Quotulatiousness

March 26, 2026

An alternative reading of the American Revolution

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As the majority of my current readers are Americans (or Chinese folks using VPNs to pretend to be Americans), the following could be interpreted as clickbait. Just sayin’.

Upper Canadian Cavalier suggests that the events leading up to the Anglo-Colonial unpleasantness of 1776 onwards have been subject to a preferred reading that tidies up all the inconvenient details and sweeps them under the rug of a revolution against “royal tyranny” (even though HRM King George III was much more liberal than he’s ever given credit for, and a revolution against “an elected Parliament” doesn’t have the right ring to it):

Declaration of Independence by John Turnbull (1756-1843), showing the Committee of Five (Adams, Livingston, Sherman, Jefferson, and Franklin) presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 28 June, 1776.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

The American founding narrative is a document produced by a litigation class to justify actions already taken. Its authors were not philosophers who became rebels. They were rebels who hired philosophers.

This is not a fringe position. It is not the invention of bitter foreigners or tenured radicals looking to dismantle something they never understood. It is the conclusion you reach when you put down the mythology and pick up the actual historical record, the ledgers, the court documents, the correspondence that was never meant to be read by posterity, the testimony of people who were there and whose version of events was systematically buried because they were on the losing side. The American Revolution is the most comprehensively mythologized event in the history of the English-speaking world, and the mythologizing began before the gunpowder had cleared.

Start with the money, because it almost always starts with the money. The Navigation Acts, which colonial propagandists framed as instruments of imperial oppression, were a trade regulatory system that had been in place for over a century and under which the colonies had grown from scattered coastal settlements into some of the most prosperous communities in the Atlantic world. The specific enforcement measures that triggered the revolutionary crisis came after the Seven Years War, a conflict in which Britain spent the modern equivalent of billions of pounds defending the American colonies against French and indigenous pressure across an entire continent. When the war ended in 1763, the British national debt had nearly doubled. Parliament looked at the colonies, looked at the bill, and suggested with what strikes any disinterested observer as elementary reasonableness that the people who had benefited most from the war might contribute something toward its cost.

The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed legal documents, newspapers, and pamphlets at rates that were substantially lower than what ordinary subjects in Britain were already paying. The Townshend Acts taxed glass, paint, paper, and tea, luxury goods, not necessities. At their peak, the total tax burden on the American colonies amounted to roughly one shilling per person per year. The average British subject at home was paying twenty-six shillings. The colonial merchant class, which had grown fat on a century of salutary neglect and profitable smuggling, responded to this modest request for contribution with riots, the formation of extralegal enforcement committees, the physical destruction of property, and the systematic intimidation of anyone who disagreed. They called this liberty.

John Hancock, whose signature on the Declaration of Independence is so oversized that his name became a synonym for a signature, was the wealthiest smuggler in colonial America. His fortune was built on molasses, wine, and dry goods moved outside the official imperial trade system at substantial profit. In 1768, British customs officials seized his sloop Liberty on evidence of wine smuggling. The seizure triggered a riot. The customs commissioners were driven from Boston under threat of violence and had to take refuge on a Royal Navy vessel in the harbor. Hancock was prosecuted and represented by John Adams, who got the charges dropped on procedural grounds. The same John Adams who would later write the Massachusetts Constitution. The same John Adams who, when asked to describe his greatest service to his country, cited his defense of the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre trial. These relationships are not incidental. They are the operating structure of the revolutionary movement.

The Boston Massacre has been taught to American schoolchildren for two hundred and fifty years as evidence of British brutality. Here is what actually happened. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a small detachment of British soldiers posted outside the Custom House was surrounded by a crowd estimated at several hundred people, who pelted them with ice, rocks, oyster shells, and pieces of coal, struck them with clubs and sticks, and screamed at them to fire, daring them repeatedly to shoot. Private Hugh Montgomery was knocked to the ground by a club blow. When he recovered he fired. The other soldiers, believing an order had been given, fired as well. Five people died. It was a tragedy. What happened next is the part that gets edited out of the curriculum. John Adams, cousin of the great agitator Samuel Adams, agreed to defend the soldiers and did so brilliantly. Six of the eight soldiers were acquitted outright. The remaining two were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and were released after being branded on the thumb, the standard punishment. The jury found that the crowd had been the aggressor. Adams later wrote that the case was one of the best pieces of service he ever rendered his country, by which he meant he had established a legal record that contradicted the propaganda his cousin was already distributing. The propaganda survived. The verdict did not make it into the textbooks.

Samuel Adams, the moral conscience of the Revolution, the man who could manufacture outrage from raw air, had a financial history that his hagiographers handle with extraordinary delicacy. He had inherited his father’s malting business and run it into insolvency. He had then served as a tax collector for the town of Boston and accumulated a personal shortfall of several thousand pounds, money he had collected and failed to remit, that the town had been attempting to recover from him through legal action for years. He was an active defendant in debt proceedings during the very period when he was organizing the Sons of Liberty and writing pamphlets about the tyranny of arbitrary taxation. The Revolution did not merely advance Samuel Adams’s political philosophy. It made his financial problems disappear. When you understand this, his extraordinary energy in the cause of independence begins to look less like principle and more like survival.

March 24, 2026

More political and philosophical illusions, left and right

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

Tom Kratman continues his discussion of the illusions that distort how people on the left and people on the right view reality:

There is an illusion – yes, on both sides – of guilt by association. This is related to, but not exactly the same as, the illusion of indistinguishability. How many nail-bomb-building moral sons of Bill Ayers are over on the modern American left? Can’t be too many, I think, based on the serious dearth of Earth-shattering kabooms we hear, or rather don’t hear, lately. How many hair-shirted and sandwich board clad – with said boards reading, “Repent! The end is near!” – folks are there on the religious right? Based on how the typical Christian lives, and those being by no means a particularly bad set of men and women, there aren’t all that many. How many Christians do you really think, given a button that would make the Westboro Baptist Church and all its members go poof, wouldn’t push that button twice, the first time slowly, for the emotional satisfaction (well, that and to savor the screaming1), and the second time, quickly, to make sure. How many leftists and liberals are dead set against gun control? More than a few.

Then there’s the illusion brought on by willful blindness. For example, “No enemies to the left!” said Alexander Kerenski, Prime Minister of Russia, in 1917. Pity Kerenski wasn’t able to see that the people to his left were largely intellectual idiots and dogmatic homicidal maniacs, and that there may have been people to his right who were considerably more reasonable and sane. He said that not too long before being tossed out on his ear by the Bolsheviks, who, interestingly enough, were to his left.

You don’t see as much of this – the notion that there are no enemies to the right – on the conservative side, by the way, though there is some. Still, the next time I see an actual conservative lining up with the American National Socialist Party,2 the KKK, or Stormfront will be the first.

Part of the problem here, I think, is that we take something – civilization, actually – so much for granted that we forget how hard it is to build or to hold onto, and so forget that we have something important in common with our more moderate political opponents. Thus, taking it for granted, we forget that common ground, see the opposition, and so line up with those more extreme sorts for whom civilization is probably just a burden they’d as soon be done with.

  1. Okay, maybe some would just push it the once.
  2. Which seems to have many trivial manifestations. You can find your own links, but why bother?

“Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book”

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

In The Critic, Ben Sexsmith reviews a new book by Matt Goodwin, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity:

Here is an exceptionally easy argument to make:

  1. Mass migration is ensuring that the historical majority in Britain is becoming a minority.
  2. This is the result of policies that have been pursued regardless of popular opinion.
  3. This has had many kinds of destructive consequences.

The first claim is so obviously true that one might as well deny the greenness of the grass. The second is proven by decades of broken promises (see Anthony Bowles’s article “Immigration and Consent” for more). The third requires argumentation, but I think that it is clear if one considers hideous incidences of terrorism, grooming gangs and violent censoriousness, as well as broader trends of economic dependency and electoral sectarianism.

Again, this is not a difficult argument to make. So why is it made so badly?

Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book. It reads like the book of a political operator extending his CV. The left-wing commentator Andy Twelves caused a stir on social media by pointing out various factual mistakes and what appear to be non-existent quotes. Twelves speculates that these “quotes” are the result of AI hallucinations, which is plausible, if not proven, in the light of the fact that two of Mr Goodwin’s sparse footnotes contain source information from ChatGPT.

Inasmuch as Suicide of a Nation makes a form of the argument sketched out the beginning of this article, there is truth to it. But it contains a fundamental problem — it assumes that this argument is so true that there is no requirement to make it well.

“Slop” is an overused term but it feels painfully appropriate for a book that is spoon fed to its audience. Goodwin, who had a long academic career before becoming a successful commentator, is not a man who lacks intelligence. But he writes as if he thinks his audience lacks it. “I did not write this book for the ruling class”, writes Goodwin, “I wrote it for the forgotten majority”. Alas, he seems to think that the average member of the “forgotten majority” has the reading level of a dimwitted 12-year-old. As well as being stylistically simple, the book is full of annoying paternal asides. “In the pages ahead I shall walk you through what is happening to the country …” “In the next chapter we will begin our journey …” Thank you, Mr Goodwin. Can we stop for ice cream?

The book is terribly derivative, with a title that reflects Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower and a subtitle — “Immigration, Islam, Identity” — that all but repeats that of Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe — “Immigration, Identity, Islam”. It is written in the humourless and colourless rhetorical style of AI. I’m not saying it was AI-generated. (Indeed, a brief assessment using AI checkers suggests that it was not.) I’m just saying that it might as well have been.

March 23, 2026

Reject multiculturalism as you would reject fake meat

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

Spaceman Spiff looks at the technocratic dream that we’d all give up on eating meat and instead switch to lab-grown, VC-funded, and Bill-Gates-approved fake meat. It failed utterly, of course, because despite all of the arguments the corporations and the astroturf activists could marshal, nobody wanted it. Vegetarians wouldn’t switch to eating something vaguely kinda-sorta meat-ish, and meat eaters were happy continuing their carnivorous habits. It had no real market, so it was a dud product.

Our technocratic elites have been pushing multiculturalism for even longer than they were pushing fake meat, but just as with fake meat, the more people encounter it, the less willing they are to accept it:

Multiculturalism is the belief many distinct cultures can live together and flourish rather than devolve into conflict.

This is false. It has never worked anywhere.

The world itself is multicultural. The solution that emerged to manage different groups was national borders. Each culture could segregate and live apart from others because they could not successfully live together.

As the failures of multiculturalism become impossible to hide, social engineers reach for ideas to make it work. The latest is civic nationalism. The fake meat of the social governance world.

For all human history we have relied upon the real thing, but now today’s social engineers believe they have discovered a superior recipe, one that avoids the hassle and expense of tradition.

Anyone can become someone like you as long as they conform to an arbitrary list of beliefs, behaviours, laws and customs. We can ignore ethnicity, heritage and history. We can manufacture instant populations with passports and certificates just as we can create synthetic meat by combining the ingredients ourselves.

Like fake meat it looks workable on paper. Not only that, it is presented as self-evidently reasonable. Why has nobody thought of this before? How convenient governments and corporations can import a new workforce and they magically become British, American or Chinese because they “share values” and observe laws.

America was the first to experiment, a necessity after the introduction of non-European immigration in the 1960s. Needless to say they didn’t need it before that.

The country found itself importing people with no historical connection to the American population through heritage or history. Far fewer of them married into the family than previous waves of immigrants from European nations. While importing the world America was becoming the world with its racial, ethnic and cultural tensions.

They convinced themselves they had always been a nation of immigrants and conveniently forgot how long it took even the Irish to assimilate into America despite their ostensible similarity to the founding stock.

Strenuous efforts to make this seem normal, despite its novelty, included the energetic emphasis on shared values or adopted customs since the newcomers were often strikingly different.

Civic nationalism seems to be based on the same faulty reasoning as synthetic meat. We can circumvent the traditional approach using innovation. Why live through centuries of strife for a nation to emerge when you can just hand out certificates and make everyone instantly like you because they claim to respect the law and promise to adopt new customs?

Initially this can seem to work. If a small number of skilled immigrants come they are typically absorbed. Most cultures can do this if the numbers are modest and especially if the newcomers intermarry, or their children do.

Even more so, in traditional societies, including our own until recently, the pressure to adapt was almost universal; no translators, no welfare, no slack whatsoever.

Large numbers of immigrants over short time scales retard the process of assimilation, and generous welfare programmes can derail it completely.

America is also big unlike European nations, so it has taken a while for the full effects to be felt.

Despite the endless hype, people reveal their preferences in their behaviour. They can move. Pro-immigrationists have complained about white flight for decades, one very obvious example of the failure of civic nationalism.

Image from Spaceman Spiff

Just like those inconveniently full supermarket shelves with their synthetic products no one will buy, people run from diversity when they can.

Civic nationalists, like climate zealots, resort to repeating their tired lines about their great intent, how amazing it is all meant to be if people would just get into the spirit of things.

But it is all fantasy. Literal fictions that exist only inside the heads of those who imagine utopia. Real life has its own ideas.

Update: Added missing URL.

Update the second, 24 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.

Mapping the “Manosphere”

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

Janice Fiamengo says — and a lot will agree with here — that we can’t hate gender studies enough:

As Leo Kearse posted on Substack Notes – “When’s Louis Theroux doing a documentary on THIS manosphere? When’s he going to expose the idiocy of its leading proponents, such as Stella Creasy and Hannah Spencer?”

Nothing beats a threat narrative for a gender studies academic in search of relevance, and what more urgent than the dark corners of the internet where men (and the women who love them) allegedly spread misogyny and male supremacism.

Many academics now claim expertise in this area of gender studies, probing the volatile fragility and violent anxieties of manosphere men, and calling to repentance all who resist the feminist future. Many of these academics are women, making a sweet living warning about male “hate”, but there are plenty of male feminists as well, crusaders against others’ toxicity.

In “Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research“, four scholars of masculinity survey the latest research on digital media and violent extremism. Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua Roose, and Michael Flood claim to have read hundreds of studies of the manosphere, which they call an “online ecosystem of anti-women actors”.

According to them, the manosphere is brimming over with grievance-mongering, grift, and gynocidal fantasy. Nothing in it is good or sincere or well-intentioned. Various sub-genres of online content, including fitness advice, stoicism, and the tradwife lifestyle, are presented as outgrowths of misogynistic extremism from which millions of men and boys require rescue, by force if necessary.

A Roll Call of Buzzwords

The researchers make no distinction between manosphere content generally and what they call male supremacy — or, indeed, between those terms and a host of others, all pejorative. Their introductory paragraph alone provides a roll call of buzzwords that link any dissent from Marxist-feminist orthodoxy to misogynistic violence.

The manosphere, we’re told, is “bound by the belief that mainstream society is a misandrist conspiracy that disadvantages men”. Manosphere groups “frame contemporary gender politics as a ‘war against men'”. These groups also “frequently engage in misogynistic abuse as well as inciting violence against women”, thus creating an “online environment of accelerating harms”.

None of these statements is ever supported with evidence, but it is likely too much to expect evidence: the direct equation between male-positive advocacy and murderous misogyny is no longer a subject of academic debate, if it ever was. It is an axiom.

In one short paragraph, then, we move from non-feminist perspectives to “misandrist conspiracies”, and from belief in a “war against men” to “inciting violence” and “accelerating harms”. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with anti-feminist content will recognize the definitional sleights of hand. Are any of these academics genuinely familiar with the subject they are writing about? It seems more likely that they have taken a shortcut to a politically-approved position.

What about the mass of anti-feminist and male-positive content creators — Rick Bradford at The Illustrated Empathy Gap, Tom Golden at Men Are Good, Alison Tieman and company at Honey Badger Radio, Bettina Arndt at Bettina Arndt, Hannah Spier at Psychobabble, just to name a few — who come nowhere near “inciting violence against women”? On the contrary, they pursue a vision of mutual cooperation and accountability between the sexes by rejecting female privilege and paranoia. Is this manosphere content, or not?

Many men’s rights advocates — researchers like Stephen Baskerville, Paul Nathanson, James Nuzzo, David Shackleton, Gerard Casey, Helen Smith, and Grant Brown, just to name those I’ve been consulting most recently — simply document male disadvantage with evidence. They do not assert conspiracies or stoke grievance.

As for the “war against men”, have our researchers read any of the voluminous feminist writings that celebrate male death and openly advocate a world without them? When feminist leaders — many of them university professors — are not only allowed but actually celebrated for declaring their anti-male hatred and calling for a “decontamination of the earth“, what are sensible people to conclude about anti-male animus?

March 22, 2026

QotD: The treason of the scientists

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

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

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

One of those people is me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update, 23 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

March 20, 2026

It’s okay to hate …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update, 21 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

QotD: The lameness and sameness of modern science fiction novels

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

I’ll confess, though: I almost didn’t read this book. Actually, for several years I didn’t. I was vaguely aware of its existence, but I’d pretty much stopped reading new speculative fiction because I finally admitted to myself that it was pure masochism that kept me beating my head against the wall of newly-published extruded genre product when I had sixty-plus years of Hugo and Nebula nominees to choose from. Sure, every novel will reflect something of its age’s concerns (there’s a lot of nuclear war in those old Hugo winners!), but it’s gotten much worse in the last ten or fifteen years: every book that gets any buzz is so deeply inflected with questions of personal liberation from oppressive structures, so little nuanced and so obsessed with identity and representation, that I find it borderline unreadable. A few books like that, done well — fine, that’s part of life, that’s certainly a kind of story you can tell. But when it’s everything, when it becomes a precondition for publication, you’re left with a tragically denuded sample of the human experience. It’s not that I don’t want to read a book where I disagree with the underlying politics, it’s that an unsubtle obsession with the “correct” politics makes a book boring and cringe. One-dimensionally “right-wing” fiction written in reaction to the contemporary mainstream is just as bad — worse, perhaps, because if done well it’s the sort of thing I would really enjoy.1

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Powers of the Earth, by Travis J.I. Corcoran”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-04-29.

  1. There’s nothing worse than poor execution of an incredible idea, because it means no one else will come along and do the incredible idea right. Austin Grossman’s Crooked, for instance, is Richard Nixon vs. Cosmic Horrors, which is a brilliant premise (yes, the Interstate Highway System is definitely an eldritch sigil designed to protect America, I will not accept any argument) but falls apart on the totally ahistorical version of our 37th President designed to justify making him the “good guy”. The real Nixon is such a fascinating and compelling figure — why not keep him as weird and twitchy and striving as he actually was and have him be the good guy anyway?

    2. Or, say, the Napoleon movie.

March 19, 2026

District 9 and the Story of “Race”

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

Feral Historian
Published 14 Nov 2025

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

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

QotD: From the fall of the Soviets to the rise of the Wokerati

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… for 50 years the Soviet nuclear threat provided […] an Armageddon to fear, and a reason to rally round the state in the free countries of the West. It provided an unexpected bonus, which protected us all though we did not realise it at the time. Since the USSR was the arsenal of repression, political liberty in the Western lands was under special protection as long as the Kremlin was our enemy. Freedom was, supposedly, what we fought and stood for. Governments claiming to be guarding us from Soviet tyranny could not go very far in limiting liberty on their own territory, however much they may have wanted to.

That protection ended when the Berlin Wall fell. In the same extraordinary moment, the collapse of Russian communism liberated revolutionary radicals across the Western world. The ghastly, failed Brezhnev state could not be hung round their necks like a putrid albatross any more. They were no longer considered as potential traitors simply because they were on the left. Eric Hobsbawm, and those like him, could at last join the establishment. Indeed, fortresses of the establishment such as the BBC now welcomed political as well as cultural leftists onto their upper decks.

Antonio Gramsci’s rethinking of the revolution — seize the university, the school, the TV station, the newspaper, the church, the theatre, rather than the barracks, the railway station and the post office — could at last get under way. At that moment, the long march of 1960s leftists through the institutions began to reach its objective, as they moved into the important jobs for the first time. And so one of the main protections of liberty and reason vanished, exactly when it was most needed.

The BBC’s simpering coverage of the Blair regime’s arrival in Downing Street, with its North-Korean-style fake crowd waving Union Jacks they despised, and new dawn atmosphere was not as ridiculous as it looked. May 1997 truly was a regime change. Illiberal utopians really were increasingly in charge, and the Cultural Revolution at last had political muscle.

Then came the new enemy, the shapeless ever-shifting menace of terrorism, against which almost any means were justified. To combat this, we willingly gave up Habeas Corpus and the real presumption of innocence, and allowed ourselves to be treated as if we were newly-convicted prisoners every time we passed through an airport.

Those who think the era of the face-mask will soon be over might like to recall that the irrational precautions of airport “security” (almost wholly futile once the simple precaution of refusing to open the door to the flight deck has been introduced) have not only remained in place since September 2001: they have been intensified. Yet, by and large, they are almost popular. Those who mutter against them, as I sometimes do, face stern lectures from our fellow-citizens implying that we are irresponsible and heedless.

Now a new fear, even more shapeless, invisible, perpetual (and hard to defeat — how can you ever eliminate a virus?) than al-Qaeda or Isis, has arrived in our midst. There is almost no bad action it cannot be used to excuse, including the strangling of an already shaky economy for which those eccentric or lucky enough to still be working will pay for decades. Millions have greeted this new peril as an excuse to abandon a liberty they did not really care much about anyway.

As a nation, we now produce more fear than we can consume locally, hiding in our homes as civil society evaporates. We queue up happily to hand in our freedom and to collect our muzzles and our digital IDs. And those of us who cry out, until we are hoarse, to say that this is a catastrophe, are met with shrugs from the chattering classes, and snarls of “just put on the frigging mask” from the mob. If I hadn’t despaired long ago, I would be despairing now.

Peter Hitchens, “Democracy muzzled”, The Critic, 2020-09-25.

March 18, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 14, 2026

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

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

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

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QotD: “Bludgeonspeak”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update, Ides of March, 2026: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

March 13, 2026

Enacting the original proposed 12th Amendment

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

At Astral Codex Ten, guest writer David Speiser discusses the two “extra” proposed amendments that didn’t make it into the Bill of Rights, but crucially, didn’t have an expiration date. The 11th did eventually make its way into the Constitution as the 27th Amendment in 1992, leaving only the 12th original still in limbo. The proposed 12th was a doozy:

Here is the text of the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, the sole unratified amendment from the Bill of Rights:

    After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

In other words, there will be one Representative per X people, depending on the size of the US. Once the US is big enough, it will top out at one Representative per 50,000 citizens.

(if you’ve noticed something off about this description, good work — we’ll cover it in the section “A Troublesome Typo”, near the end)

The US is far bigger than in the Framers’ time, so it’s the 50,000 number that would apply in the present day. This would increase the size of the House of Representatives from 435 reps to 6,6412. Wyoming would have 12 seats; California would have 791. Here’s a map:

This would give the U.S. the largest legislature in the world, topping the 2,904-member National People’s Congress of China. It would land us right about the middle of the list of citizens per representative, at #104, right between Hungary and Qatar (we currently sit at #3, right between Afghanistan and Pakistan).

Would this solve the issues that make Congress so hated? It would be a step in the right direction. Our various think tanks identified three primary reasons behind the estrangement of Congress and citizens: gerrymandering, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors. This fixes, or at least ameliorates, all of them.

Gerrymandering: Gerrymandering many small districts is a harder problem than gerrymandering a few big ones. Durable gerrymandering requires drawing districts with the exact right combination of cities and rural areas, but there are only a limited number of each per state. With too many districts, achievable margins decrease and the gerrymander is more likely to fail.

We can see this with state legislatures vs. congressional delegations. A dominant party has equal incentive to gerrymander each, but most states have more legislature seats than Congressional ones, and so the legislatures end up less gerrymandered. Here are some real numbers from last election cycle1:

So for example, in Republican-dominated North Carolina, 50.9% of people voted Trump, 60% of state senate seats are held by Republicans, and 71.4% of their House seats belong to Republicans. The state senate (50 seats) is only half as gerrymandered as the House delegation (14 seats).

In many states, the new CAA-compliant delegation would be about the same size as the state legislature, and so could also be expected to halve gerrymandering.

As a bonus, the Electoral College bias towards small states would be essentially solved. Currently, a Wyomingite’s presidential vote controls three times as many electoral votes as a Californian’s. Under the CAA, both states would be about equal.

Money: This one is intuitive. If you can effectively buy 1/435 elections, you’ve bought 0.23% of Congress. If the same money only buys you 0.02% of Congress, you’re less incentivized to try to buy House elections and more incentivized to try to buy Senate seats or just to gain influence within a given political party. Money in politics is still a thing, but it becomes much harder to coordinate among people. This makes it easier for somebody to run for Congress without having to fundraise millions of dollars. Because it’s less worth it to spend so much money on any one seat, elections to the House become cheaper2.

Polarization: Some of the think tanks that want to increase the size of Congress by a few hundred members rather than a few thousand claim that this increase will fix political polarization by making representatives more answerable to their constituents who tend to care more about local issues than national ones.

I’m more skeptical of this claim, mainly because it seems that all politics is national politics now. There’s one newspaper and three websites and all they care about is national politics. My Congressional representative ran for office touting her background in energy conservation and water management, arguing that in a drying state and a warming climate we really need somebody in Congress who knows water problems inside and out. Now that she’s actually in Congress, it seems that her main job is calling Donald Trump a pedophile3. The incentives here are to get noticed by the press and to go viral talking about how evil the other side is, so that people who are angry at the evil other side will give you money and you can win your next election.

But maybe Big Congress can solve that. Maybe in a district of less than 50,000 there will be less incentive to go viral and more incentive to connect with your constituents. At the very least, it seems that people trust their state representatives more. And when my state representative and my state Senator tell me about the good work that they’ve done and ask for me to vote for them again, they point to legislation that they’ve passed, not clips of them calling their opponents pedophiles.

  1. In case this smacks of cherry-picking, here is a breakdown of the “error” in every state’s Congressional delegation, state house delegation, and state senate delegation. “Error” here is defined as the difference between the representation of each state’s delegation and the percentage of that state that voted for Trump over Harris (or vice versa). In only two states, Florida and Virginia, is the error greatest in the largest body, and both of those states would have Congressional delegations larger than that largest body. In the case of Florida, their delegation would be nearly quadruple the size of their state house.
  2. There could also be an effect from the structure of the TV market. Stations sell ads by region, and each existing media region is larger than the new Congressional districts. So absent a change in market structure, a candidate who wanted to purchase TV advertising couldn’t target their own district easily; they would have to overpay to target a much larger region.
  3. And just to harp on this more, we just blew by the Colorado River Compact agreement deadline and now the federal government is going to start mandating cuts; everybody’s going to sue everybody else. Lake Powell is quite possibly going to dead pool this year, and as far as I can find the congressperson who ran on water issues is saying nothing about it.

March 12, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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