Quotulatiousness

June 20, 2026

Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”

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

Canadian Members of Parliament care more for their summer vacations than they do for the rights of Canadian citizens. While this isn’t really news, it’s just the latest proof that our elected representatives are … well, I was about to describe their moral failings in great detail, but that could get me arrested and jailed if-and-when the many authoritarian measures the Liberals want to enact become law. Instead, here’s Michael Geist‘s summary of the way Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Bill, got sent to the Senate on Thursday night:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, passed the House of Commons yesterday with the government invoking a single motion to approve several bills without further debate or individual votes as MPs raced for home for the summer. Bill C-22 will now head to the Senate, where it can expect a rougher ride when study begins in the fall. Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.

The final days of Bill C-22 in the House marked a genuine abrogation of democratic norms. The government moved a motion to shut down the clause-by-clause study in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, preventing the committee from adjourning until the bill had been pushed through. That led to a session that stretched past midnight, as MPs were barred from introducing new amendments and were left to vote on amendment after amendment without any discussion, debate, or even public disclosure of their contents. By the end of the committee session, no one could have known the contents of the bill that MPs had duly approved and sent back to the House for final approval. As noted, once back in the House, there was no further debate, discussion or even a vote. Just a motion that said the deal was done.

If the process was troubling, the rhetoric was embarrassing. I wrote earlier this week about Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews moment, as he said it was time for opposition parties to “choose” whether to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime (a refrain that sounded a lot like Toews’ 2012 comment to Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, who is now the Speaker of the House, that he could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”). Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon pushed that posture further on Thursday by dismissing the bill’s critics as wearing “tinfoil hats” engaged in “paranoia.” The charge fits a broader pattern in which this government treats independent privacy scrutiny as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, seen most clearly in the Bill C-36 approach to strip the Privacy Commissioner of authority over private-sector privacy law altogether.

The committee did approve some government amendments to the bill that improve aspects of the lawful access plan but they are still likely to leave companies, security experts, and privacy advocates concerned. For example, the maximum metadata retention period the government can impose drops from one year to six months, and a category of metadata can now be mandated only where the Minister is satisfied that the category and all of its elements are essential to investigations. That is better, but still not good enough as it is not tied to any actual evidence about why six months is needed and both the costs and risks associated with metadata retention, which is not a requirement in the U.S., are largely unchanged.

As The Reclamare explains, this bill is yet another likely irritant in US/Canadian affairs, as it will expose US citizens’ data to Canadian government oversight:

– A USA person creates/maintains a social media account — lets call it “XXX”

– Using its new C22 law, Canadian RCMP develops a “reasonable grounds to suspect” of “XXX” to a CDN investigation (a low investigative hunch standard under C-22).

– RCMP obtains a Canadian judicial authorization (an “Order”) and sends the Social Media company an International Production Request, which is not a USA warrant, not a §2703(d) order, and not routed through full MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) review.

– The social media company is bound by US law (SCA/ECPA), treats the request as a formal foreign inquiry.

– The social media company discloses limited metadata: summary of login IP ranges, account country setting, and other classification signals to prove USA origin

– This disclosure happens at Canada’s “reasonable suspicion” threshold, which is lower and less scrutinized than the US domestic requirement of “specific and articulable facts showing relevance and materiality” under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) for the exact same type of data.

– The USA user’s metadata, which would normally enjoy stronger 4th Amendment derived judicial protections, if sought directly by US authorities, is handed to a foreign government on weaker foreign grounds, without the same level of US court filtering or notice that a purely domestic US request would trigger.

– The 4th Amendment protection is effectively diluted because the platform’s good faith compliance with the foreign lower bar creates a new, easier pathway around domestic US constitutional safeguards for accounts that platforms classify as American

Canada’s Liberal government continues to chip away at our “Charter of Rights”, under the guise of “Protecting Citizens” and we are moving towards authoritarianism

While I loathe to create friction, I also hope your Rights can help slow Canada’s devolvement

It impacts you too

June 19, 2026

Nobody voted for this kind of dystopian nightmare, Mr. Carney!

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

The Liberal Party, having engineered themselves a majority in the House of Commons, are on a speed-run to the kind of dystopian police state we used to read about in science fiction novels:

Millions of Canadians are beginning to see the similarities between communist regimes and the direction of current government policy.

The pattern is always the same.

It begins with noble promises: safety, equality, compassion, protection, the greater good.

It ends with censorship, coercion, surveillance, prisons, ruined lives, and a police state.

Always.

It comes wrapped in slogans, experts, committees, emergency powers, censorship, enemies of the people, and the belief that the state has the right to crush the individual for the greater good.

Consider…

C-2 – Strong Borders Act
C-22 – Lawful Access Act
C-34 – Safe Social Media Act
C-36 – Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act
C-9 – Combatting Hate Act
C-25 – Strong and Free Elections Act
S-209 – Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act

All seven are live in the 45th Parliament right now. None has received royal assent yet.

Consider that good, law-abiding Canadians are being gradually and systematically disarmed.

This is not a warning about some distant future.

In 2022 the federal government invoked emergency powers it did not have, froze the bank accounts of citizens over their political views, and banned Canadians from funding a protest. Two levels of court have since ruled it unconstitutional — a violation of the very Charter rights every one of these bills now circles.

That was the trial run. It needed an emergency as the excuse.

The seven bills above are the permanent version — the same reach, made routine — so that next time, no emergency need be declared at all.

A free country is not lost in a single day. It is legislated away in pieces, each one introduced with a reassuring name and defended as necessary, while good people keep assuring themselves it could never happen here.

It already did. The only question is whether enough Canadians notice before it becomes permanent.

Read every bill. Watch every one of them. Because this is the stage where it can still be stopped … and perhaps our last chance.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is trying to get Canadians to pay attention to what just one of these bills will do:

Bill C-34 will affect every Canadian. Age verification. AI regulation. A new Digital Safety Commission. Most Canadians have never heard of it. Here’s what it will do.

Michael Geist posts a Substack Note about bill C-22:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, has been reported back from committee and is headed toward passage. There are some amendments, but many concerns remain. The updated bill with changes is at

parl.ca/Content/Bills/4…

There are two changes to metadata retention. First, the maximum retention period the government can impose drops from 1 year to 6 months. Second, it can now mandate a category of metadata only if satisfied the category and all its elements are essential to investigations.

The committee rewrote the definition of systemic vulnerability. A “substantial risk” becomes a “credible risk, based on recognized international technical standards”. But it also added a carve-out: a flaw exposing only a target’s data is not “systemic”.

Added a new section on decryption that says nothing in the Act can be read to compel a provider to decrypt user-encrypted data, unless the provider supplied the encryption and holds the key. Borrowed from US law, but doesn’t fit the same way.

Compliance with ministerial orders is now expressly subject to the systemic vulnerability exception. That addresses a contradiction in the original text, where the duty to comply appeared to be unconditional.

The original bill set no maximum duration on these ministerial orders. This now changes to a two-year cap without the open-ended review-and-extend mechanism.

The amendments will rightly leave many still concerned. Companies considering exiting Canada due to Bill C-22 are unlikely to conclude that it fully addresses their issues. Yet the government is likely to push it through the House today.

June 18, 2026

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report

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

At The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian expresses his disgust and contempt at the British government which has categorically failed to protect a quarter of a million girls and young women from sexual predators imported by that government, which then actively covered up the crimes. It’s impossible to put into words just how cowardly every politician, every police officer, and every “social worker” has been for decades in allowing these crimes to flourish:

Click the image to open the report PDF

I was not expecting to learn that the grooming gangs have been operating since 1955. Seventy-one years. At least two generations of British children have been savagely sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism, willingly helped and encouraged by not only the State, but by our “Journalistic Betters”.

I was not expecting to learn that the victims number a quarter of a million. At minimum.

The least job of a society — the very minimal function expected — is the protection of the innocent and the defence of those who cannot protect themselves.

The Government of Great Britain — from the least to the highest — not only failed in this most minor of duties, but actively aided and abetted the destruction of the innocent and the depredation of the defenceless — with the enthusiastic assistance of “professional” “journalists”.

Seventy-one (71) years. Two-hundred and fifty-thousand (250,000) children raped. Trafficked. Tortured.

I don’t ever bloody well want to hear any English person tell me I don’t need guns again. “The police will protect you” you say, with that supercilious smirk. Read that report again — especially the part about the police failing to protect children, CHILDREN for God’s sake — and then get sodding bent.

I am furious. I don’t want apologies — I want officers executed. I want politicians hung in the public square, their possessions seized. I want journalistic edifices chained shut and set on fire.

I want the bloodshed and retribution visited upon those responsible, those who enabled, and those who willingly ignored to be of a level that will snarl softly to British people for ages to come:

“Do. Not. Fail. Again.”

Bastards.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, X Freeze summarizes some of the findings from the report:

Perpetrators:
~87% of convicted group-based CSE offenders had Muslim names. Estimates put the real figure at ~95% Muslim. Networks were almost entirely Muslim men — overwhelmingly Pakistani. Massively disproportionate to population share.

Enabled by honour-shame clan culture and Islamic doctrines that treat non-Muslim girls as available property: Muslim superiority over kuffar, al-walā‘ wa-l-barā‘ enmity to non-Muslims, no fixed age of consent, and rules allowing sexual use of captives.

How the grooming worked:

Girls as young as 11 were befriended by young Muslim men who treated them like adults, supplied alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. They were collected in taxis from school gates, care homes and streets, taken to houses, flats, restaurants and hotels, then raped repeatedly by groups of men, passed between perpetrators, tortured, filmed, and told they were “white trash” or “kuffar” who deserved punishment. Many became pregnant while still children. Some were trafficked to the Middle East for Islamic marriage.

failure & cover-up

Every pillar of the state failed catastrophically for decades:

  • Police ignored reports, criminalised victims instead of perpetrators, destroyed evidence and bailed known rapists.
  • Social services placed children in trafficking hubs inside children’s homes, closed cases despite clear signs, and retaliated against whistleblowers.
  • NHS recorded genital injuries, multiple STIs in children as young as 13, and rape pregnancies — then discharged victims back to their abusers.
  • Schools saw older men collecting girls at the gates and heard disclosures, yet often excluded the victims rather than protecting them.
  • Politicians (especially Labour-controlled councils and the party nationally) denied knowledge, blocked or watered down inquiries, suppressed ethnicity data, and prioritised electoral support from Muslim voting blocs and “community cohesion” over child protection. Fear of being called “racist” paralysed action. Sadiq Khan repeatedly insisted there were no grooming gangs in London, despite the Metropolitan Police holding reports of girls being raped by groups of men in hotels and other locations across the capital.

On her Substack, Celina identifies the specific state failures that perpetuated what started as isolated, local crimes:

The central thesis of the Rape Gang Inquiry Report is unequivocal: the estimated 250,000 victims were the victims of a deliberate collapse of the British state’s safeguarding architecture. Across every crucial sector, the state chose institutional convenience over the lives of children.

The Police: Criminalisation and Complicity

The Inquiry documents how officers frequently arrived hours late to missing persons reports, actively discouraged parents from filing complaints, and routinely closed cases without conducting basic forensic or digital examinations.

The most pervasive failure was the ideological decision to view the victims as willing participants in their own destruction. Children like Chloe, found highly intoxicated in the cars of adult men, were labelled “prostitutes” making “lifestyle choices”. By framing the organised rape of children as consensual sex work, the police absolved themselves of the legal requirement to launch resource-heavy investigations into organised crime syndicates.

When victims or their families did provide actionable evidence, it was routinely mishandled, ignored, or actively destroyed. Ross, the father of a survivor named Phoebe, testified that vital digital evidence handed over to the police was inexplicably deleted from the device while in police custody. When Grace’s abusers repeatedly breached their bail conditions and stalked her family, the police took no action, rendering protective non-molestation orders entirely meaningless.

The bureaucratic responses were often farcical. In some instances, the only formal action taken by police was issuing “harbouring notices” to the men, pieces of paper warning them not to associate with the child. When the men inevitably ignored these notices, no further enforcement followed. Furthermore, the Inquiry uncovered a deeply entrenched “two-tier” policing system. While forces surrendered to the fear of disorder from certain communities, they aggressively targeted the victims and their families. Chloe was arrested in her pyjamas after her mother called the police for help, kept in a cell until 2:00 AM, and released onto the streets without transportation, leading directly to her being picked up by a gang member and trafficked nationwide.

Most disturbingly, the report highlights allegations of direct police complicity, referencing whistleblower accounts of “cop nights” where officers were allegedly active participants in the trafficking and abuse of girls using police vehicles. The revelation that an abuser could be legally accepted as an “appropriate adult” for Michelle during police questioning underscores a force either dangerously incompetent or wilfully blind to the dynamics of coercive control.

Social Services: Abandonment and Retaliation

If the police failed to enforce the law, social services failed to enforce basic humanity. Across multiple districts, social care systems identified the precise markers of severe exploitation, truancy, self-harm, sudden wealth, STIs, missing episodes and consistently chose to look away.

The Inquiry demonstrates that social workers frequently undermined protective parents, isolating children from their families and placing them in residential care homes and semi-independent units that functioned as drive-through delivery systems for the gangs. Children were centralised, making them easier targets.

Jane, a victim placed in semi-independent living at 16, was trafficked directly from her state-provided accommodation. When she disclosed the abuse and the exchange of money to the staff, she was told it did not constitute trafficking because she was over 16. The staff then blackmailed her, threatening to blame her for the exploitation if she complained further. Following a psychiatric hospitalisation, Jane discovered that all statutory care records from her placement had been mysteriously “lost or destroyed,” legally obstructing any path to future accountability.

When internal whistleblowers attempted to expose the ongoing grooming, trafficking, and financial abuse of children in these units, they were met with severe retaliation. An unnamed social worker who acted as an Interim Co-Manager testified that after raising concerns about untreated exploitation risks and unlawful housing practices, she faced sudden suspensions, the removal of payments, fabricated allegations, and career-ending professional isolation orchestrated by senior leadership to protect the council’s reputation. Social services actively punished those who tried to protect children.

Schools:

Teachers and school administrators observed older men waiting at the school gates to collect young girls in taxis. They noted sudden drops in attendance, drastic changes in behaviour, and physical exhaustion.

Instead of recognising these as textbook indicators of exploitation, schools responded with punitive measures that pushed the children further to the margins. When Chloe’s trauma manifested as truancy, the school repeatedly placed her in isolation, compounding her emotional distress and alienation. When Jen was bullied to the point of wetting herself because a teacher refused her access to the toilet, the school ignored her subsequent self-harm and suicidal ideation, failing to initiate any safeguarding response.

In the most tragic instances, schools actively protected the abusers to avoid scandal. When Rachel’s autistic daughter disclosed that she had been orally raped by a peer, the school failed to effectively safeguard her, allowing the alleged perpetrator to remain on the premises. She was subjected to relentless physical and online bullying by students linked to the abuser, which was filmed and shared online. The intimidation escalated until the twelve-year-old took a fatal overdose of colchicine, stating she “just wanted everything to stop”.

Rupert Lowe explains his next steps after the publication of the inquiry report:

QotD: James K. Polk – a dark horse?

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

“Who is James K. Polk?” the Nashville Republican Banner asked in a headline after news of Polk’s nomination as the 1844 Democratic Party standard-bearer reached the Tennessee capital. The question was meant to be derisive, and it struck so shrill a chord that the Whigs adopted it as their national campaign taunt.

The truth is that Polk’s political opponents knew very well who James K. Polk was — and why they should fear him. Yet almost two centuries later, despite solid standing in modern presidential polls and a portrait that currently graces the Oval Office, Polk’s legacy is entwined in mischaracterizations.

The Myth of the Dark Horse

Many will tell you that Polk was a dark horse. No, he was not.

Born in North Carolina in 1795, Polk aspired to the presidency at least from his first election to the Tennessee House of Representatives at the age of twenty-eight. He always had what every budding politician craves: the unqualified support of the era’s greatest hero. Although some vilified Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory was a political force that could not be denied. With Jackson’s encouragement, Polk entered politics and then married Sarah Childress, whom Andrew and Rachel Jackson treated as a daughter.

Prior to his nomination, Polk had served seven terms in Congress, including two as Speaker of the House; he had been governor of Tennessee; and he had tried to unseat the sitting vice president to become President Martin Van Buren’s running mate in 1840. To be sure, there were defeats along the way. Polk lost his first try for the Speakership and two gubernatorial campaigns in Tennessee, a state as bitterly divided as any between Jackson’s Democrats and emerging Whig forces.

But Polk never lost sight of the prize. Even in defeat, he continued to correspond with Democratic leaders across the country. His presidential nomination in 1844 at a convention divided over the annexation of Texas may well have been — as one of his most ardent supporters advised — four years ahead of schedule. After all, former president Van Buren, who had lost his reelection campaign in 1840, again sought the nomination in 1844. But Polk was not a dark horse suddenly surging from the back of the field. He was in the arena and one of the most astute and well-connected politicians of his day.

Walter R. Borneman, “James K. Polk and the 5,106 Votes That Changed America”, Coolidge Review, 2026-02-20.

June 17, 2026

Canada’s new civic religion, with the “land acknowledgement” as the daily rite

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

L. Wayne Mathison shows how cultural boundaries changed radically over relatively short periods of time in what is now Manitoba, rather discrediting the fairy tale we tell our children about pre-contact First Nations living in peace and harmony:

Canada’s institutional obsession with land acknowledgements and historical guilt has officially jumped the shark.

Every university lecture, corporate meeting, school event, and government memo now seems to begin with the same rehearsed confession about whose land we are supposedly standing on. It has become a civic ritual, complete with liturgy, original sin, and mandatory public piety.

Strip away the administrative sermonizing and the whole thing rests on a very shaky version of history.

We are expected to pretend pre-contact North America was a peaceful, static, eco-friendly paradise where distinct peoples lived in permanent harmony until Europeans arrived and ruined everything.

That is not history. That is mythology.

Worse, it is patronizing. It strips Indigenous peoples of their full humanity by pretending they were somehow immune to the normal forces that shaped every other society on earth: ambition, conflict, trade, migration, alliance, conquest, revenge, and expansion.

The actual history of this continent was not a postcard. It was dynamic, complex, and often brutal.

The Haudenosaunee expansion during the Beaver Wars reshaped huge parts of what is now Southern Ontario. The Huron-Wendat, Neutral, and Erie peoples were devastated, displaced, or absorbed through war and political domination.

On the plains, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Iron Confederacy, and others fought long struggles over territory, trade, horses, resources, and survival. Peoples moved. Borders shifted. Alliances formed and collapsed. Some groups conquered. Some retreated. Some disappeared into larger political orders.

History did not begin when Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence.

This land was already a theatre of power, movement, conflict, diplomacy, and displacement long before Europeans arrived.

The modern Canadian narrative treats European colonisation as a unique cosmic crime, as if conquest and territorial displacement were invented in 1492. They were not. Europeans arrived as a technologically dominant global power and did what powerful groups had done across human history, including on this continent.

That does not make the suffering harmless. It does not erase broken treaties, residential schools, forced relocations, or government abuse. Those things happened, and they matter.

But a serious country cannot build its future on a childish version of the past.

Every habitable part of the world has been taken, lost, fought over, inherited, traded, defended, and taken again. The people Europeans encountered were not frozen in moral perfection. They were human beings living inside history, not outside it.

The guilt industry does not repair the past. It often paralyzes the present.

Canada cannot move forward by treating itself as a permanent crime scene or by dividing citizens into inherited moral categories of “settler” and “Indigenous”.

We can tell the truth about cruelty, conquest, broken promises, and injustice without pretending history had a correct stopping point right before European ships appeared.

A mature country does not need ritual guilt.

It needs honesty, equal citizenship, legal clarity, and the courage to build a future instead of endlessly prosecuting the past.

June 16, 2026

Piketty’s bid for another fifteen minutes

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

I’m not an economist, so my personal opinion on Thomas Piketty’s work is based purely on the reports of others … you could say I’m not a fan. In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille discusses Piketty’s latest push to impoverish the rich nations for the noble cause of “global justice”:

Piketty’s 2021 paean to socialism and central panning.

Celebrity economist Thomas Piketty won fame with a claim that, in market economies, capital accumulates in the hands of the already wealthy, leading to increased inequality. The message found a receptive audience among people eager to believe economic success isn’t earned. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney cited Piketty in his own 2021 book-length argument that economic activity should be managed by people like Carney.

And now Piketty is back seeking new fans with a scheme for top-down central planning of the world’s economy. He is the co-director of the new Global Justice Report from the World Inequality Lab.

Introducing the project, Piketty posted on X, “The world today is characterized by large-scale inequalities. And a climate crisis is looming over us. We urgently need a new vision for global progress in the 21st Century. One that grounds human development and equality in planetary habitability.”

Piketty shoehorns an impressive number of buzz phrases into a few lines. He includes concerns about equality and inequality, climate change and progress that should send thrills through college campuses. But Piketty has a talent for tapping into the moment. In this case, at a time when Freedom House’s annual report finds that “Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025,” the economist and his colleagues propose authoritarian policies for shaping the entire planet to their liking.

In his post, Piketty asks, “What would it take to achieve high prosperity and equality while remaining within planetary boundaries?” He answers that “energy transition” (meaning moving away from power sources that produce carbon) is necessary, as well as “labour hour reductions, growth caps in rich countries, less material consumption, and changes in food habits.”

The report itself asserts, “The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.”

To fight climate change and battle inequality, Piketty and company want “full income convergence across countries by 2100.” This requires, in part, limiting growth to “around 0-0.5% in today’s richest regions (North America/Oceania, Europe).” They argue that near-zero growth in rich countries “does not mean that their living standards stagnate” because people will benefit from flattened incomes.

On his Substack, Tim Worstall says that the latest Piketty emission disproves the “we need a global wealth tax” case of fellow French economist Gabriel Zucman:

So Tommy Piketty has released his big report self-pleasuring over how a few Frogs are going to run the global economy forever. The Guardian, of course, thinks there’s merit in it:

    One of the report’s key aims is to bring every country to today’s rich-country level of €5,000 per person per month in purchasing-power terms. The figure for sub-Saharan Africa is €290. The report proposes a new global fiscal and monetary architecture: taxes on the very rich would build the public realm, while a Keynesian “clearing union” and new international currency would ease the external constraints that limit poorer countries’ state spending.

Super, eh?

But the plan doesn’t just try to get the poor up to our standard of living — an excellent goal in and of itself, obviously. It also insists that we don’t increase our standard of living. For a century. Which is, you know, going to be a little more difficult.

So, how is this to be achieved? Well, this is Piketty — Frogs, eh? — so it’s going to be truly swingeing taxation of anyone who puts their head up above the parapet. The global 1% in fact.

And, well, this isn’t wholly true but it’s a useful rule of thumb, the top 1% globally is about the top 10% of the UK. -Ish, you know? Somewhere just above £50k a year for an individual in the UK. £150k for a two adult w/children household perhaps. That’s the level at which the 90% income tax swinges into action.

Oh, and, lovely wealth taxes on top too.

The effect of this is to kill economic growth. That’s what it’s designed to do too. You’ve enough, you rich bourgeois bastard, you, so that’s all you’re going to get and we’re going to use punitive taxation to make sure that’s true.

Well, OK, it’s a plan, right?

Universal suffrage has its drawbacks

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

Democracy is a better system than many others that have been tried over the centuries, but it’s far from perfect. Giving everyone the vote sounds like a good idea: you have some small theoretical degree of influence over the people who run the country (note the “theoretical” here). Devon Eriksen points out one of the problems with universal suffrage today:

The problem with universal suffrage is that the more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the smaller the fraction of people there are in it with the native intelligence to understand how it works.

When the majority of humanity was employed in whacking at the dirt with a pointed stick, and the height of technology was a slightly better pointed stick, anyone with a triple digit IQ could understand what was going on.

Now, we have things like stock markets, the internet, transportation infrastructure, and the Linux kernel, but most people who vote are unable to conceive of these as anything but large piles of chocolate coins, or something else they can put their mouths.

Because that’s how the average monkey interacts with money. They stack the blocks, the research assistant gives them a token, they exchange the token for a banana.

It’s no good trying to explain to the monkeys what supply chain is, or how a trillion dollars worth of rockets can’t magically be converted into a trillion dollars worth of bananas just because they’re both measured in dollars, as if a six-foot man and a six-foot plank of wood were interchangeable.

Finding a slightly different explanation, or getting the monkeys to sit still and really listen, doesn’t really help.

Because the problem isn’t just that the monkeys aren’t paying attention. The problem is that the monkeys are monkeys.

Their brains simply don’t have the developmental capacity to grow the neural connections they would need in order to grasp and manipulate the concept.

In the long term, this is why universal democracy is doomed. Because societies that let retards vote will fail, and be replaced by those that don’t.

You may think that we, as a society, face a great variety of problems. We do not. We have only one. Retards. Every other problem we have is downstream from their inability to understand the consequences of their political opinions.

But to fully grasp the implications of this, you have to understand that the definition of “retard” changes over time, as technology advances, because the IQ level required to grasp what’s really going on gets steadily higher and higher.

Eventually, the category “retard” grows until it includes the average person.

This has already happened.

Nick Knudsen isn’t dumber than the average guy. But the average guy, the 100 IQ salt of the earth guy that’s sitting on the next bar stool over, can no longer understand the modern economy. And this isn’t correctable, because the problem isn’t ignorance, it’s complexity.

You can’t make Nick Knudsen smarter by telling him things. You can’t even make him less ignorant, because the bare facts aren’t believable to someone who doesn’t have the framework to understand how they fit together.

The people who understand what’s going on are so much smarter than him that he doesn’t even think they sound smart.

He thinks they sound crazy.

June 15, 2026

The British by-election in Makerfield and the split on the right

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

Normally, single seat contests are not all that newsworthy in countries using the Westminster-style of Parliamentary democracy, but the Makerfield by-election in the Manchester region of England seems to be rather more significant. The Labour Party candidate is widely seen as the successor-in-waiting to Sir Keir Starmer (by everyone but Starmer, apparently). The main opposition was expected to be Nigel Farage’s Reform party’s candidate, but the vote on the right is also being contested by Rupert Lowe’s breakaway Restore Britain party. Splitting the vote between Reform and Restore might let an unpopular Labour party win the by-election and start the process of ousting Starmer from Number 10 Downing Street. This might keep Labour in power for another year or so, which is plenty of time to bring in a few hundred thousand “refugees” or enact stricter censorship rules, or any of a number of other hugely unpopular things.

Sean Gabb explains the situation from a libertarian point of view:

The coming by-election at Makerfield has provoked a familiar argument on the patriotic right. On one side are those who denounce the intervention of Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain movement. Labour is vulnerable. Reform has a realistic chance of victory. Any division of the anti-Labour vote therefore appears self-indulgent and destructive. Rupert Lowe, they say, may have legitimate grievances against Nigel Farage. He was certainly treated badly by Reform UK. But personal grievances ought to be put aside when the national interest is at stake. If Labour can be defeated, then Labour should be defeated.

On the other side are those who see Nigel Farage as the problem rather than the solution. They argue that Reform UK is little more than a vehicle for containing public anger. Every time popular discontent threatens to escape the boundaries of acceptable politics, Farage appears, gathers up the protest vote, makes a series of compromises, and then leaves the underlying structure untouched. In this view, Rupert Lowe is valuable because he threatens Farage’s position. The sooner Farage is challenged and replaced by a man of greater integrity, the better for the country.

Both positions have a certain logic. Both also rest on assumptions that do not survive contact with political reality.

The first assumption is that Britain stands on the verge of some great political rupture. If only the correct party can gather enough votes, or if only the correct leader can emerge, the existing order will be swept away and replaced with something fundamentally different. Of course, there are examples of such transformations. Russia in 1917 saw the destruction of one ruling class and its replacement by another. Iran in 1979 witnessed the collapse of a monarchy and the rise of a revolutionary theocracy. Similar examples can be found elsewhere. Yet these events were exceptional. They occurred when the existing state apparatus had ceased to function effectively. The old order was no longer capable of commanding obedience. Administrative structures had broken down. The loyalty of key institutions could no longer be relied upon. Under those conditions, revolution became possible.

Britain is not presently in that condition. The country may be badly governed. Its political class may be incompetent. Its institutions may be corrupt and increasingly detached from the interests of the population. None of this amounts to state collapse. Modern Britain remains one of the most centralised and administratively sophisticated states in the world. It possesses powers of surveillance, regulation and information management that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. The police state is often clumsy. It is frequently absurd. It is not, however, weak.

This matters because fantasies of imminent revolution are often based on a misunderstanding of where Britain actually stands. People look at social decay, demographic change, collapsing public services, and widespread public dissatisfaction, and assume that these conditions must shortly produce some decisive confrontation. They forget that highly organised states can survive astonishing levels of dysfunction. The late Soviet Union endured decades of stagnation. The Ottoman Empire acquired the nickname “the sick man of Europe” long before it finally disappeared, and that needed the Great War. It was the same with the Hapsburg Empire. Decay and collapse are not the same thing.

If revolution is improbable, perhaps the answer lies in electoral victory. This is the second assumption behind much of the argument over Makerfield. Perhaps Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe will eventually enter government through the ballot box. Once there, they will make the necessary reforms. Immigration will be reversed. The bureaucracies will be cut back. The censorship apparatus will be dismantled. Industry will be restored. The country will begin moving in a healthier direction. This belief is less implausible than dreams of barricades and insurrection. But less implausible is not the same as plausible.

The great theorists of elite rule explained the truth of democracy more than a century ago. Gaetano Mosca observed that every society is governed by an organised minority. Vilfredo Pareto described the circulation of elites, whereby personnel change while underlying structures remain. Robert Michels formulated his famous Iron Law of Oligarchy, according to which every large organisation develops a permanent leadership class that becomes increasingly independent of its nominal supporters. These men disagreed about many things. On one point they were united. Democracy changes faces more readily than it changes systems.

The reason is obvious enough. Every viable state possesses a permanent administrative core. Civil servants, judges, regulators, military officers, police officials, academics, media managers and corporate functionaries form an interconnected network of expertise and influence. Governments come and go. This network remains. It possesses continuity, institutional memory, technical knowledge and the immense advantage of permanence. The elected politician arrives promising radical change. The permanent apparatus replies with delay, obstruction, reinterpretation, consultation, procedural complexity, judicial review, regulatory resistance and media hostility. The shock is absorbed. The energy dissipates. The machine grinds on.

June 14, 2026

QotD: Some of H.G. Wells’ more awkward views

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

When I was researching my biography of H.G. Wells in the early 1990s what shocked me, apart from his habitual and extreme selfishness, was the man’s life-long support for social engineering and eugenics. Put simply, his socialism embraced the idea that for the bulk of humanity to be free, prosperous, and happy a sizeable minority had to simply disappear. For Wells this included the disabled, the “perverse”, and even perhaps many who were non-white. What became apparent very quickly was that such an approach wasn’t confined to the author of The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man, but was extraordinarily common on the intellectual left. Many in the Fabian Society and Labour Party shared these ideas, as did mainstream socialist thinkers in Europe and North America.

This was, of course, before the genocidal policies of the Nazis were implemented, and while many of these grand men and women of the left had died before the camps were liberated and the horrors known, others certainly lived on. Some were contrite, others not. Either way, it hardly forgives them their ideology and influence – naiveté and ignorance simply isn’t a viable defence in such circumstances.

Michael Coren, “Eugenics and the intellectual left”, The Critic, 2020-09-16.

Update, 15 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

June 13, 2026

Hating on Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire

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

It shouldn’t be surprising that so many people are doing what they can to raise resentment against the very rich in general, and Elon Musk in particular. Stoking resentment of the better off has always been a viable short-term political play, and it’s not every day we see wealth of this scale:

Reddit meme

For all these dumbasses claiming if they had Elon’s money they’d end world hunger, cause world peace, educate everyone, or whatever, blah blah blah … No you wouldn’t. You’re full of shit and everyone knows it, because that’s not how the world works.

Throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it. The entire history of government demonstrates that. Saying vapid nonsense just makes weak, unimaginative people with a childlike grasp on reality feel better about themselves for caring harder, while accomplishing nothing.

Meanwhile, the guy you hate revolutionized EVs and self driving cars, brought affordable reliable internet to every corner of the Earth, and is making the dream of colonizing space real. And the process of doing all that has given hundreds of thousands of people jobs.

While you posture about how you’d give everybody an imaginary unicorn, he’s done stuff that’s actually changed the world for the better.

And you don’t get it. You can’t get it. Because you’re just too fucking small.

And even the Globe and Mail, which used to consider itself the most respectable and influential newspaper in Canada goes for the “hate the rich” market:

But some people just can’t help themselves and ginning up the hate and envy is all they can do:

For the left, it’s important that you do more than view billionaires with skepticism. You have to actually hate them. You have to blame them for every ill that befalls you, and you must actively resent their wealth.

One way that the left accomplishes this is by framing their gains as somehow your losses.

Congressman Greg Cesar (D-TX) decided to try that on X Tuesday with this banger.

Now, it’s interesting that he talks about their wealth being three times what it was 15 years ago, but doesn’t account for what the rest of us are dealing with. Instead, he engages in an apples-and-oranges comparison.

For starters, the increase in net worth for billionaires has nothing at all to do with whether your life is three times better than it was back then. There are too many variables. Someone who was unemployed and homeless and got a job, built a life back up, and then started a successful business is a lot more than three times better off, right?

Plus, it doesn’t account for differences in the cost of living or anything else.

Instead, a better metric is whether the median household net worth in America has increased a similar amount. So, I went to Google, then got its AI to generate a graph for me showing what’s happened over that timeframe.

While that’s not three times, it is 2.5 times the median net worth 15 years ago, and since this caps at 2022, it may well have increased even more.

In other words, the net worth of ordinary Americans seems to be mostly keeping up with that of the billionaires.

Cesar’s question, though, is disengenuous because the cost of living has gone up about 53 percent over that timeframe. So while net worth has increased, so has the cost of living. Not enough to completely drain away the gains in net worth, but enough that people aren’t living three times better than they were.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?

It’s not enough that, on average, Americans are much richer than they were 15 years ago, and by about the same amount as the billionaires, because that won’t foster the necessary resentment the left needs to push through their policies. You have to resent their wealth, and that’s less likely if you realize you’ve gained as much as they have by percentages. You have to feel like their wealth has been taken from yours, otherwise you’re less likely to look at wealth redistribution as a good thing.

And wealth redistribution is what it’s always about.

The Laurentian Elite

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

The people who actually rule Canada — including but not limited to Liberal Party members — don’t mind “populists” who want to “spread awareness”, because it’s about as ineffective as can be and dissipates some of the energy that might otherwise be used to oppose the Laurentian Elite’s preferred outcomes:

Homesteaders, agrarians, and populists relying on “spreading awareness”, protesting, or Americanisms like “we the people” and “the silent majority” aren’t nearly as effective or influential as people think they are.

A deeply unpopular Laurentian liberal elite minority, one that increasingly LARPs as blue-state Americans and takes its cues from them, managed to transform the country against the popular will.

Over a roughly twenty-year period between the 1940s and 1960s, they spent decades scheming behind the scenes. They changed the flag, lured French Canadians into supporting them through the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism by promising greater national recognition of Canada’s French heritage, then dropped the whole thing almost immediately. They pulled the rug out from under them and basically said, “SYKE, you thought. Here’s infinite immigrants instead.”

In 1971 they pushed multiculturalism and the cultural mosaic, abolished assimilation while polling showed around 80% of Canadians opposed increased immigration. They later entrenched their ideology through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, stacked and empowered a judiciary that would future-proof it, formalized the project through the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, and gradually consolidated influence over the media, education system, and cultural institutions.

The result was a decades-long effort to indoctrinate Canadians into viewing their country as a post-national economic zone built on stolen land called Turtle Island, where Canadians don’t exist, but foreigners are just as Canadian as you and me, borders are morally questionable, and none is illegal on stolen land.

This isn’t going to be reversed through awareness campaigns, symbolic protests, or endlessly posting facts online. Political systems are ultimately shaped by elites and counter-elites. The only way this order gets replaced is if a rival elite, or a political force capable of becoming one, displaces the existing ruling class and takes its place.

That process will almost certainly involve some degree of populism, but populism by itself is not enough. You need people who can actually build institutions, wield power, and replace the current establishment rather than just complain about it or bug off into the woods, or try to balkanize the country.

QotD: Ecce BCG

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

Seriously, you’re wondering if a young lady in your life is a BCG? Let’s go over the diagnostic criteria. Fully acknowledging that some folks don’t photograph well, appearing to be 10-15 years older than your chronological age is a strong tell. BCGs live hard, on a steady diet of half-caff pumpkin spice mocha latte frappucinos and cock. […]

Of course BCG stands for “Basic College Girl”, and thus she can be found at any institution of “higher” “learning”, but the most Basic ones of all go to colleges you’ve never heard of. Jonah Goldberg is a good example, and while I know he’s technically male, his act is classic BCG. He famously — or infamously — went to Goucher College, which is the kind of school that likes to pretend it’s a mini-Ivy, when in fact it’s the kind of school bright-enough but directionless young nouveau riche kids go to when they just can’t kick that drug habit.

[…]

Achieving shockingly high rank right out of the gate is another tell, and I know what you’re thinking, because of course I thought it too: Mark Meadows is 63 years old, and in the world we grew up in, there’s only one way for a straight-out-of-college girl to become a “close confidante” of a 63 year old man. In my experience, though, BCGs aren’t socially savvy enough to figure that out.

Yeah yeah, I know, but y’all, as primal as that is, these BCGs are just weird. They have no social skills whatsoever. Two data points. First, from Hutchinson’s wiki page:

    Identified as a “White House legislative aide”, Hutchinson was the subject of a nationally-syndicated AP photograph in which she was shown dancing to the song “Y.M.C.A.” alongside White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the end of Trump’s September 21, 2020, campaign rally in Swanton, Ohio.

That is not grownup behavior. No woman who ever hoped to be taken seriously in politics would be caught dead doing that, as recently as 15 years ago. They have absolutely zero idea how they come off to other people.

Second data point: I once taught a night class in one of my Flyover State tours. I had this girl there who was just dying to get to Capitol Hill. She was involved in every possible Poli Sci club, the pre-law club, the Young Legislators (or whatever FNG shit it was), and so on. She emailed me once to say she’d be coming to class late, because she was representing Student Senate (or whatever) in some big to-do the college was hosting for the Governor.

When she shows up to my class, she’s wearing this tight red cocktail dress that would’ve looked trashy on a Vegas waitress. It was slit at the sides and back. and at the midriff. It had sequins, I shit you not. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing. You went to a reception. With the Governor. Wearing that.

They have no savvy at all, y’all. None whatsoever. The invitation she got read “formal attire”, so she wore what she wore to the sorority formal. You could practically still see Chad Thundercock’s handprints on her ass.

And that’s the fourth and most diagnostic criterion: utter, complete, hilarious fucking cluelessness. About everything.

Severian, “Alt Thread: Diagnosing the BCG”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.

June 12, 2026

Protests and riots send different messages to the PTB

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

While this is specifically related to the situation in Belfast, it applies to protests and riots generally:

The message of a protest is “we don’t like this”.

The message of a riot is “we don’t like this, and we’re able to do something about it”.

People who unconditionally call for peace and calm, regardless of the provocation, don’t fundamentally understand how politics works in the real world.

They do understand that the purpose of politics is to provide an alternative to violence, but that’s as far as their understanding goes. They don’t think through the implications, usually because they are quite comfortable with things as they are.

If politics is an alternative to violence, then politics is a proxy for violence.

And that means you have to dole out power in proportion to capacity for violence. Or someone’s going to figure out they can do better by flipping the table.

Monarchy wasn’t replaced by democracy because of fine-sounding philosophical ideals and eloquent documents declaring this or that.

Democracy happened because if you added rifling to the flintlock firearm, suddenly a individual farmer with a tube was the pinnacle of military technology, and now you had to keep all the farmers with tubes happy by giving them political power.

(Ancient Greek democracy had a similar relationship with the hoplite warrior.)

When political systems work well, for a while, the violence they represent becomes further and further from people’s minds, and those who can’t effectively commit or direct violence worm their way into power, and begin to take it away from those who can.

And they’ll defend their position by saying that violence is unthinkable, barbaric, always bad, must be disavowed at all costs, etc.

This isn’t some sort of high-minded principle on their part. It simply means one of two things. Either “the status quo works for me, so I don’t want you to upset it”, or “I suck at violence, and I don’t want to have to fight”.

They want young men demoralized, so that their artificial meritocracy of spreadsheets, or their non-meritocracy of patronage networks, can be protected from the natural meritocracy of conflict.

This means that riots aren’t actually for achieving any specific material aim. They are for reminding the comfortable that judges and bureaucrats and policemen have home addresses and families. And that violence is always on the table.

A protest would only send the message that the Irish don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. But the bureaucrats and judges and lawyers already know that. They just don’t care.

A riot reminds them that they have to care, because the Irish have a long tradition of doing something about it.

June 11, 2026

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

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

As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:

The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.

Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.

I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.

The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly

The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.

[…]

The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s

The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]

The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition

The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]

The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties

The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.

“Thoughts and prayers” in a Two-Tier Keir accent

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

Sir Keir Starmer posted to X in response to the attempted beheading of a Belfast man a few days ago:

It drew some angry responses like this:

And a longer response from Jim Chimirie:

.@Keir_Starmer, your statement says you have absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets.

With respect, tolerance is not the issue. Nobody tolerates a near beheading on a residential street in Belfast. The question your statement carefully avoids is prevention. And prevention requires honesty about a pattern your government has consistently refused to name.

A man in his thirties, a Somali national, pinned a man to the ground on a residential street and stabbed him repeatedly in the face and neck. Members of the public intervened with a hurling stick. A woman required hospital treatment for the stress of witnessing it. This happened in Northern Ireland, a place that has known more than its share of violence, and even there residents said they had never seen anything like it.

Your government has presided over record small boat crossings. It has failed to proscribe the IRGC despite repeated promises. It has blocked the grooming gang inquiry for a year before being forced to concede it. It has spent £10 billion on asylum accommodation contracts. It has actively resisted measures that would have reduced the number of unvetted individuals entering and remaining in this country.

The victims of these attacks are not statistics. They are British people, going about their lives on their own streets, who were failed before the attack happened. Failed at the border. Failed by a system that prioritises the rights of those who arrive illegally over the safety of those who were already here.

Your thoughts are with the victim. So are ours. The difference is that thoughts are not policy. Thoughts do not secure borders. Thoughts do not remove individuals with no right to be here. Thoughts do not protect the next victim, whose name we do not yet know, on a street we cannot yet identify, from an attack that has not yet happened.

How many more before the thoughts become action?

The family of the victim talked to the media and it in no way seems to have been pre-scripted by the government and was clearly uncoerced and of their free will and is in no way any kind of hostage statement:

Northern Ireland has seen a lot over the last few decades, but I doubt anybody expected to see the two opposing sides of “The Troubles” joining forces:

Between them, the Ulster Protestant paramilitaries and the IRA operatives have a lot of hard-won skills at avoiding the authorities and committing direct violence. At The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian notes that he predicted this earlier:

In June of last year I penned an essay titled “Popular Misconceptions” in which I opined that if the “good men and true” of an area get “fed up with lawlessness” they tend to take matters into their own hands.

We are now seeing this play out in real time in Northern Ireland.

For those of you not paying attention to the news, a refugee from the Sudan attempted to saw off the head of an Irish man in Belfast on Monday, 08 JUN 26. He was on a public street when he did so, and several locals rushed to stop his assault. His victim has lost an eye from the attack, and is in critical care at a local hospital.

If you read my previous essay, I postulated that when the vigilance committees show up, a lot of collateral damage come with them — so nobody should be shocked to understand that a whole bunch of immigrant homes and businesses are currently on fire in Northern Ireland.

I will now expound upon that previous essay. I will even go so far as to issue a warning that the people who should heed said warning are going to ignore:

If the “good men and true” get the perception that the government and officialdom are not only facilitating what has them all riled up, but just might be a source of what has them all riled up … well, history has shown that the “good men and true” have very little problem with expanding the “extra-judicial punishments” to include Minions of the Law and Government.

And for those folks who pish-tosh any sort of threat from the British “subjects” — this is Northern-bloody-Ireland. The time and area where the locals refined the “Vehicle-Borne Improved Explosive Device” to the point a popular cocktail was named after the practice.

This is the area where there are more SLRs, Sterlings, and Browning Hi-Powers buried around that little island than any three countries in Africa.

Hell, the Irish made the AR-18 famous.

I speak to the government and officials of Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom: Listen to me — you won’t, but listen to me … You’d better — at the very least — pay some sort of lip service towards a credible perception that you give a tinker’s damn about what has the people all lathered up, and make the people believe that you’re doing something about it.

If you don’t — and you won’t — don’t come whinging to me when your dance card abruptly becomes filled with such exhilarating numbers as: the Hemp Fandango, the Beatdown Boogie, and the Arson Waltz.

You have failed the people. You have failed them utterly, completely, and totally. They’re about to rectify that situation. You might want to get ahead of that power curve before you find yourself watching folks get loaded onto cattle cars alongside you.

John Ringo on X:

One more post on the subject of the Irish getting their dander up.

The Irish Troubles (a continuous low level insurgency) lasted from the 1960s to 1998. But they were the continuation of “Troubles” stretching back to the 1800s.

1998, that’s a bit over 25 years ago.

Both sides in the Troubles, the Catholics and the Protestants, are one generation away from a civil war that lasted for TWO GENERATIONS.

The Gen Z men of today were raised on the stories of the heroism and patriotism of their fathers and grandfathers and THEY HAVE HAD NO SIMILAR OUTLET.

The IRA did not invent the vehicle borne IED. The Vietnamese used it before them.

They just invented a cocktail from their name as well as a drinking song.

“Former” IRA weapons dealers are still some of the top illegal weapons dealers in the world.

1/10th of “British” SAS come from Ulster. A significant fraction of the British infantry as well.

Many of them served in GWOT so they have a recent master’s class in insurgency.

And now Keir Bloody Starmer and the Irish Government have given BOTH SIDES a reason to start again, but this time UNITED.

We may be about to get a glimpse of what a civil war in the US looks like up against a massive surveillance state.

Take notes.

Update, 12 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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