Quotulatiousness

April 7, 2026

QotD: Advice for foreign leaders trying to deal with Donald Trump

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

If you want to understand Trump, you have to understand that he’s not a politician.

I do not say this as meaningless praise, just to say, oh, he’s not a corrupt scumbag. I say it with a very specific meaning.

To understand Trump, you must purge yourself of all expectations you have learned from watching politicians, include the assumptions you are not even aware you are making.

Trump is a completely different animal.

Trump is a businessman, and while there are many sorts of businessman, he is of a very specific type. He rose to wealth and prominence by doing two things very well:

1. Brand reputation building.
2. Negotiation.

#1 forms the basis of how he deals with voters.

#2 forms the basis of how he deals with other power blocs within the US, and with other nations.

You see, the true love of Donald Trump’s life is bargaining. He is a business deal sperg. And he’s very, very good at it, because the actual process is his idea of fun, and winning at it is definition of pure satisfaction and joy.

He’s never made uncomfortable by the play of offer and counteroffer, or by butting heads and seeing who blinks first. That is, instead, his happy place. This means that not only is he totally at peace in the moment, he’s also practiced a lot.

When he called his book The Art of the Deal, it wasn’t just because he wants to think he’s good at this, it’s because this is the meaning of his life. The man finds meaning in haggling the way Musk finds meaning in building technologies, or the way I find meaning in explaining things to an audience.

So when Trump is dealing with others, from political office, he’s negotiating as if it were his money. Because that’s just how he ticks.

Now, the ground rule of global politics for the past 100+ years is that no matter who you are, you are allowed to rob American taxpayers and voters, so long as you pay American politicians for the privilege of doing so.

All of us, even democrat voters who don’t want to think about it, know what 10 percent for the big guy meant, and who the particular big guy was.

For all that time, global politics amounted to treating America as a giant cash pinata, and the deals had only two guardrails on them.

1. You must pay American politicians a large enough sum, in a subtle enough manner.
2. You can’t buy anything that your paid-off politicians won’t be able to hide their personal connection to.

That’s it.

Everything else was on the table.

Trump isn’t like that. He can’t be bought.

Not because he’s some kind of saint, which he isn’t, nor because corrupt-politician money is loose change compared to Donald Trump money, which it is.

But because Trump can’t stand to deliberately lose a negotiation for a bribe, any more than Floyd Mayweather wants to throw a match to get paid off by bookies.

And this is how Trump became involved in politics in the first place. He was a standard New York City rich moderate democrat. Believed in the Postwar Dream, bought into the raceblind thing, was all in favor of exporting democracy, and taxed capitalism paying for a moderate amount of welfare state. But as he realized the political machines were selling out America, he got personally offended.

Not because he was principled and deeply cared about middle America. Perhaps a little because selling out America was hurting his real estate interests.

But mostly because bad business deals give Donald Trump the ick.

Trump seems like a loose cannon to a lot of people, because they don’t what he’ll do next. And they don’t know that because they don’t understand what motivates him.

Trump wants America to make better deals and stop being taken advantage of. And to make those better deals, he has to demonstrate to the people who are used to buying American politicians that the rules in play have changed.

So what’s the deal with Venezuela and Maduro?

Simple. If you ride the NYC subway enough, it’s pretty likely that eventually a bum will come up to you, whip out his dick, and piss on your shoes.

Why? Because he wants to feel powerful. Because his day isn’t going well, and so he wants to ruin yours. Because he’s crazy. Because who the fuck cares?

But most of all, because he can. Because NYC is run by out of touch commie liberals, and he knows that if he is arrested, he’ll be fed and let out in the morning, but if you punch him in the teeth, your life will be ruined.

So when things change, people need to be put on notice. The bums aren’t going to read a sign that says “this subway now functions under Tennessee rules”, and if they do read it, they aren’t going to believe it. They’ve heard it all before as a bluff.

You have to actually punch someone in mouth and knock some teeth out. And then have the Tennessee cops show up and say, so what, you shouldn’t have pissed on his shoes, dumbass.

It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that Maduro was offered plenty of gentle offramps which would have preserved his dignity, lifestyle, etc, if not his pride.

But he didn’t take them, because everything is a bluff … until it isn’t.

Maduro is a head on a spike. A signal that the ground truth of how to deal with America has changed.

A signal that both violence, and personal consequences, are no longer off the table.

Because the whole reason for the existence of governments is to wield organized violence instead of the disorganized kind.

Other nations will now be coming to the negotiating table with this example in mind.

America is tired of being your ATM.

Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-01-06.

Update, 8 April: 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.

April 6, 2026

NATO without the United States?

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

At The Conservative Woman, Jonathan Riley considers the sudden existential crisis facing the NATO alliance with President Trump openly musing about pulling the United States out of their current commitment to joint European defence:

PRESIDENT Trump’s warning that the US could pull out of Nato should shock even the most complacent and anti-American elements on the political left. Mr Trump has raised the issue in private discussions with White House aides in recent days, and on Wednesday confirmed that he was “absolutely” reviewing membership.

I have underlined several times in these pages why this is so – the global reach and sheer size of US military power and the fact that the USA brings capabilities to Nato that no other country has, or is ever likely to have. With American backing, Nato has credibility in its deterrent posture – deterrence being built on capability and will to use those capabilities. Without the US, credibility remains only in the nuclear sphere because of the independent British and French arsenals, but not in the conventional sphere. An aggressor could well, therefore, be tempted to take actions that fell short of the use, or riposte, of weapons of mass destruction. A Russian incursion into a non-Nato state, for example, Bosnia and Herzegovina or Moldova; or even a limited incursion in the Baltic, either on land or at sea.

The President’s threat came as the latest in a sequence of angry responses to the failure of traditional allies to give their support, as he sees it, to the US/Israeli war on Iran. Not least was his disappointment with Starmer, first over his refusal to give the US use of Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire for strikes on Iran, second over Starmer’s reluctance to deploy the Royal Navy and then his refusal to take the lead on re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. France’s preference for diplomacy has irked him too. Austria, not a Nato member, has become the latest EU country to deny US military use of its airspace.

Whether or not this outburst was more than a mark of his frustration with unappreciative allies – more wake-up call than genuine warning – it still suggests an alarming failure on his part to understand what Nato is and is not; why a US pull-out would be a lose/lose situation for Europe and the US.

Nato is an alliance founded in the Treaty of 1949 and is about mutual defence. Article Five affirms that an attack on one member state is an attack on all and obliges all other states to come to the aid of whoever has been attacked. During the Cold War, there was no discussion about resources, or caveats, or vetoes – what mattered was survival. Once the Cold War was over, nations did have a choice about what they committed – and in the case of every European country, it was less.

The water was muddied by the Nato-led expeditions to Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. These were carried out using coalitions built on the Alliance and in some cases, simultaneously, coalitions built within the Alliance. For example, in Afghanistan, there were really two International Assistance Forces (ISAFs): one was a coalition of the willing confronting insurgency and terrorism; the other was a non-kinetic coalition based on the Bonn Agreement, concerned with nation-building. Some people and member states may therefore believe that Nato is a vehicle for Allies to climb aboard and support US (or French, or British) expeditionary operations. It is not.

Cross-country booze woes

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Politics, USA, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, Brian Lilley discussed the frustrations of Canadian drinkers thanks to our odd and often illogical regulations around the sale of alcohol:

How Canadian Premiers think they’d have to operate if they let private enterprise into the alcohol trade.
New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach, right, watching agents pour liquor into sewer following a raid, 1921.
Wikimedia Commons.

I landed in Saskatoon after a late in the evening flight from Toronto on Thursday. As we headed to a family gathering south of the city, we stopped to pick up some refreshments to add to the festivities.

First off, I’ll say private liquor stores in Sask, like the ones run by Sobey’s or Co-Op are generally quite nice. It’s proof that you can have private liquor stores, the province won’t fall apart and consumers can get their products in a nice, clean, friendly environment.

This is in reference to the silly Canadian abhorrence of private liquor sales … most of our provincial governments are deeply involved in the booze trade, and regularly imply that letting any more of that business go into private hands will instantly create a maple-flavoured version of Al Capone’s empire during Prohibition.

You can also buy booze here that is forbidden in Ontario.

But holy crap is beer expensive here!

[…]

The combined federal and provincial tax rate for Quebec is about 31.5%, Ontario’s is 43% and Sakatchewan’s are the highest in the country at 49.4%.

While beer is more expensive in Sask, Ontario made liquor is cheaper here…
Why is it that in Saskatoon I can buy a bottle of Wiser’s whiskey, made in Windsor, Ontario, for about $10 cheaper than I can at the LCBO, Ontario’s government run liquor stores?

[…]

In Saskatchewan, consumers can choose what to buy…

Ontario has had a ban on the sale of American alcohol products via the LCBO since March 2025. In Saskatchewan, as in Alberta, you can choose whether to buy your Kentucky bourbon or California wine.

That’s a lot of sweet, sweet bourbon for sale at a Sobey’s store in Saskatoon.

If you want to buy some California wine in Saskatoon, you can.
So far, Alberta and Saskatchewan are alone in allowing the regular sale of American alcohol. Consumers who want to boycott here can and I’m sure many do. I hear plenty of anti-Trump/anti-American attittudes here so sales are likely lower than they were pre-tariff.

That said, you are an adult and can buy Yankee hooch if you want to.

That won’t be happening in Ontario anytime soon.

Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election … it just happened to him”

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

While I wouldn’t agree with the statement in the title of this post, it has been a common enough reading of the US 1924 presidential election — that it wasn’t an endorsement of Coolidge and his policies but merely a reflection of voters’ overall satisfaction with the economy. The editors of the Coolidge Review would beg to differ:

From the distance of more than a century, a political scientist has taken a fresh look at the 1924 presidential election.

In an article published last year in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Christopher Devine questions the conventional wisdom about how and why the incumbent, Calvin Coolidge, won that election in a landslide. Coolidge had assumed the presidency little more than a year earlier, after the unexpected death of Warren Harding. In 1924’s three-way race, he received more votes than the other two candidates combined and carried thirty-five of the forty-eight states.

As Devine points out, most historians say that a robust economy was by far the biggest reason Coolidge won. Strong economic conditions did work in the president’s favor. But Devine notes that many historians adopt a form of economic “determinism”. In this very common view, Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election”. Rather, “thanks mostly to the economy, it just happened to him”.

That argument is too simplistic, Devine suggests. He presents both qualitative and quantitative evidence to challenge the standard narrative of the 1924 campaign.

Old Assumptions, New Data

For his empirical analysis, Devine examines “county-level political, economic, and demographic data” alongside county-by-county voting results. Using these data, he tests three common explanations for the election’s outcome:

Did Coolidge win primarily because of the economy? Scraping the data, Devine concludes that the answer is largely yes. And he shows it’s misleading to claim that — as one history textbook put it — Coolidge merely rode “the crest of a wave of economic prosperity for which he was given undeserved credit”. Devine demonstrates that from behind the scenes, Coolidge “took an active role in coordinating campaign messaging” that showcased the administration’s and Republicans’ achievements. For example, Coolidge worked closely with his running mate, Charles Dawes, to keep the famously free-range vice-presidential candidate focused on the economic message. “In the matter of economy and tax reduction”, Dawes declared, “the Federal Government is headed in the right direction”. Moreover, as Devine reports, Dawes argued that the administration’s work to stabilize Europe via the Dawes Plan spared America from “the depths of an inevitable and great depression” while also ensuring that “the whole world enters upon a period of peace and prosperity”.

Did third-party candidate Robert M. La Follette hurt Democratic nominee John W. Davis more than Coolidge? Devine concludes that this effect appeared only in the Great Plains and the Mountain West. It probably wasn’t large enough to change the election’s outcome.

Did internal divisions cost the Democratic Party votes in 1924? The Democrats were so fractured that they needed 103 ballots to choose a nominee at their convention. Devine says it would be hard to imagine that such disarray did not hurt Democrats in the election. Yet he notes that quantitative evidence on the reasons for Democratic losses in 1924 is hard to find because “scientific polling did not exist in the 1920s”.

Seeking an alternative approach, Devine looks at patterns of defection from the Democratic Party by state. He finds that northern states that voted to defeat the anti-Ku-Klux-Klan plank at that year’s Democratic National Convention — in other words, states whose delegations supported the Klan — saw heavier defections in the general election. From that, Devine extrapolates to suggest that Coolidge “benefited from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan — or, perhaps one might say, Democrats lost ground because of it”.

April 4, 2026

If we think that “ordinary criticism and disagreement are bullying, then we have an infantilized and feminized culture”

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

Chris Bray finds a highly accurate label for the pearl-clutching “elites” who — to a persyn — believe that your words are violence, but their violence (delivered through third parties, of course) is merely emphatic communication to the distasteful lower orders:

Donald Trump is a mean man. He’s a bully!

Oh no SCARY, he’s trying to BULLY the Supreme Court! I wrote at the Federalist this week about the stupidity of this argument — what is he implying he can do to the life-tenured justices, for crying out loud? — but I suspect I undersold the underlying sickness. Adults don’t use the word “bully” to talk about other adults, arguably outside of a few very narrow spaces involving things like domestic violence. It’s a preschool word. The easy recourse to toddler language at the New York Times is a sign of cultural regression. But it’s also a sign of habitual and persistent dishonesty. They’re pretending. I suspect they’ve pretended so much that they’ve forgotten they’re pretending, and the mask has become the face, but at root, they’re pretending.

We have fictional characters like Willie Stark and Frank Underwood because no one on the planet is dumb enough to think that politics is nice. The federal government spends $7 trillion a year, and the lure of that bucket of money brings out a bunch of throatcutters. This is possibly one of the most obvious realities of human existence. Politics is a knife fight. […]

Quite famously, members of Congress who suggested that they would oppose the legislative priorities of President Lyndon Johnson would get phone calls in the middle night from the man himself, waking them up and letting them know that they were dead men. He’s supposed to have said things like, “I’m gonna cut your balls off, you cocksucker”, though it’s not like anyone had a stenographer on the calls to nail the quotes. He was threatening and nasty on all days ending in -y, and got bills passed by, among other things, actually, physically intimidating people who didn’t roll over. He was a leaner. He got in faces, constantly and openly.

You gonna pass my bill [insert string of highly personal threats and profanity], or is your political career over? Pressure, threats, and horsetrading are the default behaviors, the normal stuff. Andrew Jackson got the Indian Removal Act through Congress by handing out government sinecures. The premise that I can take care of you or I can go to war with you, and it’s your choice which one happens is … politics. The make-believe story about Mean Donald Trump bullying the Supreme Court by tweeting at them or sitting in a chair where they could see him is playtime, clutching at Fisher-Price pearls. Somewhat remarkably, Trump appears to bully institutional opponents quite a bit less than the historical norm, and Lisa Murkowski can do whatever she wants without consequence. I am personally calling for Donald Trump to start actually bullying some people who have it coming, but be sure to have a fainting couch ready in the newsroom at Times Square.

Update, 6 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.

QotD: Protect us from “disinformation”, Big Brother!

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

    Troy Westwood @TroyWestwood
    The only thing more important than “free speech” is protecting society from disinformation.

Troy is trying to sound enlightened, but unfortunately he has the IQ of a lobster. “The only thing more important than ‘free speech’ is protecting society from disinformation.”

Translation: “I’m terrified of ideas I don’t like, so please, Big Brother, put a nanny filter on everyone else’s brain … just to keep us all safe, of course.”

Nothing says “I trust the marketplace of ideas” quite like demanding a government-approved Ministry of Truth to decide what’s true for the rest of us. Bonus points for implying that the plebs can’t possibly sort fact from fiction without an elite class holding their hand.

Truly the hallmark of a deep thinker. Admitting you don’t believe people are capable of handling freedom, then dressing it up as noble concern for society.

If free speech is dangerous, the most dangerous speech of all is the one declaring that some authority should get to silence the rest. But don’t worry, comrade, they’ll only censor the bad information. Promise.

Another swing and a miss for Troy.

Martyupnorth, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-28.

April 2, 2026

Modern-day serial killers are called “Doctor”

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

At Science is not the answer, William M. Briggs explains why these are the long-foretold “hard times”:

Poor John Wayne Gacy. Reports are that the infamous mass murderer was looking up from his perch in Hell, musing about the more than thirty people he raped, tortured, then butchered and said “I was born too early”.

He was right.

If he had only waited a few short years to begin his horror spree, not only would he not have been arrested and executed, he would have received glowing tributes, warm praise from his colleagues, and he would have been paid by the state for every person he killed. And he would have had a much, much higher score than a mere 33 (official count).

Tale the case of modern-day born-on-time serial killer Dr — doctor, doctor — Ellen Wiebe. She beats Gacy’s score by more than ten times. She is credited with slaughtering over 500 people in Canada’s MAiD program. As impressive as that tally is, it is incomplete. It doesn’t count the lives inside would-be mothers she ended, for she is also an abortionist. And she is still going strong, cheered on by the Canadian government. By the time she is done, Mao himself will be envious of her feats.

That its own government joyfully starts killing off its own people proves Canadian civilization has exhausted itself. It, and a great many other civilizations, are experiencing the last phase of the ancient cycle: hard men make good times, good times make soft men, soft men make hard times. The hard times are just coming upon them, and us, created by the good times the remarkable lives of our predecessors created for us.

There are small cycles and large. Small versions of this litany are always playing out: in individual lives, in select localities, in nations. These are easy to see. But there are also larger waves, harder to spot because they are so encompassing. They are global in scope and span eras. This is why even when riding down a Great Wave toward an abyss, it can seem, and be, for a time and in a place things are improving.

Our lives are short, we see most things only with immediacy; we extrapolate too easily, and we expect matters will play out in Hollywood time, as it were. The fault is expected because when history is presented it is foreshortened. Events which took centuries are completed in pages. It is almost impossible to put ourselves in the position of a man who lived in the latter stages of the Roman empire, who lived his entire life in reasonable enough times, and who didn’t see the end coming.

It is a great mistake to view the litany wholly, or even largely, in material terms. Certainly cushy living makes for sloth and fat men. But we are also spiritual (rational) creatures. When the bulk of our ideas are given to us in packaged “education”, and we don’t have to work from them, we are cursed by easy thinking, intellectual malaise. It’s true the West has largely given up Christianity, its ideas stale and uninspiring to most. But in the East it is the same. The great hope of Science has paled. Our customary motivating forces are no longer motivating, the great old visions no longer forceful as they once were. Largely. There are many local exceptions. But they are just that: exceptions.

We recall Emil Cioran, who said, “Every exhausted civilization awaits its barbarian, and every barbarian awaits his demon”. Our barbarians are no longer awaited (we are their demons). Rulers in the West are inviting them in. And making it a crime, in many places, to oppose the inflow. Such is their ardor to have strangers among us, it is hard not to argue that these rulers want to be put out of their misery.

The persistent wish to “seize the means of production”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Rational Animal explains why the din of progressives demanding that “the rich” be dispossessed of their property always leads to the worst kind of results:

This perfectly captures the parasite’s delusion: that wealth is static loot to be seized and redistributed.

Here’s what actually happens when you “repossess all their stuff”:

The producers will rebuild. They’ll create new wealth because that’s what they do. They identify opportunities, solve problems, innovate, build businesses, and generate value. Their wealth came from their minds, not magic.

The looters will consume what they stole at light speed and wind up with nothing. Because they never learned to produce. They only know how to take.

Look at every socialist revolution in history: seize the factories, the farms, the businesses. Within years, everything collapses. The factories stop producing. The farms stop yielding. The wealth evaporates. Venezuela. Cuba. Soviet Union. Zimbabwe. The pattern is identical.

Why? Because wealth isn’t stuff sitting in a vault. Wealth is the ongoing process of human intelligence applied to production. Confiscate a factory and you get the building. You don’t get the knowledge, vision, and competence that made it productive.

The “rich” you want to loot aren’t dragons hoarding gold. They’re producers creating value. Rob them and you rob everyone, including yourself.

You’ll be left with ruins and still blame capitalism.

Update: Fixed missing URL.

March 31, 2026

Reaction to Avi Lewis being elected federal NDP leader

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to an ill-informed snipe at @TheFoodProfessor for a post about Avi Lewis:

This take reads like someone who’s never had to meet a payroll or balance a ledger under real pressure.

Accusing the “Food Professor” of being bribed is just noise. No evidence, no numbers, just a conspiracy to avoid the actual argument. Classic move when the facts aren’t cooperating.

I ran a grocery business. Not a theory. Not a model. A real one. Thin margins, constant spoilage risk, price swings, labour costs, supplier pressure, and customers who notice every 10-cent increase. Grocery isn’t some gold mine. It’s a logistics grind with razor-thin profit.

Here’s the part people like this never mention:
Canada’s total grocery profits are roughly $6 billion. Spread that across 40 million people and you’re looking at maybe $12 a month per person if you wiped out every dollar of profit.

So what’s the fantasy here?

Government steps in, runs stores “for the people”, eliminates profit… and somehow prices magically drop while efficiency improves?

Let’s test behaviour, not intentions.

What happens when you remove profit?

No incentive to optimize operations
No accountability for waste
Political hiring instead of performance hiring
Pricing driven by optics, not supply reality
Losses covered by taxpayers … meaning you, again

You don’t eliminate costs. You just hide them and move them.

I lived through high interest rates north of 20%, carried customer debt, and still had to make the numbers work. Government doesn’t operate under that discipline. It can fail indefinitely and call it policy.

Public grocery isn’t “not Marxist”. It’s not even that sophisticated. It’s just naive.

The real issue isn’t ideology. It’s a complete lack of understanding of how incentives drive outcomes.

You don’t fix affordability by replacing people who have to be efficient with a system that doesn’t.

You fix it by increasing competition, reducing regulatory drag, and letting supply actually respond.

Everything else is theatre.

In the National Post, Kelly McParland outlines the scale of challenge Lewis is facing to make the NDP electorally viable again:

Thumbnail of one of Avi Lewis’s campaign shorts

After two weeks on the road [Jagmeet Singh] finally conceded to reality, allowing that while “I would be honoured to serve as prime minister … I don’t want to presuppose the outcome of the election”.

Maybe Lewis should start straight off with that line, since choosing him as leader saves the party from pretending it expects to find itself in power. “The return of the NDP starts today!” Lewis declared in his victory speech, but as the most out-there ideologue of the candidates he defeated he’ll have a harder time convincing ordinary Canadians than he did winning over his fourth-place party. A film-maker and activist, he’s not just left-wing, but way off in a universe of his own.

His ambitions are dazzling: a Canada powered entirely by renewable energy in which everyone gets a guaranteed income, vast infrastructure projects are built to sustain the environment, farmers produce healthier, affordable, cleaner food while homebuilders concentrate on energy-efficient homes for lower income groups. All this paid for by an economy that somehow remains vibrant while its vital energy industry is crippled, jobs are lost, taxes are raised, royalties are increased, government spending balloons, the carbon tax is re-introduced and “the rich” are somehow found to have plenty of excess revenue to cover the costs.

Voters who continue to back the NDP will now know exactly what they’re casting their ballots for. That wasn’t always clear under previous leaders. Thomas Mulcair didn’t hate trade deals or pipelines enough to satisfy party stalwarts deeply hostile to both. To the unyielding, Singh did a deal with the devil when he agreed to prop up Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, even if the decision succeeded in squeezing out some policy victories.

Small victories aren’t in Lewis’s lexicon. He wants a revolution. “This is more than a rigged economy, it is a war on working people”, he declared on Sunday. “It is immoral, it is unCanadian and we cannot let it stand.”

March 30, 2026

Canada’s official bilingualism benefits only one of the two “founding” peoples

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

Canada has been officially a bilingual country for decades, but it hasn’t made most Canadians capable of effective use of both official languages, especially in the western half of the country. Instead, with the imposition of mandatory bilingualism for most federal civil service roles, it’s functioned as a strong bias in favour of bilingual Quebeckers and against Canadians from majority anglophone provinces. Given that government jobs have been growing at a far faster rate than private-sector jobs, this injustice is fuelling anger and support for separatism in the west:

This is why French Immersion schools function as “private schools for the middle class” … it provides access to lucrative and secure government jobs for the children of the bourgeoisie, excluding most working class kids.

It’s a uniquely ridiculous Canadian story.

Two Canadian pilots were killed in a freak accident at LaGuardia airport and yet Canadian news coverage has been dominated by outrage over the fact that the CEO of the pilots’ airline, Michael Rousseau of Air Canada, released a condolence video that had French captions but no spoken French!

Though one of the two dead pilots was French Canadian, near as I can tell, none of the anger at Rousseau’s video is coming from anyone associated with the victims themselves, but rather the Canadian political class and punditocracy. Prime Minister Carney denounced the video for lacking “judgment” and “compassion,” and a bunch of other politicians have said similar things, particularly in Quebec, where the legislature passed a unanimous motion demanding Rousseau’s resignation. There have been a ton of angry anti-Rousseau editorials in all the leading Canadian papers.

It is obviously a highly performative, almost ritualistic, almost religious outrage occurring mostly so members of the Canadian establishment can collectively affirm one of their shibboleths: the country’s elite should be bilingual.

On social media, however, the reaction has been quite different, with ordinary Canadians expressing frustration and annoyance at the distasteful nature of it all. Two men are dead and this is what our betters are yapping about? An old debate — long stigmatized, but never successfully suppressed — has resurfaced: why are we doing this bilingualism thing at all?

I’ve been arguing against the Canadian elite’s cult of official bilingualism for a very long time. To the extent I have a controversial reputation in Canada and don’t get invited on things very much, it’s in large part because I’m very outspoken on this issue, which is often treated as the one line you’re not allowed to cross. Hating trans people or saying October 7 wasn’t so bad … those are edgy opinions that can be forgiven. Questioning bilingualism is a much more unforgivably toxic take, because it’s seen as offending Quebeckers, and a lot of elite Canada wants to be on Quebec’s good side.

But I also feel this is one issue where I’m very, very obviously in the right, and where I have the least self-doubt. There aren’t many issues where I feel I could hold my own in some Jubilee-style “Surrounded” debate bro type thing, but this is one.

So, with that being said, let me attempt to engage with some of the arguments you see made in favor of not just official bilingualism, but the idea of Canada requiring a bilingual ruling class in particular.

Canada is a bilingual country, so it makes sense for the Canadian government, and other Canadian national institutions, to provide nationwide services in both French and English.

Canada is a bilingual country by law, but not by fact. Canada is in fact an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. According to the 2021 census, 87% of Canadians can speak English while 11% can speak only French and about 2% can speak neither. Of this four million Canadians who can only speak French, 96% are located in the province of Quebec. Excluding Quebec, the rate of Canadians who can speak English rises to 97.8%.

It’s sensible for things in Quebec to function mostly in the French language, given about 94% of people in the province can speak it. It’s sensible for things outside of Quebec to operate mostly in English for the same reason. In both Quebec and the rest of Canada there is a very small minority of people, mostly in urban centers, who cannot speak the dominant language of where they live, so it’s reasonable for accommodations to be made for their needs on a case-by-case, community-by-community basis.

What is decidedly not reasonable, however, is to blindly organize all public (and in some cases, private) operations in this country as if there exists some substantial unilingual French-speaking minority everywhere from Newfoundland to Nunavut that is helpless without services specifically tailored to them — a minority in need of French-speaking receptionists and clerks and cops and teachers and librarians and journalists and guides and managers and lawyers and judges and HR departments and all the rest, all accessible at all times, anywhere in Canada.

For Canada’s service sector to go above and beyond in seeking to accommodate the needs of a unilingual French population in provinces and territories outside of Quebec that either barely exists or is substantially overshadowed by other linguistic minorities is to engage in a preposterous misallocation of resources simply to pay tribute to a bilingual fantasy version of Canada that’s never actually existed.

Net Zero or mass immigration, pick one (or better, pick neither)

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

Lorenzo Warby points out the blindingly obvious (to anyone with common sense) fact that the top two pet projects of western transnationalist elites — Net Zero and mass third-world immigration — are in direct conflict with one another. But rather than choosing one form of societal suicide over the other, the healthy alternative is to absolutely reject both:

Culturally more homogeneous democracies are happier than more culturally diverse democracies. Also, in the Anglophone countries, where the centre-right won the most recent national election, happiness went up slightly. Where the centre-left won the most recent national election, happiness went down noticeably.

Australia is the latest developed democracy to experience conventional centre-right politics being threatened by a national populist surge. Just as country-club Republicans were Trumped, Gaullists were Le Penned, Forza Italia was Melonied, and the Tories are being Faraged, so the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.

What Australia has in common with the pattern in the UK, and the rise of AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, is the combination of Net Zero (or equivalent) with mass immigration leading to a national populist surge.

National populism well predates Net Zero. It does not predate the adoption of policies of elite display and elite benefit, particularly regarding immigration. The combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is, however, particularly conducive to surges electoral support for national populism, as we can see in the UK, Germany and now Australia.

It is not hard to see why. Mass prosperity rests on cheap energy: that is much more important than, for instance, free trade. The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.

As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:

    by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.

Net Zero means raising the price of energy, thereby narrowing access to it, and, in particular, narrowing the range of economic activity that is commercially sustainable. Even without increasing the population, that will increase contestation over resources.

Add mass immigration to the mix, and that contestation becomes much worse. All the experienced costs of mass immigration — higher rents and house prices; increased congestion; downward pressure on wages and increased fiscal stress (if importing significant numbers of low-capital/skill immigrants); downward pressure on social trust and corrosive effects on the norms and rules that underpin institutions (if importing lots of people from very different cultures); increased crime (if importing significant numbers of people from higher crime cultures) — are then magnified.

March 28, 2026

Noelia Castillo Ramos, RIP

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

Celina provides the background information you certainly won’t get from skimming the mainstream media’s coverage of the death of twenty-five year old Noelia Castillo Ramos:

This is how broken the West has become. On Thursday, March 26, 2026, in a clinically sterile room within an assisted living facility in Barcelona, Spain, the government executed a twenty five year old paralysed rape victim. Her name was Noelia Castillo Ramos.1 Noelia did not die of a terminal illness, nor did she pass away from natural causes. Rather, she was administered a lethal injection by the Spanish state that had dismantled her family, forced her into a hostile and horribly dangerous environment, ignored her horrific violation, and ultimately deemed her broken existence too inconvenient to maintain.2

A still from Noelia Castillo’s Antena 3 interview on March 24.

While Noelia Castillo’s heart was stopped by a cocktail of state-sponsored chemicals, the unvetted migrant men who gang-raped her, shattered her mind, and drove her to fling herself from a fifth-floor window continue to walk the streets of Europe, entirely shielded from justice. They faced zero consequences. She faced the death penalty.

These were the last words that her grandmother said to Noelia: “I love you, my girl; someday we will be together again”.

The fate of Noelia Castillo stands as a single almost perfect, undeniable illustration of everything that is broken, evil, and actively suicidal about modern Western society under progressive, woke, open-border, and secular-left governance. Progressive Europe has functionally and legally decided that native European women and girls are a disposable commodity, just collateral damage in the grand suicidal project of multiculturalism.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_of_Noelia_Castillo
  2. https://www.v2radio.co.uk/news/v2-radio-world-news/gang-rape-victim-25-to-be-euthanised-after-fathers-legal-challenge-fails/

“Avi Lewis isn’t just left-wing … He’s the Leap Manifesto come to life”

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

The federal New Democratic Party is having a leadership contest with the voting to be tallied this weekend. Avi Lewis is apparently the overwhelmingly odds-on candidate to take it on the first ballot, and as Fred DeLorey explains, it’s likely to be very bad news indeed … for the NDP’s provincial counterparts:

Maclean’s called it a decade ago. (Cover image: Maclean’s, April 25, 2016)

Pundits love to overcomplicate politics, but the math for this Sunday’s NDP leadership vote is painfully simple. For Avi Lewis to be denied a first-ballot victory, the other four candidates on the ballot need to somehow scrape together 50% plus one of the vote.

Let’s be brutally honest: that ain’t happening.

[…]

So, what does this imminent coronation mean for the NDP?

My gut tells me it’s an unmitigated disaster. Avi Lewis isn’t just left-wing; he’s arguably the most radical, far-left extremist to ever take the helm of a major Canadian political party. We’re talking about a guy who literally wants to nationalize our grocery stores, completely defund the Canadian military, and aggressively shut down our entire energy sector by next Tuesday. He’s the Leap Manifesto [Wiki] come to life.

And here is why this is a catastrophic problem for the broader NDP movement. Unlike the federal Liberals or Conservatives, the NDP is one highly integrated entity. There is no structural separation between their federal and provincial wings. Right now, the federal party is a broke, 6-seat laughingstock without official party status in the House of Commons. But provincially? The NDP is a powerhouse, currently sitting as the government or the Official Opposition in 6 of Canada’s 7 largest provinces.

Those provincial machines weren’t built on Leap Manifesto radicalism. Leaders like John Horgan, Wab Kinew, and Rachel Notley found massive success by dragging their parties to the pragmatic, business-friendly middle. Back in my home province of Nova Scotia, Darrell Dexter famously secured his historic majority by literally branding himself a “conservative progressive”.

Avi Lewis wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near that kind of pragmatism. As federal leader, his extreme views will instantly infect the brand of the entire integrated party. Every time he attacks the resource sector or champions a fringe socialist policy in Ottawa, Conservative and Liberal premiers are going to gleefully hang those quotes around the necks of every provincial NDP leader in the country. He isn’t just going to sink the federal party; he is going to drag the successful provincial wings down with him.

But then again, the world is changing rapidly, and usually in crazy ways. Maybe Canadians can be convinced that they desperately want Canada Post managing their produce aisles. Maybe the electorate is finally ready for a platform where your weekly ration of locally sourced lentils is delivered by a government-appointed bicycle courier.

I remain deeply unconvinced. But these days? Who knows.

QotD: The moment the American empire began to decline

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans1 for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So … they just kept on looking.

The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy”. What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?

I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity.2 But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life. The United States spent trillions of dollars and caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million and a million people in Iraq alone. The goal of this was “regional transformation”, and we transformed the region all right. The war destabilized several neighboring regimes, which led them to collapse into anarchy and civil war. Consequences of that included millions more deaths and the near extinction of Christianity in the place it came from.

As an American, I didn’t feel any of this directly,3 but with the benefit of hindsight the war looks even more epochal for us. It marks, in so many ways, the turning point from our decades of unchallenged global supremacy to the current headlong charge into “multipolarity”. I know this may sound melodramatic, but I truly believe future historians will point to it as the moment that we squandered our empire. Remember, hegemonic empires work best when nobody thinks they’re an empire. True strength is not the ability to enforce your commands, it’s everybody being so desperate to please you that they spend all their time figuring out what you want, such that you don’t even have to issue edicts.

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, American global dominance was so unquestioned we didn’t even have to swat down any challengers. This is a very good position for an empire to be in, because it means you don’t run the risk of blunders or surprise upset victories that make you look weak and encourage others to take a chance. Conversely, there’s a negative spiral where the hegemon has to start making demands of its clients, which makes the clients resentful and uncooperative, which in turn means that they have to be told what to do. All of this makes the hegemon-client relationship start to look less like a good “deal” and more purely extractive, which can rapidly lead the whole system to fall apart.

Iraq was the moment the American empire went into this negative cycle.

Even if you don’t agree with me about that, presumably you will agree that it was very bad for American soft power and prestige, bad for a number of friendly regimes in the area, and bad for our finances and our military readiness. So to anybody curious about the world, it seems very important to ask why we did this, why we thought it was a good idea, and how nobody predicted the ensuing debacle that seems so obvious in hindsight.

The conventional answers to these questions tend to be either “George W. Bush was dumb” or “Dick Cheney was evil”. I totally reject these as answers. Or I think at best they’re seriously incomplete: if the first Trump administration taught us anything, it’s that the US President can’t actually do very much on his own if the bureaucracy is set against him. The United States is an oligarchy, a kind of surface democracy; big decisions don’t happen without a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. More to the point, the decision to invade Iraq actually was endorsed and supported by pretty much every important politician and every institution, including the whole mainstream media and most of the Democratic Party. Blaming it on a single bad administration is too easy. It’s an excuse designed to avoid asking hard questions about how organizations filled with well-meaning people can go totally off the rails

Fortunately, Michael Mazarr has written the definitive4 book on this very question. It’s not a history of the Iraq War and occupation: it’s a history of the decision to invade Iraq, ending shortly after the tanks went steaming across the border. It’s an exhaustively-researched doorstopper composed out of hundreds and hundreds of interviews with officials working in the innards of the White House and of various federal bureaucracies and spy agencies, all aimed at answering a single question: “What were they thinking?”

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.

  1. Those plans were provided by the Russians, who prior to multiple rounds of NATO expansion were our allies.
  2. Given that almost everybody in the US mainstream, both Democrats and Republicans, were for it, this probably explains a lot about how I turned out.
  3. Sure, maybe someday we’ll have a fiscal crisis, but the incredible thing about America is that all the money wasted in Iraq still won’t be in the top 5 reasons for it. >
  4. “Definitive” is publisher-speak for “very, very long.”

March 27, 2026

QotD: The Pimp Hand Theory of Social Discourse

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

Dealing with the Left is exactly like dealing with the worst, most hysterical woman in your life. She digs her heels in on some point of batshit insanity, and you only have three choices:

1) Acquiesce, by which is meant “try to bring whatever batshit insanity she won’t budge on into as much alignment with Reality as you possibly can”; or

2) Walk away, knowing that you’re not going to get laid ever again with her, or any of her friends, or anyone she might conceivably talk to, ever, in her entire life; or

3) Smack the bitch, which might end up with 2), but much more likely will get you …

… well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Most men — being the decent, civilized sort — would fill in the blank with anything from “arrested” to “beaten to a pulp by decent men”. But is it true? The Pimp Hand Theory says no.

Trump has shown the ho that is America his pimp hand, and it is strong.

Severian, commenting on “Kvetching Up With Karen”, Founding Questions, 2025-10-30.

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