Quotulatiousness

July 1, 2026

Scholarship replaced by elitist gatekeeping and bad faith

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

It is possible — in fact, essential — to discover and disseminate the facts about Indian Residential Schools. Repeating the unproven (and to many, deeply discredited) narrative and denouncing those seeking the facts as “denialists” has nothing to do with scholarship but it’s very much in line with gatekeeping:

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

Let’s be honest about what is happening in this video.

This is not academic debate. It is a character attack dressed up as scholarship.

Dr. Travis Hay’s presentation at Mount Royal University, uploaded by Frances Widdowson under the title “Bad Faith: Residential School Denialism and the Academy”, is deeply disappointing. I expected a serious lecture. I expected evidence, argument, and a careful dismantling of claims he believes are wrong.

Instead, what we get is a bad faith lecture.

So yes, Bad Faith is a good title. Just not for the reason Hay thinks.

The real bad faith is pretending to defend scholarship while avoiding the hard work of open debate.

Hay spends much of the lecture drawing a line between “good faith” and “bad faith” criticism. But his standard for good faith appears to be simple: you may disagree only inside the boundaries of the approved framework. You can quibble over details. You can adjust the margins. You can offer polite corrections.

But if you challenge the premise itself, suddenly you are no longer mistaken. You are morally defective. You are a “denialist”, a “grievance merchant”, or some broken person who must be pushed outside respectable academic life.

That is not scholarship. That is gatekeeping.

None of this requires minimizing the real harm done by residential schools. It simply means historical claims should be open to examination. Evidence should be tested. Terms should be defined. Numbers should be scrutinized. Arguments should be answered.

Instead, Hay leans heavily on moral outrage, personal denunciation, and guilt by association. Rather than carefully taking apart Widdowson’s arguments, he drags in old controversies involving other people, uses emotional anecdotes, and builds a mood where the audience is being told what to feel before they are allowed to think.

The most revealing part is the conclusion. Hay says people like Widdowson do not belong in the academy. In other words, the answer to uncomfortable academic work is not better evidence, better reasoning, or open debate. It is expulsion.

That should bother everyone.

A university that cannot tolerate dissent is not protecting knowledge. It is protecting doctrine.

If Widdowson is wrong, prove it. Debate her. Bring the evidence. Take her claims apart in public. That is what serious scholars are supposed to do.

But when the response is censorship, exclusion, and personal insult, it starts to look less like confidence and more like fear.

I came away from viewing this lecture disappointed. Not because Hay disagrees with Widdowson. Disagreement is the whole point of academic life. I was disappointed because the lecture showed so little faith in the public’s ability to hear competing arguments and judge the evidence for themselves.

This lecture does not prove that Widdowson’s arguments are wrong. It proves that parts of the academy no longer know how to handle a serious challenge without reaching for moral panic and professional exile.

June 30, 2026

QotD: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The founders of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were just two of many radical critics of the industrial society. But it was their achievement to devise the first internally consistent blueprint for an alternative social order. A mixture of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy, which represented the historical process as dialectical, and the political economy of David Ricardo, which posited diminishing returns for capital and an “iron” law of wages, Marxism took Carlyle’s revulsion against the industrial economy and substituted a utopia for nostalgia.

Marx himself was an odious individual. An unkempt scrounger and a savage polemicist, he liked to boast that his wife was “née Baroness von Westphalen” but was not above siring an illegitimate son by their maidservant. On the sole occasion when he applied for a job (as a railway clerk) he was rejected because his handwriting was so atrocious. He sought to play the stock market but was hopeless at it. For most of his life he therefore depended on handouts from Engels, for whom socialism was an evening hobby, along with foxhunting and womanizing; his day job was running one of his father’s cotton factories in Manchester (the patent product of which was known as Diamond Thread). No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton.

The essence of Marxism was the belief that the industrial economy was doomed to produce an intolerably unequal society divided between the bourgeoisie, the owners of capital, and a property-less proletariat. Capitalism inexorably demanded the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands and the reduction of everyone else to wage slavery, which meant being paid only “that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer”. In chapter 32 of the first tome of Capital (1867), Marx prophesied the inevitable denouement:

    Along with the constant decrease of the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class …

    The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

It is no coincidence that this passage has a Wagnerian quality, part Götterdämmerung, part Parsifal. But by the time the book was published the great composer had left the spirit of 1848 far behind. Instead it was Eugene Pottier’s song “The Internationale” that became the anthem of Marxism. Set to music by Pierre De Geyter, it urged the “servile masses” to put aside their religious “superstitions” and national allegiances and to make war on the “thieves” and their accomplices, the tyrants, the generals, princes and peers.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

June 29, 2026

“The state of 24 Sussex Dr. [is] a painfully obvious symbol of broader Canadian dysfunction”

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

For the vast majority of my readers, the address “24 Sussex Drive” might as well be “99 Sunset Strip” or “12 Grimmault Place”, but it’s a real place with some minor importance to Canadians: it’s the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada. It’s also, famously, a dump (rather like the country has been allowed to become). It finally reached the point of structural decrepitude that the current and previous PMs never bothered to move in. Now, as related in the free-to-cheapskates portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, it’s supposed to be renovated.

The official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada, 24 Sussex Drive, as seen from the Ottawa River. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (La résidence officielle du Premier ministre du Canada 24, promenade Sussex vu de la rivière des Outaouais).
Photo by sookie via Wikimedia Commons.

Hallelujah.

We’re responding to the announcement on Friday that the Canadian government will finally deal with the mess that is 24 Sussex Dr., the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada (at least in theory). Successive Canadian prime ministers have refused to spend the money necessary to keep the building, which dates to the 1860s, in a state of good repair. PM after PM has been too terrified of the optics of spending taxpayer money on their own mansion.

Rather than solve this problem like a grown-up country by pushing control of a reasonable maintenance budget to a non-political body — something like the National Capital Commission, come to think of it — we instead simply sat around and allowed the building to decay to the point where it was no longer habitable. Stephen Harper and his family gritted their way through their time there. Justin Trudeau and his family never bothered moving in, settling instead at Rideau Cottage, on the grounds of the Governor General’s residence.

Mark Carney, God bless him, has decided that enough is enough and it’s time to bite the bullet and just fix the damn thing.

We repeat: hallelujah.

We are actually fairly agnostic on one of the central debates here, namely whether the mansion should have been rehabilitated or simply knocked down and replaced. You can make the argument fairly either way. In making his announcement on Friday, Carney indicated that he had chosen rehabilitation because Canadians need to do more to stand up for their heritage and their history, and that includes 24 Sussex.

That struck us as an astute reading of where public sentiment is, and a way to buy at least partial political cover for what will remain controversial.

We were less impressed by the rest of what he announced. Instead of simply hiring a reputable firm to come up with a new design for the renovated building, getting some quotes and then proceeding directly, the government will instead dramatically overcomplicate things, as Canadian governments tend to do, by commissioning some kind of design competition to be overseen by eminent Canadian designers and architects. We wouldn’t be shocked if David Johnston shows up somehow. Louise Arbour is, of course, recently spoken for, but we’ll see if any other retired Supreme Court justices end up giving their design skills a whirl.

Renovated building this way is dumb. But we think the next part of what was announced was weirder, and certainly riskier for the government. To offset the costs, this will become something the government fundraises for.

Okay. We guess?

Hey, The Line has no problem with fundraising. (Ahem. See below.) But we aren’t a national government? The devil will be in the details here. If this is structured in a way that limits donations to Canadian citizens and residents, caps donations at a set dollar value, and includes strong transparency requirements, we guess it’s fine. Canadians have been feeling patriotic of late, especially boomers and Liberals. If the prime minister has figured out a way to offload the financing of this project onto them, we’ll find a way to live with that.

Gosh, there’s risk here. Will foreign donations be permitted? Corporations? If corporations are allowed, must they be Canadian? Will Canadian subsidiaries of foreign corporations be able to contribute? What about foreign governments? Will the future dining room of the official residence of the prime minister of Canada be brought to you by the People’s Republic of China? Will the front foyer be a gift of the people of Qatar?

We’ll see. Those details are still pending. We suspect, or at least hope, that the government was smart enough to foresee the optics of having the prime minister’s official residence sponsored by Brookfield Asset Management, to pick one example out of thin air.

So we don’t love the process, but we love that we’re at least doing this. The state of 24 Sussex Dr. has not only been a long-standing national embarrassment, it’s been a painfully obvious symbol of broader Canadian dysfunction. Taking care of the damn house, or fixing it or replacing it, is a really easy thing by the standards of the problems the federal government is often faced with. But both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau curled up into tiny little balls and melted into jelly instead of just doing their jobs and taking care of a national infrastructure asset. That they did this simply to avoid the optics of spending a little money on themselves and future prime ministers is easily understood through the lens of politics, but no less pathetic for it.

For the record, I have no problem with the government spending the money to maintain or even upgrade the PM’s official residence, but it’s been a political liability for so long that fixing the place up will likely be far more expensive than any amount of deferred maintenance might have cost if we’d just committed to keeping the place in good condition. I’ve always been puzzled why it isn’t in the purview of the National Capital Commision anyway, so that it wouldn’t become a cheap political point-scoring opportunity every time it springs a leak or needs a window pane replaced.

The Line editors also declare they’re on Team Art Deco against the anti-human monsters of Brutalist architecture and point out that there actually is a uniquely Canadian architectural style:

Look, if the decline of 24 Sussex had become symbolic of Canadian vices like dysfunction and cheapness, there was an opportunity here to signal symbolic virtues like decisiveness and seriousness by just — announcing the government was going to fix a known problem using an architect that Carney had personally approved. There is absolutely no reason to use this building as an opportunity to create a travelling roadshow of the country’s architectural “greatness” by holding a design competition that will produce 15 different varieties of the AGO Crystal or the Edmonton Public Tank/Library. To be blunt, this country’s talent pool in architecture is as shallow as every other cultural industry we can name. It can be summed up thusly; we produce the odd star in the field who moves elsewhere. What gets left behind is derivative government-funded schlock that allows us to keep up appearances and maintain our national illusions. Our ability to create world class art of any kind at present is right up there with our ability to build a pipeline, scale a company, or manage an efficient regulatory process. Our decline is a universal problem.

“Chateau Laurier, 1927 with the new extenstion” by Ross Dunn is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Meanwhile, Canada already has a unique and rich architectural style that we should be using on all federal buildings intended to convey authority and heritage — it goes by many names, ranging from Railway Gothic, to neo-Chateau. It can be seen in beloved buildings ranging from the University of Toronto’s Hart House, to the aforementioned railway hotels that spread across the land. It’s turn of the century gothic revival meets French Chateaux and Scottish Kirk; romantic, a little ornate, and always grounded in the landscape and climate, and using the local materials. In other words, we already have a uniquely Canadian aesthetic language. We just stopped designing buildings this way when our cultural institutions decided that our history was a problem rather than the prima materia of our complicated national identity. We’ve been stuck with glass buildings and cheap concrete Soviet suicide boxes ever since.

And to be clear, we don’t think every Canadian building needs to look like it was built in 1919. Form ought to meet function. For buildings that are trying to convey modern values, or to align with environments sporting an updated aesthetic, there’s nothing wrong with a modern style. Museums and art galleries, for example, offer fine opportunities to push artistic envelopes. But when we’re considering buildings intended to convey government power, institutional authority, and the establishment of democratic legitimacy through continuation and heritage, that’s when we ought to be leaning back into our shared historic design languages. That’s the time to convey gravitas, solidity, and confidence; stone, ornate woodwork, traditional aspects and classical symmetry.

An updated version of Railway style, working in tandem with the existing structure of 24 Sussex, is the very obvious answer to the problem of the Prime Minister’s residence. If we can incorporate First Nations motifs or building materials, all the better.

But this country’s current architectural culture is profoundly derivative and fundamentally uncomfortable with the very institutional heritage this building needs to convey. Restrained and old fashioned is not the kind of thing that wins international acclaim. So instead, what we’re going to get is the generic, omnipresent, and pathologically insecure style better defined as “Modern Canadian Try Hard”. Think updated farmhouse, black window frames and white walls à la Studio McGee. Wavy glass Eurotrash that makes no sense for the climate of Canada and offers no gesture toward the symbolic value of the building.

A “good guy with a gun” is responsible for stopping a lot of crime in the US

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

If you’ve paid any attention, you’ll have been told that private gun owners are rarely if ever able to stop a crime, and even that you’re somehow in more danger if you carry a gun than if you go unarmed. The FBI certainly contributed to that message with their annual Active Shooting Reports, which seemed to indicate that civilians with guns were only responsible for stopping gun attacks 3.7% of the time. This understates the frequency by a very large margin:

The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a public place, not involving gang violence or some other crime such as robbery. Such an incident could be something as minor as one person being shot at and missed up to a mass public shooting.

While the FBI includes cases where civilians stop active shooters, the news media frequently relies on the limited number of these cases to argue that such interventions are rare. Headlines illustrate this framing: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander” (Associated Press); “Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting” (Washington Post); and “After Indiana mall shooting, one hero but no lasting solution to gun violence” (New York Times). The FBI’s reports acknowledge that armed civilians stopped active shooting attacks in seven of the eleven years they reviewed.

When John Stossel asked the FBI about our claim that they had omitted many cases, the Bureau responded: “[Our data is] not intended to explore all active shooting incidents but rather to provide a baseline understanding …”

[…]

Between 2014 and 2024, citizens stopped 178 out of 339 potential or actual mass shootings where we could identify that guns were allowed in the area. So 52.5% of attacks were stopped by people legally carrying concealed handguns.

The numbers indicate that if we didn’t have gun-free zones, we would have more people stopping these attacks.

Finally, even these numbers underestimate the usefulness of legally carried concealed handguns in stopping mass public shootings because many of these active shooting incidents involve only one person being targeted. For example, suppose one person is targeted and only one person may be present. In that case, there is relatively little opportunity for people to stop attacks compared to a mass public shooting where many potential victims are present.

The general public seems to agree. A July 2022 survey by the Trafalgar Group showed that a plurality of American general election voters believe that armed citizens are the most effective element in protecting you and your family in the case of a mass shooting. First on the list was “armed citizens” at 42%, followed by “local police” (25%) and “federal agents” (10%). [“None of the above” was the answer chosen by 23% of respondents.] A survey by YouGov in May – before the Uvalde, Texas, attack – found that by a margin of 51% to 37% American adults supported letting schoolteachers and administrations carry concealed handguns.

June 28, 2026

Multiculturalism in Australia: theory and practice

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Australia, like the rest of the Anglosphere (with the notable exception of the United States) has adopted multiculturalism as a secular national religion, yet all is not well Down Under, as Celina illustrates:

Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club address last week has thrust the conversation of multiculturalism back into the centre of Australian politics. With One Nation now the most popular party in the polls, her pledge for a “monoculture” is no longer being pushed into the fringes. Yet, as it stands One Nation doesn’t really have any concrete policy on how to abolish multiculturalism.

Firstly, we must distinguish what is meant by multiculturalism in relation to politics. Multiculturalism is not just the presence of different cultural practices in Australia. That is a deliberate straw-man. “Abolish multiculturalism and you lose your Bah mi or Chinese takeaways” is a lazy reductionism pushed by people who are either stupid or as a sarcastic question from the left about the lack of One Nations ability to provide actual policy.

Multiculturalism, as it operates in Australia, is the institutionalisation of minority ethnic and religious lobbying. It is a system in which governments treat organised ethnic, religious and minority identity-based groups as permanent stakeholders with privileged access to policy-making. These groups receive taxpayer funding, sit on advisory bodies, submit formal recommendations, and see their priorities turned into law on hate speech, anti-discrimination, social cohesion and diversity policy. The broader Australian public is expected to accept the resulting consensus.

The Machinery That Actually Exists

Australia maintains a Minister for Multicultural Affairs, an Office for Multicultural Affairs inside the Department of Home Affairs, an Australian Multicultural Council, and a Ministerial Forum on Multicultural Affairs. States have their own legislation: the Multicultural NSW Act, Victoria’s Multicultural Victoria Act, South Australia’s Multicultural Act, Queensland’s Multicultural Recognition Act and others. They create recurring funding streams, annual reporting obligations, advisory councils and grants programs that sustain an entire ecosystem of peak bodies, settlement providers and advocacy organisations.

Commonwealth multicultural grants run into tens of millions annually. Additional streams exist for “social cohesion”, security upgrades for specific communities and settlement services. Peak bodies such as the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA), the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) and the Hindu Council routinely prepare submissions, appear before inquiries and maintain ongoing relationships with ministers and bureaucrats. Personnel overlap between federal and state advisory structures is visible and recurring.

This is what political scientist Theodore Lowi called “interest group liberalism“.1 Lowi’s insight was that the pluralist system does not represent the public interest but rather rewards whichever organised groups can gain access to the machinery of government. The democratic problem is that the state has granted specific groups a structural position that ordinary, unorganised citizens do not enjoy. This results in something called mobilisation of bias, as coined by E.E. Schattschneider. described this form of power as the “mobilisation of bias“, where “some issues are organised into politics while others are organised out“.2,3


  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_group_liberalism
  2. https://www.powercube.net/analyse-power/forms-of-power/hidden-power/
  3. (2011). “Mobilization of bias”. In K. Dowding (Ed.) Encyclopedia of power (pp. 424-424). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412994088.n234

June 27, 2026

QotD: When Marxism went mainstream in higher education

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On October 25, 1989, a mere two months after Poland’s pivotal election, the New York Times published an article, headlined “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges“, describing a strange and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Even as the world’s great experiment in Marxism was collapsing for all to see, Marxist ideas were taking root and becoming mainstream in the halls of American universities.

“As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders”, wrote Felicity Barringer.

There were notable differences, however. The stark, unmistakable contrast between the grinding poverty of the Communist nations and the prosperity of Western economies had obliterated socialism’s claim to economic superiority.

As a result, orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on economics, was no longer in vogue. Traditional Marxism was “retreating” and had become “unfashionable”, the Times reported.

“There are a lot of people who don’t want to call themselves Marxist,” Eugene D. Genovese, an eminent Marxist academic, told the Times. (Genovese, who died in 2012, later abandoned socialism and embraced traditional conservatism after rediscovering Catholicism.)

Marxism wasn’t truly retreating, however. It was simply adapting to survive. Watching the upheaval in Poland and other Eastern bloc nations had convinced even Marxists that capitalism would not “give way to socialism” anytime soon. But this would cause an evolution of Marxist ideas, not an abandonment of them.

“Marx has become relativized”, Loren Graham, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.

Graham was just one of a dozen of the scholars the Times spoke to, a mix of economists, legal scholars, historians, sociologists, and literary critics. Most of them seemed to reach the same conclusion as Graham.

Marxism was not dying, it was mutating.

“Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race – this is where the exciting debates are”, Jonathan M. Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, told the paper.

Marxism was still thriving, Barringer concluded, but not in the social sciences, “where there is a possibility of practical application”, but in abstract fields such as literary criticism.

Kristian Niemietz, “The New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges’ 30 Years Ago. Today, We See the Results”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-09-18.

June 26, 2026

No “capital formation”, please: we’re Canadian

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies one of the biggest reasons the Canadian economy is falling ever further behind other industrialized nations:

AI-generated image from L. Wayne Mathison

Canada does not have a talent shortage.

It has a capital formation shortage.

In Q1 2026, Canada managed one growth-stage VC deal. One. Worth $1M.

That is lemonade-stand money in a global tech race.

The U.S. pulled in $267.2B in VC investment. Capital is not confused. It goes where risk is rewarded, scale is possible, and success is not treated like a moral offence.

Carney and the Liberals keep talking about “building the economy” while presiding over a country where founders raise seed money here, then scale somewhere else.

That is the real brain drain.

Not just doctors. Not just engineers. Builders. Founders. Investors. People who can turn ideas into payrolls.

They look at Canada and see taxes, red tape, weak productivity, political favouritism, and a government more interested in managing decline than getting out of the way.

Carney was sold as the adult in the room. OK. Then explain this: why is Canada producing press releases while the Americans are producing companies?

Because capital can smell fear.

And right now, Canada smells like a country that punishes ambition, subsidizes failure, and calls it fairness.

June 25, 2026

Passively shaping public opinion is one of big tech’s favourite techniques

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

In the portion of this post above the paywall, Celina shows a good example of how social engineering doesn’t have to be blatant to be effective:

Before reading further, open a new browser tab and type the search term “married white woman” into Google Images. Scroll through the first several rows of results. What do you see?

The output which is consistently replicated across different devices and geographic locations is a deluge of mixed-race couples. The output is overwhelmingly dominated by images of white women intimately paired with black or non-white men. To the casual observer passively consuming this digital output, the presentation establishes an immediate baseline for normalcy. The volume and priority of these specific demographic pairings create the distinct impression that such relationships are the standard, ubiquitous, and foundational reality of modern Western society.

Yet, when we contrast this algorithmic simulation with reality, a massive discrepancy emerges. Statistically, interracial marriages remain a distinct minority of overall unions in the United States and across the broader Western world. According to comprehensive data from the Pew Research Center, in 2020, only 11% of all married couples in the United States were interracial or interethnic. When we drill down into the specific pairing that dominates the aforementioned image search, the numbers shrink even further. Marriages specifically between a white woman and a black man account for a mere 7% of that already small 11% sliver of intermarriages. In absolute terms, out of over 51 million married white women in the United States, less than 1% are married to black men.

Despite this statistical rarity, the digital simulation feels entirely “normal” to the modern consumer because media giants like Google, alongside massive stock photography conglomerates like Getty Images and Shutterstock, consciously and relentlessly curate it that way. This immense disparity between reality is the result of neutral, blind code cataloging human existence. It is an intentional act of social enforcement, by artificially elevating specific demographic pairings, media platforms execute a subtle but pervasive socio-cultural engineering project.

It can thus be argued that this engineered visual output serves a distinct ideological purpose: pushing European women toward demographic change and eroding the visual primacy of the homogeneous nuclear family that built and sustained Western nation-states for centuries. When digital representations are manipulated to consistently overwrite physical realities, a significant ontological shift occurs within the host population. The native majority is conditioned to view their own demographic decline as an organic, inevitable, and morally righteous progression. This forces us to confront the question: If images precede and dictate reality, who is engineering our extinction?

I’m long out of the habit of watching TV, so when the NFL season gets started and I’m presented with three-plus hours per week of commercial TV to watch my favourite team play, I can’t help but notice that most commercials that include representations of married couples are inter-racial or non-white. The advertisers are also presenting a small minority of marriages in North America as being the overwhelming majority in their TV ads. Why might they want to do that?

Formerly Peru’s First Lady, Keiko Fujimori is now President in her own right

The new President of Peru, Keiko Fujimori, faces a big economic challenge to her nation:

With just over 99% of ballots counted, Keiko Fujimori holds a lead of roughly 40,000 votes over Roberto Sánchez — less than half a percentage point, and the third consecutive Peruvian presidential contest decided by a margin that narrow. Sánchez led through the early days of counting, carried by rural and highland turnout; but the overseas votes, which broke for Fujimori above 63%, pulled the result the other way as the tally crossed 95%.

The outcome is no longer seriously in doubt. What remains in doubt is whether a victory this narrow constitutes a mandate to govern, or merely a turn to occupy the office in impotence.

Fujimori has never held executive power. What she inherits, however, is a name: her father, Alberto Fujimori, governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, stabilizing a hyperinflationary economy and crushing the Shining Path insurgency, albeit with darkly authoritarian techniques for which he was later convicted. Long known as Peru’s answer to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Fujimori has cast a long shadow over Peruvian politics ever since.

Keiko served as his First Lady through the latter half of the 1990s, then built her own career: a congresswoman from 2006 to 2011, and the leader of Fuerza Popular (“Popular Force”) since. She spent 13 months in pretrial detention on corruption charges tied to Odebrecht financing; a court voided the case in January 2025. She has run for president four times, losing the previous three runoffs by margins under a single percentage point before, now, winning her fourth.

Her governing history is, as a result, tied deeply to her father’s. She has spent two decades defending it rather than living it, which is itself a kind of qualification in a country where economic memory often prevails over institutional memory. The model her father installed — trade liberalization, fiscal orthodoxy, an open door to foreign capital — has outlasted eight changes of president in ten years. The claims of Fujimorismo — the governing-economic doctrine named for Fujimori that has dominated ever since his time — is that it alone can be trusted to keep that model standing.

Keiko Fujimori’s flagship commitments are, consequently, the two pillars of Fujimorismo itself: a hard line on crime, and an unapologetic defense of the market economy.

The security platform proposes deploying the military against organized crime and prison disorder, taking inspiration both from Peru’s own recent past, and Nayib Bukele’s divisive tactics in El Salvador. Alongside this, the platform promises expanding video surveillance, and modernizing this apparatus through the use of artificial intelligence to detect corruption in public contracting. She insists that her father’s system’s abuses will not be repeated.

The economic platform is a much-needed deregulatory shock: cutting investment-approval timelines by 40%, reducing the fiscal deficit from 2.2% to 1% of GDP, and shrinking the state. As for exactly how that shrinking will be achieved besides the aforementioned measures, Keiko is not clear.

Nevertheless, both pillars of the plan were sold on a single word, repeated at her closing rally and in her final debate: order, against the chaos she says the left represents.

In counterpoint to recent claims that cutting USAID funding cost the lives of millions of children who depended on those funds, taking away USAID support in much of South America led to a number of electoral changes:

Why Britain voted for Brexit

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

Pat Condell explains some of the reasons British voters chose Brexit over staying in the EU back in 2016:

Why did we vote for Brexit ten years ago? Because we understood that the core purpose of the European Union is to destroy the independent countries of Europe by opening the borders and transforming a diverse continent of sovereign nations into a single homogenous political bloc governed by a committee of unelected bureaucrats, as a model for the planned global dictatorship.

Obviously, you’re not going to get many votes for that if you just lay it out for people, so you start with something innocuous like trade.

You say “Let’s harmonise our trade arrangements and everything will run more smoothly.”

And people say “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”

Then you say “While we’re at it, let’s give this small group of people the power to organise all this from one place, and everything will run more smoothly.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense. We want things to run smoothly.”

Then it’s “Actually, let’s give these people the power to make our laws and override our parliament and justice system, and everything will run much more smoothly.”

“Hold on a second, I don’t know about that …”

“You fascist. You racist. You xenophobe. You bigot. You pig ignorant little Englander. You vermin. You scum.”

Although that attitude certainly helped to tip the balance, the most important reason we voted for Brexit is that politicians had no right to sign away the governance of the UK to a foreign entity, but that is what they did, while pretending it was about trade. They lied to us, and they tried to cheat us out of our country.

That is why we voted for Brexit, and it’s why we’re now being punished for our disobedience by traitors who refuse to secure the border and who are allowing our country to be flooded with millions of unwanted and incompatible immigrants and illegally invaded and occupied by an army of dangerous military age men in whose presence no woman or child is safe.

Forced mass immigration from hostile and barbarous cultures is punishment for Brexit. Our country is being purposely destroyed for not voting the way we were told.

June 24, 2026

This is why the media didn’t want to share the murderer’s manifesto

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

In short, it does not support the narrative. Ezra Levant shares the details of the manifesto left behind by an Alberta man after he killed a police officer in Côte-des-Neiges, a Jewish section of Montreal the other day:

READ HIS MANIFESTO: The Montreal murderer was a Jew-hating Communist censor

The murderer in Montreal has been named: Seth Hatfield, from Alberta. He murdered a policeman in a shooting spree in a Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal.

Soon afterwards, government journalists at the CBC and elsewhere started describing a manifesto that he had left behind. But none of them published the actual document — they just quoted the odd phrase from it, and called him an “incel”. That’s a term for someone who was “involuntarily celibate”, or someone who didn’t do well with women. The usual suspects were doing the media circuit claiming that Hatfield was a “right wing” extremist.

But if that was true, why was the manifesto being shown only to selected, government-friendly journalists? Why were the rest of us blocked from seeing it for ourselves?

Well, that just changed. Rebel News has acquired a copy of the full, 104-page manifesto. You can read it for yourself right here: https://rebelnews.com/manifesto_reveals_alleged_montreal_gunman_s_antisemitic_far_left_and_incel_ideology

It’s true that the murderer had extreme ideas about women. But that was only a small part of his world view. In most of the rest of his rambling remarks, he was indistinguishable from left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders, Avi Lewis, or half the Liberal cabinet.

He praised Communism. He called for the abolition of private property. He railed against the Jews, and Zionism. And — like Mark Carney himself — he demanded the censorship of the Internet.

Read the manifesto of a crazed, left-wing extremist.

And never forget: the mainstream media lies to you about everything important.

If you trust Grok, here’s a summary of the manifesto:

June 23, 2026

They don’t do “democracy” in Europe for any important issue: the voters might get it wrong

It used to be a joke that voting never matters because the voters can’t be trusted with that kind of power. Over time, the joke stopped being at all funny, because that’s exactly what has happened in most western countries at the national level, but most blatantly in the European Union, where voters can express their will in a clear majority, yet see exactly the opposite policies implemented by Brussels:

EU delenda est

2005: the day they decided your “no” didn’t count

May 29, 2005. The French vote. Referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.

Result: 54.68% NO.

Turnout: 69%.

Not a vote of abstainers, not a misunderstanding.

A people speaking out, massively, with full awareness.

Three years later, the same text — or nearly so — came into force. Without asking their opinion again.

Here’s how.

The context.

The Constitutional Treaty was the great federal leap: a text that gave the EU the attributes of a state. A flag, an anthem, a “constitution”, a foreign minister, supremacy written in black and white. Chirac, full of confidence, calls the French to the polls. The “yes” campaign mobilizes everything: the state, the major parties, the media, big business, the institutional unions.

And the French say no. For reasons the elite refused to hear: fear of social dumping (the infamous “Polish plumber”, the Bolkestein directive), a sense of a machine slipping out of their control, rejection of a project decided from on high and ratified by acclamation. Five days later, the Dutch say no in turn. 61%.

The treaty is dead. Officially, it’s called a “period of reflection”. In reality, it’s time to find a workaround.

The workaround has a name: Nicolas Sarkozy.

2007 campaign. Sarkozy proposes a “simplified treaty”. And above all, he lays out the adoption method: it will be the parliamentary route. No referendum. Parliament will vote in place of the people.

That’s his promise. He is elected.

And he keeps it against the people who had already decided.

The sleight of hand: the Lisbon Treaty.

Signed in December 2007.

They remove the symbols that scared people: no more “constitution”, no flag in the text, no “minister”.

They keep the essentials: permanent presidency of the Council, extension of qualified majority voting, retreat from unanimity, the Union’s legal personality, European diplomatic service. The institutional substance of the rejected text, repackaged.

The most cynical part is that they admitted it. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the architect of the Constitution, wrote it himself: the tools are the same, we’ve simply changed their order in the box. The stated goal: make the text unreadable so no government would be forced to submit it to a referendum. Technique replacing the popular verdict.

February 2008. Versailles.

Congress convenes to amend the French Constitution and allow ratification. Then Parliament ratifies Lisbon. The government left, which had campaigned for “no”, abstains and lets it pass. The French, they are never consulted again.

The “no” of 2005 has just been converted to “yes” by procedure.

And for those who might doubt the method: Ireland, for its part, was constitutionally required to vote. It says no in June 2008. They make it revote in 2009 until they get the right result. Vote until you get it right.

And that’s where it all connects.

This isn’t a procedural anecdote. It’s the founding act of a legitimacy problem that France has never settled.

Because the question of 2005 is exactly the one today. When Brussels signs 96 billion in development aid, when the NDICI directs billions to foreign “civil societies”, when the Global Gateway promises 300 billion the real question is never “should we do it?”.

It’s: who decided, and with what legitimacy?

The answer, we’ve known it since 2005: an administration that believes the people, when they answer wrong, must be circumvented, not heard. Hayek called it the fatal conceit.

The idea that a center knows better than the peoples what is good for them including against their explicit vote.

The French never accepted Lisbon. They were never asked.

And a structure built by going over the head of a lost referendum doesn’t carry a democratic deficit: it carries a birth defect.

The American Constitution starts with “We the People”.

Ours, the European version, started with a people who said no and an apparatus that decided it didn’t count.

Auto-translated by X from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post.

June 22, 2026

Two-tier Keir resigns as UK Prime Minister

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

History will not be kind to Sir Keir Starmer’s time in office, both for his actions and his failures-to-act. The Labour Party will now select the next person to live at Number 10 Downing Street, as they still hold a majority in the House of Commons and are not required to go back to the people for a new mandate, regardless of who is their party leader.

Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, greeted the news on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

I reposted this on my other social media accounts, saying “Sadly, this is completely true. We belatedly ditched the clown prince of progressivism … only to install Mark Carney, who believes all the same progressive shibboleths that Trudeau did, but he’s far more capable of implementing them by hook or by crook.”

Starmer resigns — he has been a truly disgraceful Prime Minister.

I do not believe him to be a good man or a patriot.

He has deliberately and rapidly accelerated the destruction of our Britain, of our home.

History will not remember him kindly, nor should it.

I sat in Parliament, looking him in the eye, listening to him attempting to justify his decision to block a national inquiry into the mass rape of young British girls.

I will never forgive him. For that, and so much else.

What comes next, I do not know.

Whatever that is, Restore Britain will be ready to offer the British people a democratic route out — a better way, the only way.

But Starmer is gone.

And that is a good thing.

Enjoy it.

Former Manchester mayor and recently elected Member of Parliament for Makerfield Andy Burnham is the most likely successor to Starmer.

Then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visiting Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School in Manchester on 13 April 2026 with Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.

Progressive intellectual arrogance

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

John Konrad tries to explain the apparently universal intellectual snobbery of progressives, which has brought pretty much every western country into the era of the expert:

Why is the left so arrogant?

Because they put their trust in a global elite. Not directly, but through the media and the universities the elite manipulate.

My dad always said it the other way around: privilege comes with responsibility. But responsibility is hard. Responsibility requires knowledge.

And in a world growing more complex and unpredictable by the year, understanding what’s happening around you takes more and more of it.

Twenty years ago you could walk through Manhattan around noon on a Sunday and watch half the city reading the Times. The thing was massive, but a fast, educated reader could come away with a decent picture of the whole world in a few hours.

Then two things happened.

Craigslist gutted newspaper revenue, and DEI mandates swapped great reporters for morally indignant j-school hacks. The quality and accuracy of information cratered.

At the same time, the internet roared to life and the world got radically more interconnected overnight.

So the elite grew less informed exactly as complexity exploded.

To cope, they borrowed a trick from NASA. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be the best rocket scientist and the best navigator and the best flight surgeon all at once. So mission control compartmentalized. The best person in each silo got a desk. Thruster problem? Everyone turns to the engine expert. Someone’s hurt? Everyone turns to the flight surgeon. The rocket guy never had to learn a thing about medicine.

The elite copied the model. They switched their brains off for anything outside their lane. Everyone specialized inside their own bubble.

But compartmentalization runs on trust. Put one bad actor in mission control, and the moment everyone turns to him, bad things happen.

To guard against that, they doubled down on credentialism. They learned to trust only the experts minted by certain colleges and blessed by certain think tanks.

And the bad actors had a field day. Fraud, disinformation, theft, all of it could happen inside a silo, unseen. And it did.

Then came a mission control director who told them not to worry. Everything was fine. They didn’t know what was going on, but he did, and he was smarter than all of them. He said so, right there in the meetings.

Everyone loves a brilliant, competent boss, especially a charismatic one who seems kind, because it means they no longer have to worry. He’s got it handled. Just trust him.

And trust Obama they did.

But he had nothing handled except his own aura. And he let Marxist actors run loose inside the silos that mattered, education and HR chief among them.

The right was skeptical, so they kept reading, kept hunting for alternative sources, kept trying to make sense of the complexity themselves. Nobody cracked it completely. But they started seeing the big red anomaly lights blinking across the dashboard.

So the smart people on the right kept building broad knowledge while the left stayed siloed. Ten years passed, and the left’s elite fell far, far behind.

They’re starting to see that Obama was a fool. But they’re stuck. You can’t cram ten years of missed homework into a few months. And they’re rich and powerful and have no interest in going back to school.

They have two options. Admit they were wrong and put in months, maybe years, of hard work to take responsibility for their actions. Or keep acting like sheep. If the rewards weren’t there, some might choose the work.

But the system is so riddled with fraud, so many hollowed-out silos kept on life support, that there’s more than enough money sloshing around the NGOs to fund their posh lives.

They have the privilege with none of the responsibility. It’s a comfortable place to sit. They don’t want to change.

But holding that position requires one thing: they have to believe their mission control director has it all under control and is smarter than anyone on the right.

The bottom line is the have to be arrogant. Or the whole house of cards comes down.

June 20, 2026

Lessons learned: “In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not”

The flare-up of anti-immigrant/anti-government violence in Belfast has drifted out of the headlines lately, as state-oriented media try to get their audiences back onto safer topics like footy and hissing at the Bad Orange Man. But the situation in Northern Ireland has not resolved itself in the preferred way — preferred, that is, by the British government. John Carter responds to some American social media users who loudly wonder why British men generally are not “doing something” now:

In response to the migroid atrocity du jour, one often hears Americans ask “why haven’t British men done anything?”, to which Americans will flatteringly reply to themselves, “It’s because those BRITCUCKS have gone SOFT, they gave up their GUNS like little BITCHES, but you won’t see anyone trying THAT in a SMALL TOWN”. Which conveniently elides the awkward detail that American men, armed to the teeth as no other people on Earth, have allowed themselves to be pushed around this way and that since the sleep of the good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior (PBUH) was disturbed by his little dream. “Just you wait”, Americans will promise when this is pointed out, “The electric boogaloo will come any day now, you’ll see!” Sure we will. In the meantime, all those guns have done precisely nothing to prevent the relentless incursions of Section 8 housing, disparate impact, affirmative action, DEI, anti-discrimination training, Title IX, human resources, and all the rest of the soft tyrannies that flew out of the Pandora’s box of America’s ersatz race communist constitution. There was no resistance to any of this. Heavily armed red state Americans abandoned the cities for the suburbs rather than standing and fighting for them, and then stolidly watched as their kids were sidelined in education and employment while being terrorized by black criminals.

American speech is protected by the first amendment and backstopped by the second, yet nevertheless you will not find many Americans daring to even so much as mutter the forbidden word of power. This is not because white Americans don’t understand the problems. They have developed an elaborate vocabulary of “bad neighbourhoods” and “good schools” and “urban crime” and “troubled youth” and so on and so forth with which to discuss, in whispers, after glancing twice over their shoulders, the realities of life in the USSA. There is no law against parrhesia [Wiki], technically an American citizen may say whatever he pleases without consequence, but of course frank speech in this Greek sense requires courage by definition, and there has been a great shortage of that. You can say whatever you please, yes, of course, fill your boots, but you will find yourself ostracized, divorced, unemployed, and homeless if you speak too directly, so you know, shut up. The unspoken strictures of the longhouse are a more effective prison than iron bars for those whose spirits have been cowed.

Meanwhile, last week there was a minor uprising in Belfast. Hadi Alodid, a gentlemen of Sudanese extraction, enriched the face of Stephen Ogilvie, a local bloke with special needs, providing him with extensive tribal scarring in a generous act of cross-cultural exchange, and only claiming two of his eyes in payment. The entire incident was caught on video. Ogilvie’s life, though not his sight (and he was already hard of hearing) was saved by three Irish men who rushed in to beat the innocent Sudanese rocket surgeon off with their hurling sticks. In the aftermath, it emerged that Ogilvie had helped Alodid move in to his new accommodations just a few days before. No good deed, etc.

[…]

The uprising was variously described as a protest and as a riot, but it was neither of these. A protest is when an angry crowd gathers to chant some slogans and wave around some signs, pretending that their numbers are a display of power, and deluding themselves that Power will redress their grievances because a noisy lump of quivering biomass is somehow intimidating to Power. A riot is an explosive release of emotional energy that results in some property destruction and futile confrontations with armoured riot police, typically ending with the rioters being rounded up and jailed. In some cases, it’s true, protests and riots appear to produce political change, but this is almost invariably because Power has orchestrated these little carnivals in order to sanctify the policies it’s already decided upon under the guise of “bowing” to “pressure” from the “public”. The Canadian government, by the way, has long since mastered a non-violent variant of this dark art: practically every “public policy research group” in the country is funded by the government to pressure the government to do what the government already wants to do. Show me what Our Democracy looks like; this is what Our Democracy looks like.

There were no signs being waved around in Belfast, no chanting of slogans. While there was a great deal of violence, it was not random and senseless, but methodical and carefully targeted. It unfolded with the tight discipline of a coordinated military operation.

The day before the uprising started, a communique was sent out to local businesses, instructing them to close before the fun started. At the appointed hour loose formations of young men, indistinguishable in black hoodies, fanned out across the city.

[…]

The uprising in Belfast was not nihilistic violence for the sake of violence, though I’ve no doubt the lads were enjoying the opportunity for mayhem. It was violence towards a specific political objective: driving the foreigners out. Migrants whose domiciles were destroyed were directly deprived of housing. Migrants who managed to avoid this were made to worry that they will be next. Landlords taking government money to house migrants, or even thinking about doing so, now need to worry about the immediate cost of repairs and the ongoing expense of higher insurance premiums, making the Home Office’s lucre a lot less attractive. Landlords also need to worry about escalation: reportedly, letters were circulated which heavily implied that bricks and petrol bombs were just the first step on the violence ladder, and that the paramilitaries would be quite happy to take more decisive measures against the landlords themselves should the message not be received.

All of this is very sad, and I don’t want to seem heartless. The immigrants whose houses were destroyed were probably innocent; there was one particularly touching video of a nurse from Ghana or somewhere. Unfortunately, that is the nature of these things. They were brought in by the government en masse as a form of biological warfare against the native population. The government wants them there, the people want them gone, and the government refuses to listen, so, this is what happens.

Only 27 migrants were actually made homeless by the arson, but reportedly, quite a few are already clearing out on their own. The British government quite naturally condemned the violence, organizing a rally against racism in the aftermath, but it also responded by instructing the media to emphasize that it would be cracking down on illegal immigration into Northern Ireland. Underneath the condemnation, there is a clear message to all of this: in this case, violence worked.

That message has been sent before in Northern Ireland. Exactly one year to the day before the uprising in Belfast, there were riots in the small town of Ballymena after the courts let two gypsy boys off with delicate wrist taps for raping an Irish girl. The rioting went on for two weeks, and resulted in two thirds of the gypsy population clearing out. Again: violence worked.

Contrast Ballymena with the other major British protest movement last summer: the anti-migrant hotel protest in Epping, a London exurb populated largely by Londoners driven out of their city by diversity, which started when one of the migrants diversified a teenage girl. In contrast to the eruption in Ballymena, the protest in Epping was explicitly non-violent: the only violence came at the hands of the cops arresting people for flying Union Jacks. The mothers of Epping spent months gathering outside the migrant hotel, holding signs and raising awareness. The council also fought the migrant hotel in the courts, and enjoyed early success when a judge found that the location was zoned as a hotel but not as a migrant dormitory, essentially telling the Home Office that they didn’t have a loicense for that. This legal victory was short-lived. The decision was overturned almost immediately by a higher court judge, who explicitly found that whatever the concerns of the people of Epping as to their children’s safety, these were outweighed by the human rights of the mystery meat that had washed up on Britain’s shores, and by the government’s interest in housing them. As a result, parallel lawsuits that had been launched by councils across the country were dropped. The migrant hotel in Epping was eventually shut down, but this likely had more to do with the government’s switch to “Operation Scatter” in which migrants were garrisoned in smaller houses all over the country, rather than concentrated in a few large centres, than it did with the government responding to the concerns of British subjects.

In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not.

Update, 22 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress