Anon @Greynxgga69
Abolish The Family.
Abolish Religion.
Abolish Wage Labour.
Abolish Money.
Abolish Work.
Abolish Commodity Production.
Abolish the State.
Abolish Class.
Abolish Private Property.
Abolish the Nation.
Abolish Patriarchy.
Abolish Gender.
Abolish Town and Country.The True Believers imagine they will live in Utopia after the Revolution.
They will instead be sent to the gulag, or lined up against the wall and shot.
Why?
Because the function of the True Believer is to make the Revolution. And the purpose of the Revolution is to replace The Regime.
Once the Revolution is made, and The Regime has been replaced, no further Revolutions are wanted. Therefore the True Believer serves no purpose.
He is a liability, because he has been promised Utopia, and Utopia is hard, even perhaps impossible, to deliver. If he does not receive the promised Utopia, he is apt to make Revolution again.
The Regime does not want this. It does not wish to be replaced in the same fashion that it replaced The Regime. So the True Believer must be disposed of. He must be replaced with the Opportunist.
The Opportunist can be relied upon, because he does not want Utopia. He wants to have more than his comrades. So long as he receives more than his comrades, he will serve The Regime.
As above, so below.
As before, so after.
Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.
Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter , 2025-07-01.
October 3, 2025
QotD: The role of the True Believer
October 2, 2025
The signature politics of the unaccountable classes
On his substack, Lorenzo Warby considers the origins of what we now call “woke” politics and how they became the predominant set of beliefs of the people who can’t be held accountable:
Western civilisation, over the last two centuries, has gone through the Emancipation Sequence whereby — taking the Anglosphere pattern — free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men to get rid of exclusions on women, straights to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians. We live in free societies of mass prosperity, yet we have highly motivated political networks that think nothing of casting our societies as marked by layers of oppression.
Yes, this is based on a monstrous (and self-serving) inflation of the concept of oppression. It also functions to channel the rage of downwardly mobile children of Western elites.
More important still, it is the signature politics of the unaccountable classes, of those paid to turn up — as distinct from the accountable classes whose income depends directly on their performance. The dominant politics of the unaccountable classes has acquired a name: it is woke politics, the politics of wokery or of being woke.
The technical name for wokery is Critical Constructivism. It is the popularisation of Critical Theory. I have labelled it Post-Enlightenment Progressivism, as it rests on critiques of The Enlightenment, and rejection of Enlightenment values, while orienting itself towards an imagined future — one where it is no longer true, as Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848), that society is based:
on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
That is, of oppression as they define it.
Wokery is the currently dominant form of left-progressivism. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann defines “wokery” as:
making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual minorities.
That is how the Oppressor/Oppressed template that Critical Theory takes from Marxism is popularised in a post civil rights world, using any differences in outcomes between groups as markers of oppression. The Oppressor/Oppressed template requires oppression to be pervasive in contemporary societies, hence psychologist Steven Pinker’s observation about progressives hating progress.1
What wokery also is, is lazy self-righteousness. The self-righteousness is obvious and pervasive. These folk really do act as if they own morality; as if they can withhold the moral grace of their presence from the wicked, from wrongthinkers; as if wrongthinkers are purveyors of moral pollution. This has much to do with the dwindling of the culture of public debate.
But it is also lazy, in that it massively economises on the use of information and intellectual effort. Much of the appeal of “wokery” comes from how remarkably little accurate knowledge it demands. All one has to do is to master the lingo, the linguistic signalling, involved; the pre-set talking points; which terms of moral abuse apply and when; and be willing to engage in any required level of rationalisation and mental gymnastics. Once you do so, the moralised status game of lazy self-righteousness is open for you, with approved positions lined up for one to adopt, all based on semblances of knowing.
This dynamic has much to do with why one side of US politics is far more conformist in its political opinions than the other.
The underlying blank slate views about humans means you don’t have to accept any constraints from evolutionary biology. If we are all blank slates, if there are no inherent differences between groups, then all inequalities between groups can be classed as malicious — as signs of oppression — so you do not have to bother exploring differences in traits, cultures, life-strategies, etc.
Lazy self-righteousness does not require any thinking about successful and unsuccessful life strategies, about what makes things work, or not work. It does not require much in the way of statistical or mathematical understanding. The most mathematical it gets is whether social outcomes are proportional to a group’s population share or not.
If a group is doing better than average, they are oppressors. If they are doing worse, they are oppressed. Viewing society through the oppressed/oppressor mindset always ends up looking for (and finding) kulaks.
It is a simple metric to adopt, with the self-righteous status game built-in of opposing oppression and supporting the marginalised. No further intellectual effort is required.
- Pinker’s observation that populism is a phenomenon of older voters has not worn well. Also, it is a sign how reflexive future-orientated judgements have become, that the voters with the most experience of the EU were most likely to vote against it in the 2016 Brexit referendum passes people by.
The ritual humiliation of ordinary Canadians through “land acknowledgements”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Marazzo explains his objections to the ever-expanding use of “land acknowledgements”:
Let me break this down clearly so you can better understand why these mandated Land Acknowledgements are offensive to me.
They imply inherited guilt
A Land Acknowledgement usually frames the land I live and work on as “stolen”. Even if it does not say the words directly, the message is that I am benefiting from a theft. I served my country for 25 years, I have paid my taxes, raised my family responsibly, and built a life honestly. It cuts against my sense of fairness and justice to be told I must carry guilt for actions taken by people hundreds of years ago. I will not accept accountability for the past when I had no part in it.They ignore my contribution
I have invested decades of service in the military, in my education, in my community, and in my family. These acknowledgements do not recognize those sacrifices, nor those of my ancestors who also built and defended this country. Instead, they imply my very presence is illegitimate. That denies the legitimacy of my life’s work and my family’s role in helping build this nation.They make reconciliation into a ritual of shame
A healthy society should face the past with honesty. But what I see is not dialogue or shared responsibility. It is a scripted performance that demands I accept a label like “colonizer”, whether or not it reflects who I am. Rather than bringing people together, it divides by assigning one group permanent guilt and another permanent victimhood. That is not reconciliation. It is coerced shame.They erase complexity
History in Canada is complicated. Many settlers and Indigenous peoples lived, worked, and fought together. There were injustices, but also cooperation, intermarriage, and shared struggles. Long before Europeans arrived, Indigenous groups also fought among themselves, sometimes brutally, with violence and cruelty toward rival tribes. No group in history is free from wrongdoing. Yet the Land Acknowledgement format reduces this reality to a one-sided story of “oppressors vs. oppressed”, which is neither fair nor accurate.They are being mandated
Perhaps the strongest reason I find them offensive is that these acknowledgements are not voluntary. They are imposed in workplaces, schools, and public events as if they were civic duties or loyalty oaths. Refusing to participate often brings social or professional penalties. That strips away personal agency and turns what could have been a gesture of respect into a forced confession.So my reaction is not irrational. These acknowledgements conflict with my principles of fairness, personal responsibility, and earned legitimacy. They demand I accept guilt I do not bear, while ignoring the contributions my family and I have made. They also erase the truth that no people, Indigenous or otherwise, lived without conflict or wrongdoing in the past.
The first time I encountered a “land acknowledgement” in person was at my son’s university graduation ceremony. I assumed, as the university had a major First Nations study program, that this was something only done there … but now it’s hard to find any public gathering in Canada that doesn’t have the opening cultural cringe and ritual humiliation ceremony to start the event.
October 1, 2025
“Sean Fraser, the current minister of justice and attorney general, has made two major mistakes of late”
If you’re at all interested in Canadian affairs, you should subscribe to The Line … even a free subscription will definitely provide you with some excellent non-propagandistic coverage of what is happening in the dysfunctional dominion. For instance, last weekend’s weekly post from the editors included this segment about Sean Fraser, who is perhaps the worst of Mark Carney’s cabinet (and that takes some doing):
Sean Fraser, as Minister of Immigration, Refugees & Citizenship, during day one of Collision 2023 at Enercare Centre in Toronto, Canada.
Photo by Vaughn Ridley via Wikimedia Commons
We at The Line contend that Sean Fraser, the current minister of justice and attorney general, has made two major mistakes of late.
The first was in deciding not to rescind his decision to spend more time with his friends and family when it became clear that Justin Trudeau was no longer an anchor on his electoral chances. After failing to fix Canada’s housing problem and proving himself integral to blowing apart a pan-partisan consensus on immigration that was once the envy of the world, the man had a real opportunity to leave office on a high note. But, no.
Instead, after hitching his bloated baggage to Mark Carney’s trunk, Fraser decided that Canada needed more of him.
And so, as justice minister, instead of addressing petty stuff like, oh, bail reform, or fixing prisons, or getting crime under control, he turned his attention to … Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The notwithstanding clause.
You may recall that Quebec’s contentious Bill 21 — which prohibits public-service employees in positions of authority, and teachers, from wearing religious symbols while on the job — is currently before the Supreme Court of Canada. Despite numerous mixed rulings on the law, Quebec moved forward with its stance on secularism by invoking Section 33, which allows parliaments to temporarily override judicial rulings.
Section 33 was placed in the Charter for precisely this kind of situation; one in which the courts and parliament disagree about governance. As we still live in a democracy, and are still nominally governed by representatives we elect, the clause was always a bit of a compromise gesture intended to preserve parliamentary supremacy after granting the courts broad powers to basically reinterpret law according to an expansive and ever-expanding understanding of both their jurisdiction, and of the concept of “rights” writ large.
Section 33, nonetheless, has maintained a heavy odour about it, which has generally limited its application, especially outside Quebec. Among the Sean Fraser set, and the largely Liberal collection of lawyers who will insist that the Supreme Court isn’t remotely political, and how dare we entertain the thought, Section 33 was only ever intended as a symbolic right.
But as the definitely-not-political Supreme Court has edged ever deeper into the territory of override and governance, so too have provincial parliaments responded with a very not-symbolic application of the clause.
We do think there’s some blame to be placed at everyone’s door, here. But we also never really took much issue with Section 33. That’s because, at heart, we at The Line believe in, well, democracy. We believe that the people we elect should be able to decide our laws; and we believe that while the Supreme Court of Canada serves as an important check on Parliamentary power, that power doesn’t and should never override the will of the people.
And that’s basically where we part ways with Fraser and many of his — dare we say it? — Laurentian Consensus ilk. Because the unstated critique of the use of Section 33 is basically always the same: these people dislike the application of the clause because they think politics is icky, and that politicians fundamentally cannot be trusted.
In other words, these people don’t actually want a democracy.
They want a technocracy. One in which the smartest and ablest individuals (as defined by them, of course) are the ones who actually get to set the rules and guardrails for society writ large. One in which parliament really is as theatrical, symbolic and pointless as it often regards itself.
There’s an obvious illogical inconsistency here — Fraser and his colleagues are politicians. We aren’t sure if this desire to go out and limit the ability of he and his fellow parliamentarians to do the best jobs they can for the citizens reflects mere self-loathing, or a particular brand of Liberal blindspot, one that leads them to believe that they alone among politicians are exempt from anything as crass political considerations and/or motivations. Those moral failures are apparently for the other guys. But in any case, we have an elected official making the case that unelected courts should have the ability to override legislators, and that the legislators should have no recourse. However Fraser rationalizes this to himself, it’s where we are.
We think the people who have issues with Section 33 are generally not being honest with themselves in that regard; we also think that their instinctual aversion to politics (or their exemption of themselves from it) tends to make them naive. If you vest all the real power of governance in a “non-partisan” Supreme Court, what you’ll get is not a dispassionate government, but rather a heavily politicized Supreme Court. We need only look at what has happened in the U.S. over the past 30 years to see how that pans out in the long run.
Look, we at The Line don’t like Bill 21. It’s a bad law. It needlessly tramples on minority rights. But there’s a very obvious way to get that law repealed that doesn’t involve flirting with a full-blown constitutional crisis in the midst of, you know, all of the other crises going on right now.
Elect a government that will repeal that law.
That’s what democracies do.
To me, one of the most puzzling things about the Carney government’s recent actions is the overall incoherence of them. They are going ahead with one of the worst policies inherited from the Trudeau years with the “gun buyback” program that the minister responsible has openly admitted is almost completely a sop to voters in Quebec. Okay, that makes cynical sense as the Liberal vote is about as “efficient” as it possibly can be so losing just a few seats in Quebec would make it impossible for the Liberals to get re-elected. Fine. Scummy as hell, but fine. Yet the challenge to Section 33 is guaranteed to piss off far more Quebec voters — and stir up controversy across the country to boot — and you’re going to stage a pitched battle against pretty much all the provinces before the Supreme Court? Are you sure about that?
September 30, 2025
When your prime minister is addicted to photo ops
You might think, from my headline, that I’m referring to former prime minister Justin Trudeau — who really, really did love him some gushing media coverage accompanied by advertising-agency-quality visual effects. But it’s actually our current prime minister who has somehow managed to show even more love for the photogenic backdrop and the appealing props in media coverage:
Twice in four days, Prime Minister Mark Carney scheduled official photo ops in front of environments that weren’t entirely real.
During a Sept. 19 visit to Mexico, Carney led cameras through a railyard stocked with pallets of artfully arranged sacks decorated with a maple leaf and the words “product of Canada”.
The site was the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ferrovalle train yard, located outside Mexico City.
The yard is indeed equipped to process incoming railcars of Canadian wheat, but that’s all done in bulk. Hopper cars are positioned over large tanks to disgorge their loads, multiple tonnes at a time.
If any sacks ever enter into the equation, it’s long after Canadian producers have exited the process.
“Canadian grain farmers haven’t shipped wheat in sacks for over a century!” read a reaction by Chris Warkentin, Conservative MP for the heavily wheat-growing riding of Grande Prairie, Alta.
Sylvain Charlebois, a food scientist at Dalhousie University, wrote in a column this week that “bagged wheat is a relic of less mechanized economies”.
“We are among the most efficient bulk grain exporters in the world, shipping millions of tonnes through rail networks and ocean vessels designed for efficiency, safety, and traceability,” he wrote.
But it was a housing announcement just outside Ottawa where Carney would run into more direct accusations of being deliberately deceptive with his photo backdrop.
On Sept. 14, just before the opening of the fall session of Parliament, Carney stood in front of two under-construction homes in the Ottawa area and announced the official launch of Build Canada Homes, a new federal agency tasked with developing subdivisions of manufactured homes on federal land.
“The two sets of homes behind me were manufactured in two days, assembled on site in one,” Carney said to applause.
“We wanted to keep the townhouses open; we held back the workers from finishing it so you could see how things fit together,” he said, adding that one of the homes was being shipped “to Nunavut”.
Once the press conference was over, both homes were dismantled, and the site returned to what it had been before: A patch of fallow government land located near the Ottawa airport.
The land is a right-of-way for high-voltage power lines, which is why it currently doesn’t contain any development.
At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies congratulates Brian Passifume for being one of the only legacy media reporters to look past the literal Potemkin Village structure Carney had assembled for his photo op:
Our Orwellian theme continues but, this time, it’s to credit Brian Passifume of the Toronto Sun for his work digging into how our prime minister and his staff work to create fantasy settings for their announcements. Canadian Press and others were happy to play government propagandist by captioning a photo taken at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Builds launch by stating “Workers from Caivan Homes look on from a modular home under construction in Ottawa during Prime Minister Carney’s announcement for the new agency.”
Near as I can tell, most other media were happy to play along. Except Passifume who broke from the pack and pointed out the whole scene was, essentially, a movie set.
After one X user pointed out that the entire scene was fake, Passifume jumped in with “Dude I was there, that’s exactly what happened. It was a freshly-graded gravel lot with no utilities or services run. I was discussing this very topic with other reporters covering it — they didn’t even move the crane or remove the lifting apparatus, they just repurposed it to hold a gigantic Canadian flag.”
I expect some in the trade will say “hey, everyone does it” and no doubt that is true. But when people with power and those who crave it misrepresent reality, journalists are obliged to point that out. It doesn’t even have to be aggressive, just “Carney said in front of a set created for the announcement”.
Journalism isn’t actually that complicated. You just have to subscribe to its principles.
“San Francisco [is] a sort of market-segmented scheme [extracting] the basic comforts of civilization and licensing them back as upgrades”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen describes the very comfortable lives of the very wealthy, who can support any kind of luxury beliefs because they never have to face the consequences that “the poors” who ape them do:
Dear sir,
I am not a filthy poor, and therefore conditions on the street level in Portland do not matter to me.
I drive my Jaguar to nice restaurants, give it to the valet to park, then go inside and order a fancy treat. So long as the valet parks my car, and the waiter brings my fancy treat for me to consoome in peace, I am utterly unaffected by conditions ten blocks away.
While I am technically forced to acknowledge that other humans exist — otherwise who would park my car or prepare my fancy treat? — I am not actually forced to consider what their lives are like.
And if you try to force me to confront this, I will simply point out that you are a filthy poor, who is unable to live a lifestyle that insulates you from this sort of unpleasantness.
At which point I don’t have to pay attention to you, loser.
Okay, here’s what’s really going on.
At a recent gathering in San Francisco, I listened to the tech bros I was dining with and their complaints about spending a million dollars a year on security teams, and a thought occurred to me, which I shared with the congregation.
I observed that San Fransisco, and perhaps other cities as well, seemed to be a sort of market-segmented money extraction scheme whereby the basic comforts of civilization are systematically removed from the environment, and then licensed back as upgrades to those who can afford them.
In Tennessee, it doesn’t cost me a thing to not be murdered for what I write online. Sure, I have a metric fuckton of extremely high-powered weapons and the skills to use them, but let’s be honest … I own them on principle, not because I would be murdered without them.
In SF, saying right-of-center things online while not being murdered costs a million dollars a year.
It probably costs slightly less than that to have zero drugged-out and/or schizophrenic bums urinating on your porch, but again, in Tennessee, this is a free service that comes with the “Western Civilization” package.
Also, it doesn’t cost anything go to a drugstore where nothing is locked behind glass, and be told “have a nice day” by someone at the register who actually means it.
And I’m told there is some sort of mythical beast called “graffiti”, but I have to go online to find out what it looks like.
In short, the argument that “civilization is just fine because I can still buy my way out of trouble” doesn’t hold any water, because it ignores the fact that you have to buy your way out of trouble, because civilization is shrinking.
You can’t have civilization without ass-kickings.
And if you forget that, you start having to buy your way into ever more and more exclusive clubs where the uncivilized can’t afford to go.
Until they figure out that they don’t have to pay, they can just push their way past the doorman. At which point you must be prepared to kick ass again.
All civilization rests on pillars made of violence. You are in danger until the moment you understand this.
Chris Bray also responded to the Nicholas Kristof take:
Now, here’s the hugely respectable New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a very important Pulitzer Prize recipient, explaining from the heights of his journalistic perch what’s really happening in Portland:
This is as flawless a summary of the progressive cathedral classes as you could possibly manage: “‘Hell’ does not serve Pinot Noir this good”.
- Portland street journalist: Portland is a public graveyard
- Progressive New York Times columnist: Akshully, the Pinot Noir is exquisite
It’s time to shove these people onto a barge and tow them out to sea.
Like Karen Bass describing the open-air drug market of MacArthur Park as a sylvan paradise full of happy children and wonderful families having picnics, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek explained this week that Donald Trump is bizarrely intervening in a utopia, and for crying out loud look at this facial expression:
No one has ever been more lost than this. Your average good urban liberal is more insane than a psych ward full of psychotics. Akshully, the Pinot Noir is delightful. We are burdened with the existence of high-status people who have departed from earthly reality, and we can’t afford them.
Update, 1 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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 modern cult of “victimhood”
It is the idea of “victimhood”; the idea that a man is not responsible for his acts; that he is instead a victim of the oppression of some abstraction called “society” — because he is black, or on welfare, or whatever. And everyone who isn’t can be held guilty, regardless of how they have actually behaved.
Oppressed by whom?
Oppressed, actually, by the implied permission that is granted in advance, to looters, and rapists, and thugs, and amateur neighbourhood terrorists, by that very satanic idea of victimhood, and its practical corollary, that if you can play the victim, you can manoeuvre yourself into a position to victimize everyone around you.
David Warren, “Bad Gumbo”, DavidWarrenOnline, 2005-09-03.
September 29, 2025
Powderkeg Britain
The ever-expanding anti-immigration protests in Britain are an unmissable flashing red alert to the British government … which seems determined to ignore it and continue to plough ahead with their MOAR immigrants policies despite the anger of the public. Spaceman Spiff characterizes it as a revolt:
Multi-ethnic and multicultural societies do not function in the way homogenous nations do. People of radically different origins, culture and beliefs often trigger conflict as incompatible aptitudes, temperaments and worldviews operate within a shared territory.
Artificial situations like this do not naturally harmonize, despite the rhetoric. Instead, competition for resources emerges. Power sharing between rival groups is fantasy. Life is winner takes all.
This can be disconcerting as reality asserts itself and the cost of large-scale migration becomes obvious.
Some in Britain already understand the dangers we now face at home. Others are waking up and looking for answers as their world declines. They are the ones who will grasp at anything to reset society.
Racists and hatemongers
Critics of mass immigration in Britain are often branded as racists and hatemongers.
We see blanket condemnation from establishment figures for even mild observations about the effects of this deeply unpopular policy.
The noticers of reality are derided as far-right extremists even when they are evidently normal people exhausted with unwanted demographic change.
The approved media and political spokespersons insist those who make observations have become radicalized by extremist writers and thinkers. Little more needs to be added. The labels do much of the work; Nazi, fascist, racist.
It doesn’t matter that many who are critical of mass immigration are not extremists calling for violence. They are just normal people who notice what is happening.
One of the unfortunate things the noticers recognize is mixing distinct cultures inside a single geographical area might be dangerous. They sometimes read material based on government statistics that tells them mass immigration infers almost no benefits on the host nation while extracting potentially catastrophic costs.
To ordinary people that sounds like something worth discussing to determine if it is true.
Normal people are revolting
Western countries have endured unexpected demographic shifts in recent years.
The only acceptable view is this is always a net positive. We are told group differences do not exist except in the minds of racists. Foreigners are already very like us and any deviation from our norms are superficial or unworthy of comment.
It is therefore all the more shocking when this is proven wrong. From dress and manners to dietary habits, to the treatment of women and children, the world beyond our borders is quite alien when seen up close.
London’s vibrantly diverse bus riders
All this alienness was once elsewhere with oceans to protect us. Now it is here in our midst.
This is becoming obvious and is at odds with all we have been told. What we see does not match the harmonious melting pot we were sold.
Inevitably this encourages people to seek out information.
The Galactic Empire and a (Revised) Generic Model of “Fascism”
Feral Historian
Published 29 Sept 2023While we can classify significantly different regimes as “communist” based on their key similarities, we don’t have the same taxonomy for “fascism” as a political category. The term is either used so broadly it becomes meaningless, or defined so narrowly that it’s only relevant to Mussolini’s Italian Fascism.
But we can identify three key factors that, when all are present together, result in a system we can define as “fascist” in a sense that’s both historically based and general enough to be useful for analysis. In addition to laying out a simple model defining fascism, this video also dives into some history of Fascism and National Socialism, mixed with the kind of sci-fi analysis you’ve come to expect here.
00:00 Intro
00:35 Palp, Dolf, and Communists
04:05 Old Republic vs Weimar Republic
04:55 Party and State
08:57 Three-Point “Fascist Minimum”
09:24 “Third Way” Economics
15:12 Totalitarianism
19:19 Unifying Myth
22:53 Umberto Eco
24:46 Franco
26:25 Closing Miscellany🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
September 27, 2025
Canada’s supply management cartels benefit “an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners”
In Reason, J.D. Tuccille explains to an American audience why Donald Trump has been playing hardball with Canada on trade issues:
President Donald Trump justifies his enthusiasm for prohibitively high tariffs by insisting the U.S. is being “ripped off” by other countries. It’s a strange argument, since people only trade with one another if they see benefit in the deal. But the president is right to complain that other governments impose trade barriers of their own that are often every bit as burdensome as the high taxes Americans pay on imports. If foreign officials honestly wish to restore something like free trade, they should emphasize dropping their own barriers in return for lower U.S. levies. Case in point: Canada, which sends three-quarters of its exports across its southern border but imposes damaging restrictions on imports.
In a February proclamation of trade war on the world, Trump announced, “the United States will no longer tolerate being ripped off” and complained that “our trading partners keep their markets closed to U.S. exports”. The first part of that claim is silly. But the second part has a kernel of truth.
A glimpse at that truth came in June when Trump angrily posted that Canada “has just announced that they are putting a Digital Services Tax on our American Technology Companies” and, as a result, “we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada”.
The threat had the desired impact. Canada rescinded the tax immediately before it was supposed to take effect. While nominally targeted at all large tech companies, in practice that meant American companies and everybody knew it, since U.S. firms dominate the industry.
But that was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Canada’s trade barriers. Also in June, international trade attorney Lawrence Herman, a senior fellow at Canada’s C.D. Howe Institute, bemoaned proposed legislation in the Canadian parliament that he characterized as “yet another regrettable effort to enshrine Canada’s Soviet-style supply management system in the statute books.”
He added, “the bill would prohibit any increase in imports of supply-managed goods – dairy products, eggs and poultry – under current or future trade agreements”.
The legislation about which Herman complained has since become law.
[…]
More skeptically, Fraser Institute senior fellow Fred McMahon notes, “supply management is uniquely Canadian. No other country has such a system. And for good reason. It’s odious policy, favouring an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners.”
McMahon elaborates that the supply management process is controlled by agricultural management boards which “employ a variety of tools, including quotas and tariffs, and a large bureaucracy to block international and interprovincial trade and deprive Canadians of choice in dairy, eggs and poultry”.
But as we’ve seen so many times over the years, it disproportionally benefits Quebec, and the Liberals desperately need those Quebec votes to stay in power, so the government would rather destroy the national economy rather than give up on our Stalinist supply management cartels.
Dislike of Trump prompts the CBC to spread faulty medical advice
It’s a long-running joke that US progressives — and the legacy media, BIRM — are programmed to respond to anything Donald Trump says by doing the exact opposite of what he says:
The CBC apparently felt the need to do the meme:
It was not controversial for news outlets like CBC to report in 2016, and later 2021, on new medical research raising concerns about the impact of Tylenol use on pregnancy and fetal development. But in 2025, those studies (among others) have become the basis for a new cautionary approach by the U.S. government that critics and media are trying to debunk.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that, as part of a bigger strategy in quelling autism, it would be issuing a “physician notice and begin the process to initiate a safety label change for acetaminophen”.
President Donald Trump relayed this to the press, stating the medication “can be associated with a very increased risk of autism”.
“So taking Tylenol is not good, all right? I’ll say it; it’s not good. For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary. That’s, for instance, in cases of extremely high fever that you feel you can’t tough it out.”
[…]
The statement was reported in the mainstream news — including CBC, which found Canadian doctors who seemed to support the cautionary approach. The impression from these experts was that this wasn’t cause for panic and that more evidence was needed, but it was an occasion for discussion. The advice back then? Take the smallest amount for the shortest period of time, and don’t use it as a first resort to managing pain, which is consistent with the U.S. guidance.
Indeed, no major figure in this story is advocating for total avoidance because unmitigated pain and fever are bad for pregnancy, and in small amounts, Tylenol seems to be fine. That said, the manufacturer doesn’t recommend it for pregnant women (which they can’t really do without extensive testing, even if doctors generally consider it safe for mothers in minimized amounts when medically indicated).
More recently, a review of other studies by a team including Harvard University’s public health dean found similar “evidence of an association” between the drug and neurodevelopmental conditions. The dean released a statement saying that the “association is strongest when acetaminophen is taken for four weeks or longer”. That should be uncontroversial, because nobody is supposed to take Tylenol for that long, pregnant or not.
But perhaps, as the Babylon Bee suggests, it’s all Trumpian 4D Chess:
September 26, 2025
John Carter revisits the cancellation debate
As part of a much longer essay, covering a lot more ground, John Carter considers the pro and con arguments for the much-cancelled right to fully indulge in cancelling figures on the left in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and the widespread celebration of the murder by leftists:
Talking heads on network television are whining that it’s getting out of hand, while abruptly unemployed leftists take to GoFundMe to beg for support.
The purge has started, and yes, thank you, I’m feeling quite vindicated right now.
Repeating myself is boring, so I’m not going to rehash the arguments in favour of turning cancellation against the left. Suffice to say, they have it coming. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s an important distinction to be made between getting a labourer fired because he made the OK sign, and removing a medical professional who openly celebrates the death of a man for having opinions shared by half the country. Can a bloody-minded leftist doctor be trusted to give medical care to a Trump voter, when he’s on the record as advocating the execution of Trump voters? The doctor should certainly be allowed to say what he pleases, and he should have the same right to use a social media account as anyone else, but he probably shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine.
But I don’t want to rehash that. Instead, I want to focus back in on human water fountain women as an exemplar of that choir of liars suddenly singing hymns to the sacred practice of freedom of speech. People would be shocked by this self-serving mendacity if long experience had not accustomed them to it.
We aren’t shocked because we’ve seen this before, repeatedly. The left screamed about the spontaneous unguided tour of the capitol on J6 as an insurrection and an unforgivable attack on our democracy, conveniently forgetting that the Weather Underground were bombing federal facilities, including the Capitol, back in the 70s, or that the state capitol of Wisconsin was occupied by protesters in 2011 … or that they’d attacked the White House in 2020 … to say nothing of the nation-wide Burning Looting and Murdering they committed in the wake of Floyd’s fentanyl overdose.
The curious phenomenon of leftist narrative blindness was repeatedly demonstrated during the COVID years, in which the entire professional-managerial caste would switch from one narrative to its opposite like a school of fish, confidently proclaiming on one day what they had denounced as anti-scientific misinformation just the day before.
Sure enough, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, with his blood still on the ground and their gleeful cries ringing in the world’s ears, the left went on an immediate disinformation counter-offensive. They adopted the narrative that Tyler Robinson was a right-wing groyper – an online follower of Nick Fuentes – who had assassinated Kirk for not being based enough, or for supporting Israel, or something. It was for lying about this that Kimmel was pulled off the air. The evidence for Robinson’s right-wing sympathies were that he’d been raised in a conservative Mormon household by a police officer father, and that he’d dressed up as a gopnik once or something. Robinson’s live-in relationship with a troon, the Antifa slogans he’d carved into the bullet casings, and his friends and family attesting to his left-wing radicalization were waved away. This is what abusive narcissists do: “I didn’t do the thing you just saw me do to you, and anyhow you deserved it”. Sure enough, as I wrote this, another leftist sniper attacked an ICE facility in Dallas; sure enough, leftists immediately began insisting that he couldn’t possibly have been a leftist, this time on the grounds that the shooter inscribed “Anti-ICE” rather than “Fuck ICE” on his bullets.
The left also tried to change the conversation to the supposed problem of right-wing violence. Professional-looking infographics flooded onto social media, pushed by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, Ilhan Omar, and the Economist.
Ilhan Omar (note that the data are from the ADL).
The infographics make it look like there’s an epidemic of right-wing political violence being waged against a peaceful, tolerant, and defenceless left. This is of course nonsense. Every time someone dug into their data, it turned out that they were basically doing this:
It isn’t even necessary to subject the datasets to close scrutiny. Look at the Economist graphic. See that little black rectangle in 2020? The Economist would have you believe that there was practically no left-wing political violence at all in 2020, which as everyone remembers was a fiery but mostly peaceful year. The Economist dataset turns out to have been curated by an Antifa activist, by the way, which I suppose makes the Economist an affiliate of an international terrorist organization, now.
Now, you can say “they’re just lying”, and yes, quite a few of them know exactly what they’re doing.
[…]
In a lot of cases, however, calling them “liars” isn’t quite accurate. Lying implies conscious deception. If you’ve talked to these people, which I know you have to the point where you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you know that they seem to really believe the things they say. It does not matter in the slightest if they contradict the thing they said yesterday. They apparently have no memory of their previous statements. Their present belief is always entirely sincere. It does not matter if observable reality is in stark contradiction to their belief. They have lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, with the result that they routinely mistake their own pop culture propaganda for reality.
That they do not even seem to notice when they contradict themselves suggests a void of self-awareness. This is the origin of the NPC meme, which depicts leftists as Non-Player Characters, effectively no more than computer programs that emulate human behaviour. When the meme first began to spread a few years ago, there was a purge of Twitter accounts that posted it. The NPC meme cut leftists to the quick because they instinctively recognized – as everyone did – the truth in it. Leftists complained that the NPC meme was dehumanizing, which is actually perfectly correct. An NPC is not really human.
We see evidence for this NPC absence of self-awareness everywhere. A self-aware person who had spent a decade viciously persecuting anyone who publicly contradicted leftist orthodoxy would understand that an appeal to freedom of speech once they themselves were persecuted for their words would garner mockery rather than sympathy. A clever Machiavellian would therefore preface their entreaties with expressions of contrition for their past behaviour, however insincere. Not one of them has done this, which makes it less likely that their attempt to appeal to freedom of speech is mere calculated cynicism. It is instead as though they themselves are not aware of their own previous actions.
A ministry for “Heritage” should not be funding hate publications
I’m with Dan Knight that the government shouldn’t be funding any private networks, magazines, or newspapers, but since it does provide a lot of funds through various programs, it should at the very least strive to avoid funding open hatred toward ordinary Canadians:
Steven Guilbeault at a happier stage of his life, before joining the Liberal cabinet.
In a fiery exchange at the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (CHPC), Conservative MP Rachel Thomas dismantled Liberal Minister Hon. Steven Guilbeault, P.C., M.P., Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages, over taxpayer money funneled into groups publishing hate-laced screeds and smearing everyday Canadians.
Thomas zeroed in on Cult MTL, a publication receiving federal heritage funds. She read into the record a headline published the very day after reports of Charlie Kirk’s assassination attempt: “To Hell with Charlie Kirk”.
“Minister, do you think that is wrong? Taxpayer dollars are funding this group. Will you revoke their funding?” Thomas demanded.
Guilbeault looked blindsided. He admitted he had no idea the government was bankrolling a tabloid openly celebrating political violence. His answer:
I have not been made aware of this. I will verify with the department and report back to you. Obviously, spreading hate has no place in Canada, and if this is the case, we will make the necessary verifications and take the necessary steps.
Thomas didn’t stop there. She turned to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which she said has already pocketed about $1 million from Guilbeault’s department. Documents show the group paid an “investigative journalist” to hunt down so-called “far-right” targets — defining the term so broadly it included Catholics and pro-life Canadians — before seeding the stories into mainstream news outlets.
[…]
Conservative MP Rachel Thomas quoted former CBC anchor Travis Dhanraj, who launched a human rights complaint this summer […]
To be honest, this has been the hardest period of my life. What happened at CBC really broke me.
Then she put it directly to Guilbeault:
Have you reached out to the CEO of the CBC regarding this situation and the toxic work environment that is being accused there?
Guilbeault’s answer? Bureaucratic shrugging:
The government role is not to get mixed into the daily operations and management of the organization. That is the purview of the organization, in this case, the public broadcaster.
Translation: $1.4 billion of your money flows into CBC every year, but the minister says he can’t pick up the phone when staff say they’re being harassed.
“Create no-go zones for federal forces”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR responds to a comment about his three possible futures after the Charlie Kirk assassination (linked here):
Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber
Antifa websites totally open to the public explicitly call to so utterly terrorize ICE that federal agents are physically afraid to enter a city. If the Proud Boys wrote this about the FBI how fast would every single person around that website be indicted by Merrick Garland.
“Create no-go zones for federal forces.’
In one of my previous analysis postings, I outlined three possible scenarios for the future after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
This corresponds to scenario 3, the one where insurrection edges into a simmering civil war a la Bosnia. I caught some flak in my replies at the time from people who thought an insurrection based in urban areas isn’t practical under modern conditions.
Antifa thinks it is. It’s what they’re planning for.
One of the things I have to remind myself of occasionally is that most people know essentially nothing about Communist theory and Communist revolutionary tactics.
Antifa is running the classic Communist playbook. Make the enemy fight you where you are strong and they are weak — where you have support among the people and (when possible) cover from sympathetic local officials.
Historically that has usually meant fighting from rural areas where the reach of the government is weak. But the Russian Revolution was an exception, and the revolution Antifa is trying to fight is another. Their natural home ground is large coastal cities run by left-wing Democrats.
September 25, 2025
An unanticipated danger of AI – “classified” videos for decision-makers
Until fairly recently, even the least tech-savvy among us could distinguish AI-generated videos from the real thing … but most of the leaders and decision-makers in western governments aren’t very tech-savvy and put into high-pressure environments may be uniquely susceptible to AI manipulation:
What If I Told You … One of the biggest applications of AI for misinformation hasn’t been online but in the halls of power.
Aging boomer politicians, generals, and major figures are manipulated by showing them AI videos they can’t tell, can’t pause to look at, and certainly can’t digitally examine or geolocate …
“And as you saw Mr President.”
Pay attention. All of them reference seeing “videos” that you aren’t allowed to see, of events which they claim are public record, but appear no-where and no reporting supports …
Sean Hannity was interviewing a world leader and even said “You should show the public the video you showed me it’d really change everyone’s opinion. it changed mine” LIVE ON AIR. And the world leader said some non-committal maybe, then released nothing.
These aging politicians, media figures, corporate personalities, etc. all casually reference seeing insane videos that would CHANGE EVERYTHING and would have been immediately released to sway public opinion if they existed or would have been leaked if it would have been in poor taste to be seen directly releasing them (like gore films)
But of course they aren’t released because they’re faked and the internet would immediately piece together that they’re faked with AI, video game, and archival footage from old conflicts … But the aging 60- and 80-year-olds who run the world can’t tell.
There was a case where they challenged Greta Thunberg “Would you watch this video it’d change your mind” and she refused telling them to just release it … Then they didn’t and attacked her for not being willing to view evidence contrary to her views … in a controlled environment where she couldn’t scrutinize it or check its authenticity against anything else …
It sounds insane! But if you pay attention all of these politicians, media figures, and even influencers … People who often have ZERO security clearance or any official attachment of real trust or allegiance to the governments showing them this “classified” or “controlled” footage … Regularly reference seeing footage which does not exist in the public domain, for events which are viciously contested in which any of the footage they claim to have seen would be WORLD CHANGING news … Yet all these figures are just left out in the wind repeating “Trust me bro”s for some of the most important occurrences of the past decade.
