass democracy, the fraying of social capital brought about by multiculturalism, and the vast spiritual void of secular materialism, it will continue to produce generations of lost, angry men. And the e-pimps will always be there, waiting in the digital shadows, ready to sell them a monthly subscription to the abyss.

  1. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/louis-theroux-inside-the-manosphere
  2. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/mar/11/louis-theroux-inside-the-manosphere-review-why-doesnt-he-focus-more-on-the-impact-on-women
  3. Ibid

Update: Rob Henderson’s Wall Street Journal article on Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere has also been posted on their free Substack – https://wsjfreeexpression.substack.com/p/louis-theroux-exposes-the-manosphere

A new Netflix documentary takes viewers into “the manosphere,” a loose network of YouTubers, podcasters, live-streamers and online pranksters. Those interviewed in Louis Theroux’s documentary, Inside the Manosphere, claim to teach young men how to become dominant, wealthy and irresistible to women. They pitch a specific idea about male worth. Women enter the world with innate value, they say, though they often contradict this by telling their followers to mistreat women. A man must earn his value, the logic goes, through money, sex and status. Otherwise, he is worthless.

This is a bleak message. It is also a brilliant sales strategy. First you convince young men that they are nothing. Then you charge them to become something. It’s one of the oldest cons in the world, updated for the age of the algorithm.

At first glance, the documentary seems to confirm what critics already suspect. The manosphere is toxic and extreme. But the film reveals the gap between persona and reality. The influencers selling this lifestyle often don’t live it themselves.

Early in the film, Mr. Theroux asks influencer Justin Waller a simple question: How many kids do you have? The man hesitates. Later, we learn he lives with his two children and their mother — he describes her as his “wife” though they are not legally married — who is pregnant with their third child. The man leads a fairly conventional family life, yet he spends much of his online career telling followers that men should dominate women, avoid commitment and establish a rotation of multiple partners.

One influencer known as Myron Gaines brags privately to Mr. Theroux that he plans to have multiple wives. But when Mr. Theroux raises this idea of “one-way monogamy” in front of Gaines’s girlfriend, his facial expression immediately changes. He then says, “Who knows? Maybe I’ll only wanna be with one girl after all.” The credits of the documentary reveal that the girlfriend eventually left him.

March 17, 2026

How Germans were propagandized into supporting the National Socialists

Filed under: Germany, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve read a fair bit about the rise of Hitler after the First World War, beginning when I was in middle school and did a history project on the topic. Yet one aspect of the political success of Hitler’s fascist movement always puzzled me: how such blatant crude propaganda persuaded so many Germans to see things the Nazi way. Over the last five years in Canada, as our legacy media have fallen directly into the clutches of a single political party, I now understand all too well how millions of people getting their world view informed by a single point of view can create and maintain a movement. When all the mainstream media tell effectively the same story in 2026 and go out of their way to praise the government — especially the leader — and belittle and denigrate the opposition parties, it’s easy just to believe what you’re being told and not make waves.

Anyway, back to interwar Germany and their more absolute control of the newspapers and radio stations was used to mould and shape popular opinion:

In the run-up to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, most people in Germany believed what was being put about both on radio and in the state-controlled press, namely that the Poles were committing all kinds of atrocities to former Prussians living in Poland, that they were war-mongering and using threatening language, and that not only was the Danzig corridor rightfully part of Germany, it was the duty of the Reich to defend those subjects living there.

Eighteen year-old Heinz Knocke was from Hameln in central Germany and typical of many of his age. He had absolute faith in the Führer and the rightness of the German cause. Planning to join the Luftwaffe as a pilot, he had had his preliminary examinations and was hoping that with war imminent, his call-up would be accelerated. “The Polish atrocities against the German minority make horrible reading today”, he scribbled in his diary on 31st August. “Thousands are being massacred daily in territory which had once been part of Germany.”

Oberleutnant Hajo Herrmann, a twenty-four year-old pilot with the bomber group III/KG4, also thought the Poles had brought war upon themselves. As far as he was concerned, the Danzig issue was one of principle. It had been German before 1919, was still inhabited mostly by Germans, and since the Poles had rejected any peaceful solution, what did they expect? “The anger that I felt inside at their unreasonableness”, he noted, “matched my sacred conviction: that of German rightness”. For Oberleutnant Hans von Luck, on the other hand, an officer in the 7th Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, the escalating situation had brought a sudden recall from leave just a few days’ earlier. He had found everyone at the garrison in Bad Kissingen near Schweinfurt in high spirits. Neither he nor his friends believed a word of Goebbels’ propaganda about the Poles, but they did believe Danzig and the corridor should be part of Germany once more. “We were not hungry for war”, von Luck noted, “but we did not believe the British and French would come to Poland’s defence”. How wrong he was; for while von Luck may have understood that going to war was not a matter to be taken lightly, even he had blindly accepted Hitler’s assurances that Britain and France were bluffing. It was a feature of Hitler’s rule that he frequently said one thing with immense conviction and authority but quite another once events had been proved him wrong. Such was his grip on the German people, however, almost no-one ever questioned this, and certainly not his inner circle or anyone in the German media. At any rate, all three of these young men had believed parts of the nonsense that had been spouted by Nazi propaganda, whether it be false claims about the Poles, the justness of the Nazi cause for invasion, or Hitler’s assurances the British and French were bluffing. Such was he power of Nazi disinformation.

[…]

Both the Imperial Japanese and the Nazis dominated the new forms of media communication emerging in the 1930s. Propaganda had been a key component of Nazi politics from the outset, and while there were some who had not been persuaded, it had been unquestionably hugely effective, not just within the Reich but around the world too. To a large degree, this was due to Dr Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, and Gauleiter — administrative leader — of Berlin, an old Frankish term that had been resurrected by the Nazis. A former failed journalist and one of the first Nazis, he was utterly devoted to Hitler, so much so he had even given up an affair with a Czech film star with whom he was deeply in love because the Führer asked him to. Although the son of a shop assistant, Goebbels was highly intelligent and despite those humble beginnings had attended several universities and gained a doctorate. Marriage to Magda Quant, a society divorcee, gave him the kind of money and status he needed to help him climb up the Nazi ladder. He had become Propaganda Minister in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, and had immediately announced his prime goal was to achieve the “mobilisation of mind and spirit” of the German people. “We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out”, he said of defeat in 1918, “but because the weapons of our minds did not fire”.

In many ways, Goebbels was as responsible for Hitler’s position as Hitler was himself and he was the man who had largely shaped the Nazi’s public image. It was he [who] had insisted on draping swastikas – the bigger the better – from as many places as possible; it was he who taught Hitler how to whip a crowd into a frenzy; it was also Goebbels who had elevated Hitler into a demigod in the eyes of many. He knew all about manipulation theories, orchestrated heavy-handed mob violence, and in the 1933 election created the “Hitler over Germany” campaign; it was the first time, for example, that aircraft had been used to take a candidate around a country in an effort to reach more people. It worked spectacularly well.

With the Nazis in power, Goebbels had also done much to stoke up the virulent anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology and had done much to turn Nazism into a form of surrogate religion, in which, again, drawing on nostalgia, they had harked back to a “purer” Aryan past to help bind the people both together and behind the Party and, more importantly, the Leader. Goebbels’ influence – his genius – should never be underestimated.

Update, 18 March: 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.

March 14, 2026

What a Mickey Mouse idea!

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

In my far-distant youth, a “Mickey Mouse idea” would be a way of disparaging someone’s notions and hopes, belittling and ridiculing it to prevent it from being realized. In spite of that somewhat dubious association, Ted Gioia has a Mickey Mouse idea to save Disney, and it might just work … except that the studio seems to think their most famous creation is somehow tainted and disreputable:

Do aging sports stars still get hired to shake hands with tourists at Las Vegas casinos? It happened to Joe Louis. It happened to Mickey Mantle. What a sad final chapter to such illustrious careers.

Once they were great. Now they merely greet.

I fear this is Mickey Mouse’s fate today. He does his meet-and-greet routine at the theme park, then goes home to a trailer park in Orlando. Here he gripes to Minnie that he deserves better than this Walmart-ish door-tending gig. She tells him to stop whining and take Pluto for a walk.

Ah if I ran Disney I’d bring Mickey Mouse back from exile. I’d give him a movie contract, a record deal, and a tickertape parade down Main Street USA.

I’d tell the shareholders: Watch out K-Pop Demon Hunters, the Mouse is Back!

But that’s just my dream, not reality. This little fella is just as charming as ever, but his corporate overseers don’t want what he has to offer. Disney is pushing ahead on hundreds of projects right now, but none of them involve Mickey Mouse.

Back in 2002 there was some buzz about a new Disney full-length animated film entitled The Search for Mickey Mouse. This was a big deal. It would be the studio’s 50th animated feature film, and release was scheduled for Mickey’s 75th anniversary.

But the studio pulled the plug. Two years later, Disney tossed a few cheese scraps in Mickey’s direction via a 68-minute reunion with Donald Duck — but they sent the film straight to DVD after a few showings in a Hollywood theater.

It was a low-budget affair. But the theater was packed to the brim, and audiences loved the movie. That didn’t matter. The studio had other priorities.

That was our beloved mouse’s last moment of glory. Since then Mickey has appeared in a 6-minute cartoon — back in 2013 — and been granted a few on-screen cameos in low-profile short films. I’m tempted to say That’s All Folks as I contemplate Mickey’s prospects for future, but Bugs Bunny owns that line. So I’ll simply note that this is what extinction looks like when it happens onscreen.

Why is he getting cancelled?

Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse (Source)

Not long ago, Mickey Mouse was the most famous storytelling character in the world. Time magazine claimed that he was better known than even Santa Claus. Everybody in the world recognized his face — not even Winston Churchill or Greta Garbo could make that claim.

Mickey’s exile is, of course, due to his problematic copyright status. Some aspects of Mickey are entering the public domain, and even though Disney could protect his more updated modern look, it’s possible that some outsiders might earn a few coins from a Mickey Mouse resurgence.

Disney would rather go mouse-less than let that happen. That’s a bad decision — a triumphant return of Mickey would go along way toward charming audiences and fixing Disney’s tarnished reputation. He is, after all, the most beloved character in the company’s entire history.

In two years, Mickey Mouse will have reached the ripe ago of one hundred. That would be a great time for a comeback — not just for Mickey but for the whole Disney brand.

Quid pro quo – something that is given in return for something else

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper considers what the Parliamentary floor-crossers got in exchange for their loyalty:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Nunavut MP Lori Idlout has now become the fourth opposition member to join the Liberals in just the last five months, joining three Conservative MPs.

While there have been more than 100 MP floor-crossings since Canada’s 1867 founding, the circumstances have never looked quite like this. In any prior instance where multiple MPs shifted party loyalties in a short period of time, it was almost always because of a seismic political issue such as First World War conscription or Quebec separatism.

But in this case, all four floor-crossers gave vague reasons for the move, if they even tried to explain it at all. Idlout’s statement, issued by the Liberal Party, explained her switch as endorsing “strong and ambitious government that makes decisions with Nunavut — not only about Nunavut”.

Unmentioned is that the four also saw personal benefits for their defection to the government benches. A cursory summary is below.

Thus far, there are no tangible goodies to d’Entremont’s surprise November floor-crossing. He hasn’t received a position in cabinet, a pay raise or any special titles. What he did seem to secure, however, was his job.

When rumours first began to leak out that the Liberals were actively seeking floor-crossers among the Conservatives, one commonality emerged among the MPs being solicited: They all represented tightly contested ridings that were now polling for the Liberals.

This was particularly true of d’Entremont’s Acadie-Annapolis riding in Nova Scotia. He won it for the Conservatives by just 536 votes in 2025. And given a surge in Liberal popularity across the Maritimes in interim months, it now seemed likely to swap back to the Liberals; which it had done as recently as 2015.

D’Entremont’s former Conservative colleagues would allege quite directly that the defection had been done purely to remain as the MP for Acadie-Annapolis.

After the floor-crossing, Conservative MP Rick Perkins would allege that d’Entremont had told him the weekend prior, “If an election is held now, I will lose my seat. I might as well not run.”

“There is nothing in his floor crossing about principles. It was about keeping his job,” Perkins wrote in a Facebook post.

Ma also represents a tightly contested riding. Markham-Unionville had gone Liberal as recently as 2021, and he won in 2025 with just 50.65 per cent of the vote as compared to 47.05 per cent for his Liberal opponent.

But it only took a few days after the floor-crossing before Ma was conspicuously added to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s delegation headed to the People’s Republic of China and Qatar.

As noted by National Post‘s Chris Nardi at the time, Ma was the only member of the delegation who wasn’t a minister or a parliamentary secretary. His highest applicable rank was that he was vice-chair of the Canada-China Legislative Committee, a group comprising 11 other MPs and senators who didn’t similarly receive a seat on the plane.

QotD: “Bludgeonspeak”

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

I’m coining a term today: “bludgeonspeak”.

Bludgeonspeak is the use of invented terminology, or historical terminology that has been hijacked and corrupted, and then emptied of all meaning except as an attempt at moral blackmail.

Here are some notable bludgeonspeak items in 2025: “racist”, “fascist”, “homophobe”, “transphobe”, “islamophobe”, “far-right”. Also, the term “genocide” might not be quite there yet, but it’s being pushed in that direction pretty hard.

Some bludgeonspeak terms, like “fascist” and “racist” and “genocide”, used to have substantive meanings which have been destroyed by persistent abuse. It may be appropriate to recognize and use those meanings if you are reading or writing or speaking about history.

Others, like “homophobe”, “transphobe”, and “islamophobe”, were bludgeonspeak from birth. There are no circumstances in which these have substantive meaning, and it is unwise to treat them as though they do.

The only way to win is not to play. When somebody throws bludgeonspeak at you, call it out. State that you will not be controlled by their language, and you refuse to be assigned to a category you reject.

The key thing that people who employ bludgeonspeak don’t want you to grasp is that these words only have the power over you that you allow them.

Once a term has been generally recognized as bludgeonspeak, it not only loses its power as direct moral blackmail, it can no longer be used as a social attack.

So: learn to recognize bludgeonspeak. Shut down the people who use it by refusing to give it power. And educate other people about this manipulation tactic, so that they too can reject it.

You can prevent semantic manipulation. All it takes is the will to do so.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-04.

Update, Ides of March, 2026: 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.

March 12, 2026

“It is precisely the embracing of such inconsistency that shows your commitment to the cause”

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

Many, many people have called attention to the incongruity — if not total absurdity — of progressives agitating and protesting for what appear to be thoroughly anti-progressive causes. And all of those people have discovered that most progressives are in accord with Emerson’s opinion that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. As Lorenzo Warby explains, “the issue is never the issue; the issue is the revolution”:

There is a common “culture war” sport where more conservatively-minded folk, and various liberal ones, point out how inconsistent it is for various ideological/identity groups to make a thing of supporting organisations and regimes which are very much against — even murderously against — the ideals those ideological/identity groups allegedly stand for.

Queers for Palestine, and feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, are particularly blatant examples of this. Hamas in Gaza and the Islamic regime in Iran literally kill homosexuals and violently repress women’s rights: they are religiously committed to women having less rights than men and being subordinate to them.

The inconsistency between who Hamas and the Islamic regime are, what they do, and the alleged ideals of Queers for Palestine and the feminists supporting Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran is obvious. Pointing out such inconsistency has, however, no purchase on Queers for Palestine, feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, or similar groups.

On the contrary, pointing out the inconsistency brands one as not merely an outsider, but an enemy. It is precisely the embracing of such inconsistency that shows your commitment to the cause; to the shared political goals; to the shared politicised moralised status games. Doing all the required not-noticing, the required rationalisations, is a signal of commitment.

If they can make people ignore — or, even better, embrace — such inconsistency, that manifests their social and political dominance. The propensity of academics to be “risk averse“, and be conformist in various ways, has enabled motivated zealots to create the Critical Theory magisterium that has come to dominate more and more of Anglo-American academe.

As women are more risk averse and conformist than men, this has gathered steam as academe has feminised. This effect is all the stronger when they generate an accompanying elite status strategy based on “good people believe X”, turning beliefs into moralised cognitive assets. Assets to be defended — and defended together — as shared assets in a shared status game.

By attacking such inconsistency, one is simultaneously signalling one’s outsider status and attacking the signal they are using the show commitment to the cause; to the moral in-group.

As part of such signalling commitment, believers produce commentary shorn of all inconvenient context. We saw plenty of that in commentary blaming NATO and the US for the Russian attack on Ukraine. We are seeing plenty of the same on Iran.

Even more important than this—at least among the core believers — is that, at the foundational belief level, it is not inconsistent at all. The question is not what Hamas or Hezbollah or the Islamic Regime actually stands for: the question is, who they are enemies of.

Carney’s Liberals buy gain another seat in Parliament

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

What couldn’t be obtained at the ballot box can apparently be constructed through non-electoral methods. After the Liberals fell short of a majority in the 2025 federal election, they’ve now gained four more seats through attracting opposition MPs to join their caucus:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Consider several ridings from the last election where Conservatives defeated Liberals by extremely small margins. Terra Nova–The Peninsulas was decided by only a handful of votes. Milton East–Halton Hills South by just a few dozen. Windsor–Tecumseh–Lakeshore by fewer than a hundred. In Markham–Unionville and Edmonton Riverbend the margins were still narrow by federal election standards, measured in the low hundreds.

In ridings with tens of thousands of ballots cast, those margins are not ideological fortresses.
They are statistical coin flips.

Now imagine you are a strategist trying to change the parliamentary math without calling another election. Would you target MPs who defeated your party by twenty thousand votes? Or would you look at ridings where the electorate was already split nearly fifty fifty? Where persuading one individual changes everything!?

That is where the Moneyball logic appears.

Instead of persuading fifty thousand voters, you persuade one MP. The scoreboard shifts instantly. No campaign. No election. No voters trudging through snow to mark an X. Just a quiet change of jersey on the House of Commons floor.

Now consider the MPs who have crossed the floor or whose ridings are currently the focus of speculation. Seats like Edmonton Riverbend held by Matt Jeneroux and Markham–Unionville represented by Michael Ma sit squarely in that category of competitive swing ridings. Even Nunavut, represented by Lori Idlout, illustrates how single seats in geographically unique ridings can dramatically affect parliamentary arithmetic.

Notice the pattern.
Not massive strongholds.
Swing ridings.
Seats where the Liberal candidate already came within striking distance.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

Is this coincidence?
Or strategy?

Because if a riding was decided by one hundred votes, persuading the MP to change parties is dramatically easier than persuading fifty thousand voters to change their minds. The parliamentary math changes instantly.

The voters never get another say.

    Just like Canadians did not get a say when 131,674 votes from Liberal Party members at Mark Carney’s leadership race installed Mark Carney as defacto Prime Minister. He effectively became the Prime Minister of Canada through installation, not election.
    That is 0.33 percent of Canadians.
    Or, put another way, roughly one third of one percent of the country’s population participated in choosing the Liberal leader who then became Prime Minister through the parliamentary system without being elected by the people of the country.
    • 131,674 people chose the leader
    • out of about 41 million Canadians

Of course nobody in Ottawa will describe it this way. Politics prefers softer language. You will hear phrases like cooperation, evolving priorities, responsible leadership, and national unity.

Politics prefers poetry.
Arithmetic prefers patterns.

Individually every floor crossing can be explained. Each one comes with its own “so-called” story, its own “so-called” reasoning, its own “so-called” justification.

But collectively something else begins to emerge.
A seat here.
Another seat there.
Nothing dramatic.
Until one day the standings look different.

Exactly the way Moneyball worked. No blockbuster moves. Just quiet arithmetic accumulating advantage until the outcome changed.

In the past I’ve been comfortable with the Parliamentary tradition that voters elect individuals as their representatives so if that MP leaves the party they were elected for, it doesn’t change the representation of the constituents. Historically, when most MPs were free to vote their conscience except for a minority of “whipped” votes, where they were obligated to vote on party lines, this made sense. I’m becoming less comfortable as this pattern of “recently elected opposition MPs suddenly discovering they’d run for the wrong party” repeats, indicating that it’s not just ordinary politics, but a deliberate strategy on the part of the Liberals.

Some have speculated that a major factor in the latest defection was a recent federal financial benefit to the territory, but it might perhaps have been something more concrete:

Homelessness can’t be solved by just throwing more money at the problem

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to someone explaining their family’s tragic problem of a homeless relative:

The post hits a nerve because it exposes the part of the homelessness debate people prefer not to talk about.

A lot of the public story says homelessness is mainly about housing and compassion. If we build more units and remove stigma, the problem fades. That sounds humane. The trouble is that it ignores what families dealing with severe addiction and psychosis actually face.

Emily Baroz describes the reality many relatives know too well. The person on the street is often not just poor. They are deeply mentally ill, addicted, paranoid, sometimes violent, and frequently refusing help. Families try everything. Housing. Money. Treatment. Support. The illness itself destroys the ability to cooperate. Meanwhile the legal system often blocks intervention until someone gets hurt.

So the public debate becomes strange theatre. Compassion is defined as leaving the person alone. Authority is treated as cruelty.

That brings us closer to home. Manitoba’s NDP government is now moving toward supervised consumption sites. The argument is harm reduction. The idea is that if people are going to use drugs anyway, the state should at least make it safer.

The problem is that the evidence across Canada is far from comforting. Vancouver, Toronto, and other cities expanded harm-reduction sites over the last decade. Yet overdoses, street disorder, and visible addiction kept rising. Recovery rates did not suddenly surge. In many neighbourhoods the result was more normalization of drug use without a clear path back to stability.

If a policy is supposed to reduce harm, the basic question is simple: are fewer people addicted, dying, or trapped in the street?

If the answer is no, the policy deserves scrutiny.

Safe consumption sites may prevent some immediate overdoses. But they also risk locking people into a long-term cycle where the system manages addiction instead of helping people escape it. Families who are begging for treatment beds, detox spaces, psychiatric care, and recovery programs often watch governments invest more energy in enabling use than in ending it.

That’s the tension people feel but rarely say out loud.

A compassionate society does not abandon people to addiction while calling it care. Compassion sometimes means structured treatment, involuntary intervention when someone is clearly incapable of making rational choices, and serious investment in recovery infrastructure.

Otherwise we are simply managing decline.

And families like the one in that post already know it.

Update, 14 March: 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.

Update, the second: Devon Eriksen had a relevant-to-this-topic aside on a longer post –

One of the most common sources of confusion is “using the wrong word”.

For example, if you have a drug zombie problem, and you call it a “homeless” problem, then you spend a lot of tax money giving houses to drug zombies, who turn them into rat-infested drug dens.

The wrong word implies the wrong understanding.

March 10, 2026

Iran in the news

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As I mentioned last time, as I don’t try to stay on top of the “breaking news” cycle, I’m not feverishly refreshing all my social media feeds to get the latest dope about the latest confict with the Islamic State. It’s not that I don’t care, but that as with all modern wars the ratio of signal to noise renders almost all of it worthless for finding out what’s actually happening. At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter tries to gather his thoughts on the issue, subject to the same kind of informational constraints:

When I sit down to write, I usually have some idea of what I want to say – not only a topic I want to address, but a specific message I want to communicate. This is not going to be one of those essays. My feelings on the war on Iran are conflicted, to say the least. Nor do I feel that I understand enough about what’s happening to say much of substance. Nevertheless, on a matter that is of such potentially world-shaking import, I owe it to you not to be silent. So I’m setting out here to try and organize my thoughts on the matter. Whether they come to some conclusion or not, I have no idea. If nothing else, perhaps this will serve as a jumping off point for further discussion in the comments. Many of you, I’m sure, will have strong opinions on the subject, and many will also possess insights that I do not.

Will this war be of world-shaking import? That is perhaps the core of the matter. If it is not, and the principle of Nothing Ever Happens holds, then bombing Iran will not actually matter that much. A month from now, or even a couple weeks, the bombardment will fade back into the news cycle, the storm and fury of a million passionately articulated hot takes fading back into the warm, frothing ocean of discourse.

Certainly this has happened before. Trump has bombed Iran’s nuclear research facilities a few months ago, and assassinated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Qasem Soleimani a few years ago. Every time this kind of thing happens there are panicked shouts that thermonuclear Ragnarok is imminent, alongside outraged cries that Zion Don has betrayed MAGA by engaging in precisely the foreign interventionism that he repudiated, that he has been captured by the Neocohens, and that We Will Not Die For Israel. In each case, nothing much happened. Iran raised the red flag of revenge, or the gold flag of implacable annihilation, or the black flag of this time we really mean it, all of which amounted in practice to a few rockets being fired ineffectually in Israel’s general direction, to be absorbed by an Iron Dome that really seems to work quite well. There was no World War III. There were no boots on the ground. As I saw someone observe recently, We Will Not Die For Israel has become the groyper version of the Handmaid’s Tale: no one is actually asking anyone to die for Israel; there are no imminent plans for mass conscription; therefore protestations that one will resist a non-existent draft amount to the same kind of lurid masturbatory fantasy as declarations that one would never, pant, allow oneself to be confined in a harem, pant pant, and turned into, pant pant pant, breeding stock.

Brief pause for meme:

And back to John Carter:

Maybe that will change. Maybe a year from now I’ll be ruefully eating those words, as American boys are being shipped off by their hundreds of thousands to run around blinded by Russian electronic countermeasures in the cold mountain passes of the Zagros, getting picked off by snipers and shredded by Chinese drones.

But I doubt it.

Modern warfare doesn’t have much use for conscript armies. That lesson was learned in Vietnam: conscripts generally have poor morale, they aren’t highly motivated, they aren’t usually of the highest quality, and so they are of limited usefulness on the battlefield. Soldiers are highly trained professionals who have chosen the military as a career. That makes them much less likely to mutiny. Moreover, modern warfare is highly technical: soldiers have to be extremely well trained to be any use at all. The young men who volunteer for military service usually do so with some hope of adventure and even danger. As such, they often positively look forward to war.

None of this should be taken to imply that Israel hasn’t played a massive role in orchestrating and precipitating this war. They clearly have. Marco Rubio let this slip when he admitted that part of the reason the US attacked when they did was that Israel had signalled that they were going to attack with or without America’s blessing or assistance; since Iran would certainly direct some of its retaliation against the Little Satan towards the regional assets of the Great Satan, America’s hand was forced. This is a bit like when your shithead friend has had one Jameson’s too many and you sit down next to him at the bar only to find that he’s about to throw hands at some asshole you’ve never met: you’re liable to take a punch to the nose no matter what you do, so you might as well have your friend’s back. You can call him a shithead later.

Israel’s involvement goes much deeper than this, of course. Zionism’s penetration of American conservatism is hardly a secret. There are Dispensationalists all over the Republican party, including the Secretary of War Peter Hegseth, and probably Marco Rubio (though technically he’s a Catholic). Republicans who shrug off open anti-white bigotry systematically directed against America’s core population in essentially all of its universities react with fury to campus anti-Semitism, threatening to withhold funding from any institutions that tolerate hurt Jewish feelings. Then of course there’s the big guy himself. Trump has never been much of a Christian, still less an evangelical ZioChristian, but he seems to have undergone something of a religious awakening after divine intervention saved his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. And who can blame him? It certainly doesn’t seem implausible that since then, Trump has been influenced by Zionists who have convinced him that G-d saved him so that he could save America and, more importantly, G-d’s Chosen People. “You are the second coming of Cyrus the Great” would be an appealing narrative to a man with a vast ego. It would be even more appealing given the political and economic support it would come with. Certainly there would be no shortage of avenues for approach: Trump’s daughter is married into the tribe, after all.

There’s ordinary virtue signalling, then there’s virtue costuming

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison describes what happens when virtue signalling becomes someone’s entire persona:

When Virtue Becomes a Costume

Here’s an old village joke: if a man walks around telling everyone how humble he is, check his pockets. He’s usually carrying a mirror.

That’s roughly how the modern “woke” phenomenon works. It presents itself as moral enlightenment, but most of the time it behaves like a status game, who can signal the most compassion, the loudest outrage, and the strongest allegiance to the fashionable cause of the week.

My definition is blunt: woke politics is moral signalling replacing moral responsibility.

It’s not about solving problems. It’s about performing concern.

And once you start looking at it that way, the pattern shows up everywhere.

The Performance Economy of Virtue

Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs”.

Luxury beliefs are ideas held mostly by wealthy or highly educated people that signal status but impose real costs on everyone else. The people promoting them rarely suffer the consequences.

Think about it.

Defund the police.
Abolish prisons.
Decriminalize hard drugs.
Romanticize homelessness as a “lifestyle choice”.

Who pushes these ideas hardest?

Not the working-class neighbourhood dealing with break-ins. Not the single mother living beside a drug market. It’s usually professors, activists, and celebrities living in safe neighbourhoods with security cameras and gated buildings.

The belief becomes a badge of moral sophistication.

The consequences fall somewhere else.

This is the luxury belief machine.

The Five Laws of Stupidity at Work

Carlo Cipolla’s Five Laws of Human Stupidity explains the rest.

His argument was beautifully cynical: stupidity is not about intelligence. It’s about behaviour.

A stupid person, he wrote, is someone who causes harm to others while gaining nothing themselves.

Sound familiar?

Look around at some modern activism and you’ll see Cipolla’s laws running like background software.

Law #1: Always underestimate the number of stupid people.

Every generation believes it has escaped mass foolishness. Every generation is wrong.

Law #2: Stupidity is independent of education.

A PhD does not vaccinate someone against bad thinking. Sometimes it just gives them fancier vocabulary.

Law #3: A stupid person harms others without benefit.

Policies driven by emotional slogans often damage the very communities they claim to protect.

Law #4: Non-stupid people underestimate stupidity’s power.

This is why sensible people are constantly surprised when destructive ideas gain traction.

Law #5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Unlike criminals, they don’t know what they’re doing. And unlike the selfish, they aren’t pursuing rational gain.

They simply push the lever harder.

The Hollywood Example

Even entertainment hasn’t escaped the pattern.

Hollywood increasingly behaves less like a storytelling industry and more like a political signalling club. The pressure to conform is real: careers depend on being publicly aligned with the dominant ideology, and dissent can carry professional consequences.

The incentives are obvious.

Actors gain admiration by championing fashionable causes. They receive praise, awards, and moral approval, often without sacrificing anything material in their own lives.

It’s “virtue” at almost zero cost.

The Moral Time Machine

Then there’s what Bill Maher once joked about: the moral time machine.

Modern activists judge people from centuries ago as if those individuals possessed today’s cultural knowledge and moral vocabulary. It’s a kind of historical self-congratulation, imagining how virtuous we would have been in 1066 if only we had been there.

But that trick isn’t really about history.

It’s about status.

If you can condemn the past loudly enough, you look enlightened in the present.

The Incentive Problem

Here’s the uncomfortable truth.

Most systems don’t run on morality. They run on incentives.

Corporations chase profit.
Media chase attention.
Algorithms chase engagement.
Political activists chase moral prestige.

If the reward structure encourages outrage and virtue signalling, that’s exactly what people will produce.

Not because they’re evil.

Because incentives work.

The Reframe

The real divide in modern politics isn’t left versus right.

It’s performance versus results.

One side asks:

“Does this policy sound compassionate?”

The other asks:

“Did it actually improve people’s lives?”

That’s the question that cuts through the noise.

Because compassion measured by intentions is theatre.

Compassion measured by outcomes is responsibility.

Here’s the test I use now.

When someone proposes a moral crusade, ask three questions:

Who pays the cost?

Who receives the applause?

What happens if the policy fails?

Luxury beliefs collapse under those questions almost instantly.

And the moment the performance stops, something interesting happens.

We can finally start solving the problem.

[NR – emphasis added]

Update, 11 March: 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.

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