Nobody really knows why your standard corporate merger happens, which is why they often seem so bewilderingly stupid to outsiders. Someone out there invents the next greatest web-based whatzit, which gets acquired by MySpace, which gets acquired by Yahoo, which gets bought out by Microsoft, all because the Accounting boys saw something on a spreadsheet cell … which 99% of the time, in tech anyway, turns out to be ass-pulled bullshit, and everyone loses bigly. Or never makes any money in the first place — e.g. Twitter and YouTube, neither of which have ever turned a profit so far as I know. Hell, I’m not sure Facebook (or “Meta” or whatever they’re calling it now) ever has; it has always floated along on its share price, which has always been buoyed up by … what, exactly? Even Amazon, which still depends to a large degree on the (eventual, shitty) delivery of an actual physical object (a cheap Chinese knockoff of what you actually ordered), took years to turn a profit.
In other words, there are no lessons there for us (except that people will tolerate shit like Fakebook and Amazon, which is indeed disturbing, but we already knew that). But blogs? Consider the Bulwark, or the Dispatch, or whatever it is (and if those are actually different things). Jonah Goldberg’s new outfit. I don’t follow this stuff, all I know is Ace of Spades calls it “The Cuckshed”, which is awesome, so let’s go with that. When Goldberg was pitching The Cuckshed to that Persian billionaire, he no doubt promised him all kinds of filthy, degrading acts of propaganda … in person.
I have to assume that the Cuckshed exists largely as his personal brand — he can go on whatever cable news shout show needs a “conservative” and the chryon says “Founder of leading conservative opinion site ‘The Cuckshed'” — and that’s what he pitched to the Persian, rather than reams of marketing data about the site’s literally hundreds of subscribers … but then again, maybe not, because I think we can all take it as read that 95% of the people who subscribe to The Cuckshed are fellow Swamp Things, no? Persians are a crafty lot, and this guy is no dummy, he understands the cardinal rule: Never write when you can speak, and never speak when you can nod.
To get his message into the [Washington, DC] intellectual ecosystem, then, the Persian Billionaire has two choices: He could either circulate a memo with “The Persian Billionaire’s Position on X”; or he could just have a flunky come into the room and start reading off a list of options, and he’ll nod when the flunky reaches the right one. Then the flunky slaps the list on the desk of a slightly lower-ranking flunky, pointedly tapping his finger at the chosen option. Then the lower-ranking flunky calls up one of his fart catchers, pulls out a highlighter, colors in the correct option, and hands it to him. Take that out through about six more levels of toadies, rump-swabs, and catamites, and it finally lands on Jonah Goldberg’s desk, at which point he starts punching up his “Word ’95” macros into a “column” telling the world what the Persian Billionaire wants them to hear.
Thus, if he’s ever called on the carpet by the Emperor’s Truthsayer, the Persian Billionaire can in all honesty say “I never told Goldberg to write that!” It just kinda worked out that way. As it always seems to. Every time.
Severian, “On Selling Out”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-26.
June 2, 2025
QotD: How to use your billions to influence those in power, without risking prosecution
May 30, 2025
Progressives are still putting their faith in doxxing and cancellations … do they still work?
Spaceman Spiff calls our attention to the latest attempt to un-person a writer who has managed to outrage progressives:
The popular pseudonymous Substack writer, Morgoth, has been doxxed. Outed by an organization dedicated to tackling extremism and online harm.
You can read about his ordeal here:
They produced an article to unmask Morgoth’s real-world identity against his wishes, including photographs. It is replete with incendiary accusations we have grown accustomed to seeing in these attempts to discredit writers who challenge the status quo.
The impression presented is one of a bigoted figure, someone dangerously unhinged. It bears little relation to reality as Morgoth’s readers will confirm. But that hardly matters.
Doxxing exercises exist so the laptop class can efficiently file people into a convenient extremist bucket. All the hard work has been done so the distracted can skim the article and take what they need. Fascism, white supremacy, hate, racism, bigotry; take your pick.
Doxxing is not about facts, it is about keywords. More accurately it is about “hate crimes”. Those who transgress these ever-changing taboos are unfit to live among us.
Even better the piece can be exploited by others. Fascist influencer Morgoth, online hatemonger Morgoth, disgraced racist Morgoth. The current obsession with speech controls can make good use of an incestuous network of activists posing as reporters. Since the material now exists journalists can reference it to further discredit should this be needed in future.
The shrill nature of these denouncements is the giveaway all is not well in the world of perception management. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and the desire to corral all dissidents into one big extremist bucket sounds fine on paper. But much of what Morgoth writes about is widely discussed by the public at large, even if ignored by the traditional media or the political world. If Morgoth is a racist hate-driven genocidal monster then so are most of the population, which of course they are not.
This kind of thing used to work well. But as Morgoth’s own articles allude to, their enemy is reality not Substackers.
The curiously suicidal ideas the educated classes cling to are largely based on magical thinking. We can change the weather by blowing up power stations and levying taxes; we can successfully assimilate millions of hostile foreigners who dislike us and our culture; women will be happier if they work longer hours and don’t have children.
The degree of propaganda needed to maintain today’s narratives is considerable. Less advertised is how brittle it has become. Challenges to these narratives, and the theoretical foundations upon which they rest, are therefore feared by their promoters, and rightly so.
From this perspective people writing online and criticizing today’s sacred cows are worth targeting and smearing. Hence the exposure, the denouncements, the dredging up of comments from a decade ago, out of context and out of time. They know their audience don’t really care. They just need the satisfying feeling they are on the right side of history.
Senate to once again try to pass internet age verification and website blocking
Some ideas are so horrible that they never, ever die. The Canadian Senate nearly got an age verification and website blocking ban into law during the last Parliament, and as Michael Geist discusses, they’re not giving up now:
“In the east wing of the Centre Block is the Senate chamber, in which are the thrones for the Canadian monarch and consort, or for the federal viceroy and his or her consort, and from which either the sovereign or the governor general gives the Speech from the Throne and grants Royal Assent to bills passed by parliament. The senators themselves sit in the chamber, arranged so that those belonging to the governing party are to the right of the Speaker of the Senate and the opposition to the speaker’s left. The overall colour in the Senate chamber is red, seen in the upholstery, carpeting, and draperies, and reflecting the colour scheme of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom; red was a more royal colour, associated with the Crown and hereditary peers. Capping the room is a gilt ceiling with deep octagonal coffers, each filled with heraldic symbols, including maple leafs, fleur-de-lis, lions rampant, clàrsach, Welsh Dragons, and lions passant. On the east and west walls of the chamber are eight murals depicting scenes from the First World War; painted in between 1916 and 1920.”
Photo and description by Saffron Blaze via Wikimedia Commons.
The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210). Bill S-210 fell below the radar screen for many months as it started in the Senate and received only cursory review in the House. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. This week, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back. Now Bill S-209, the bill starts from scratch in the Senate with the same basic framework but with some notable changes that address at least some of the concerns raised by the prior bill (a fulsome review of those concerns can be heard in a Law Bytes podcast I conducted with Senator Miville-Dechêne).
Bill S-209 creates an offence for any organization making available pornographic material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. The previous bill used the term “sexually explicit material”, borrowing from the Criminal Code provision. This raised concerns as the definition in the Criminal Code is used in conjunction with other sexual crimes. The bill now features its own definition for pornographic material, which is defined as
any photographic, film, video or other visual representation, whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means, the dominant characteristic of which is the depiction, for a sexual purpose, of a person’s genital organs or anal region or, if the person is female, her breasts, but does not include child pornography as defined in subsection 163.1(1) of the Criminal Code.
Organizations can rely on three potential defences:
- The organization instituted a government-approved “prescribed age-verification or age estimation method” to limit access. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
- The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
- The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).
Note that Bill S-209 has expanded the scope of available technologies for implementation: while S-210 only included age verification, S-209 adds age estimation technologies. Age estimation may benefit from limiting the amount of data that needs to be collected from an individual, but it also suffers from inaccuracies. For example, using estimation to distinguish between a 17 and 18 year old is difficult for both humans and computers, yet the law depends upon it. Given the standard for highly effective technologies, age estimation technologies may not receive government approvals, leaving only age verification in place.
May 28, 2025
The Throne Speech
On his Substack, Paul Wells reports on the first Throne Speech delivered by the reigning monarch since the 1970s:
Mark Carney joins our visiting King in the traditional Making of the Small Talk.
Photo by Paul Wells from his Substack
We’re like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, or I guess, since the new PM is said to prefer British spellings, Charlye Brownne with Lewsey’s Foote Ball. Each generation of Canadian leadership tries to find a new way to make throne speeches exciting. These attempts are forever doomed, because no generation of Canadian leadership is exciting and because the format — a statement of intent from a dignitary who is forbidden to harbour autonomous intent — tends to short-circuit the delivery.
This time the delivery mechanism was the King of Canada, Charles Philip Arthur George, popping over from his secondary residence at Buckingham. His French tops Mary Simon’s, though his Inuktitut is shaky. He did his best to sound excited, or resolute, about the CBSA’s “new powers to examine goods”.
A quarter-century ago the reliably impish John Fraser told me he was preparing a book called Eminent Canadians that would survey recent developments in four Canadian institutions. The institutions he’d selected were the office of the Prime Minister; the Globe and Mail; the Anglican Church; — and here Fraser urged me to guess the fourth. Canadian institution? I dunno, the armed forces? The NHL? “The Crown”, Fraser said with a twinkle. Thus was I prepped for this week’s extended round of you-know-he’s-really-the-king-of-Canada browbeating.
This throne speech was like many before it, though out of deference for the deliverer it was on the short side, 21 pages tucked inside wide margins. In substance it was a paraphrase of Mark Carney’s already-semi-legendary Single Mandate Letter for cabinet ministers. There were sections on redefining Canada’s relationship with the United States; on internal trade; on crimefighting and national defence; and on “spending less and investing more”, which, I mean, we’ll see.
The mandate letter seems to have supplanted the Liberal election platform as the main blueprint for Carney’s action. The two aren’t wildly incompatible, but the mandate letter/throne speech is streamlined and puts stuff in different order.
I saw two surprises big enough to make me write today, but first I want to point to a few elements that are worth noting in the less-surprising stuff. That’s right, I’m trying to be useful, not just smart-assed, so here’s a way to thank me. […]
First, Carney (through His Majesty) makes claims for the “new economic and security relationship with the United States” that seem unrealistic. He expects “transformational benefits for both sovereign nations”. But surely any cross-border negotiation can only be, at best, an exercise in damage control? Any security costs that would be newly borne by Canada would represent a net cost. Trade arrangements short of the substantially free trade we’ve enjoyed for 40 years will also represent a net cost. The point of seeking “one Canadian economy” and taking relations with third countries more seriously is to offset the cost of a degraded Canada-US relationship, no?
Under “more affordable”, the throne speech repeats campaign promises for income-tax cuts and cuts to GST on new homes. The list of tangible financial benefits to individuals doesn’t go much past that. “The Government will protect the programs that are already saving families thousands of dollars every year. These include child care and pharmacare.” “Protect” is an old Ottawa word meaning “not extend”.
The goals for the “one Canadian economy” now include “free trade across the nation”, at both federal and provincial levels of government, “by Canada Day”. Which is 34 days away. The staffing and mandate of another new entity, a single-wicket “Major Federal Project Office”, may end up mattering more to this government’s success and Canada’s prosperity than the name of the PM’s next chief of staff, so put an asterisk next to that.
The government repeats a mysterious claim I’ve found shaky since Carney became a Liberal leadership candidate. It “will take a series of measures to catalyse new investment to create better jobs and higher incomes for Canadians. The scale of the Government’s initiative will match the challenges of our times and the ambitions of Canadians.” The challenges of our times, at least, are large.
So again: if the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the Canada Growth Fund and the Freeland-Sabia investment tax credits are sufficient to catalyse (British spelling) new investment, why duplicate them?
And if they haven’t worked, why keep them?
QotD: Communitarianism
What is communitarianism? Communitarians would probably define themselves as people who recognise the importance of community and social relations, but that is a bit like saying that environmentalists are people who care about the environment, or that feminists are people who believe in gender equality. Defining a political outlook in motherhood-and-apple-pie terms, so that you could not disagree with it without coming across like a complete psychopath, is not particularly useful. Apart from Britain’s four or five Randians, everybody recognises the importance of community and social relations. (And presumably, Britain’s four or five Randians tacitly recognise it too.)
In practice, communitarianism is little else but a knee-jerk anti-liberalism. Communitarians define themselves in opposition to an imaginary hyper-materialistic, hyper-individualistic liberal, who sees life as no more than a long string of financial transactions, and society as no more than a bunch of isolated individuals who happen to live side by side. Communitarians never identify any specific person who actually holds that view, which is not too surprising, because, apart from Britain’s aforementioned four or five Randians (who, on a bad day, might come a little bit close to that caricature), no such person exists.
Kristian Niemietz, “Communitarianism: the art of passing off trivial clichés as profound wisdoms”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-02-14.
May 27, 2025
Four years on, and the media still haven’t been honest about the Residential Schools claims
At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies looks back to the bombshell claims that horrified the nation, yet went unquestioned by pretty much all of the mainstream media:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
This week marks the fourth anniversary of the day Canada’s media broke faith with the public that funds it.
May 27, 2021, was when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” discovered at the former Kamloops Residential School site. Most, if not all, media reported this statement, which was based on anomalies shown on ground penetrating radar, without challenging its veracity.
Not long after, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced that ground penetrating radar had located 751 unmarked graves in a community cemetery adjacent to the former location of a residential school.
Talk of “mass graves” ricocheted across the country and the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Saskatchewan in a flash on bended knee with teddy bears. It didn’t matter that the markers in the cemetery had been removed decades ago by a rogue priest; Anderson Cooper and a 60 Minutes crew were already flying in to Regina. The impression left by the coverage was that children had been murdered en masse. Statues were toppled or put in storage and close to 200 churches were burned — many to the ground — or vandalized in the months and years that followed. Pope Francis visited Canada in 2022 to atone once again for the Roman Catholic church’s role in operating many of the schools.
All because no one had the courage to ask: “This is a very serious allegation – how can you be certain?” and then, in the immortal words of the City News Bureau of Chicago, check it out.
The coverage at the time showed little evidence journalists looked for proof beyond the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc allegation or gave sufficient play to Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme’s efforts to establish context.
Since then, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc have revised their confirmation of bodies so that they now maintain the radar showed anomalies that possibly could be graves. No bodies have been found or, for that matter, searched for. The band has received millions of dollars to assist it with its investigation and the school is now a national historic site.
The original stories remain online and, in many cases, uncorrected, leaving the public’s understanding of the matter unchanged. Here’s one example from CTV/Canadian Press. The headline — “Remains of 215 children found buried at former B.C. residential school” — is still there. CBC has made an effort to update its stories, but its original headlines remain and recent incidents suggest staff still believe the initial version.
As Marco Navarro-Genie of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently wrote, media may even have been enlisted as allies to ensure the allegations went unchallenged:
“According to The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, “select journalists” were given embargoed details to ensure “sensitive and impactful” coverage. CBC journalist Angela Sterritt admitted she was in contact with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc the day before the announcement and was one of only a few journalists granted access to the June 4, 2021, video conference, where live-streaming was prohibited. This raises serious questions about whether the CBC acted as a passive reporter or an active participant in promoting an unverified claim.”
Shamed domestically and internationally, the nation’s flags went to half mast for months before being raised only in deference to Remembrance Day. A new holiday was declared for federal employees and the Prime Minister took advantage of the first one to go surfing.
There is no question that children died at residential schools. I have stood by and honoured the once unmarked graves — including those belonging to children of the school’s principal — at the reclaimed site of the Indian Industrial School outside Regina. Nor is there doubt that many students suffered from cultural dislocation, shaming and abuse. But that is no excuse for media not reporting the original Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc claim and the Cowessess news professionally and instead wildly and widely misinforming the public, raising the spectre of mass murders and traumatizing many. It’s one thing to make a mistake, quite another to leave it uncorrected because you prefer the impression it made.
May 25, 2025
Comparing Japan’s supply management system to the Canadian version
Colby Cosh considers the fate of a Japanese government minister who accidentally told the truth about a subject near and dear to Japanese consumers’ hearts (well, stomachs, actually):
“Japanese Girls at Work in the Rice Fields – Grand Old Fuji-Yama in the Distance, Japan” by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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I’m sure some of you saw Wednesday’s NP headline for an Associated Press wire story: “Japan’s agriculture minister resigns after saying he ‘never had to buy rice’” AP’s Mari Yamaguchi explained this international-news nugget. A cabinet minister in a shaky minority government made a flippant comment indicating that he was light-years out of touch with ordinary people facing high grocery costs in a developed country.
Taku Eto’s political survival thus became impossible within a matter of hours, and his prime minister hastily swapped a congenial young star into the agriculture portfolio. Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a system of parliamentary government more or less like ours, so there’s nothing incomprehensible about any of this to a Canadian …
… but, of course, one almost couldn’t help flashing back to our recent election campaign, wherein the prime minister had half-boasted to a Radio-Canada reporter that he doesn’t buy his own groceries and has no earthly idea how the stuff in his fridge gets there. It struck me at the time that this was a classic mistake for an electoral neophyte like Mark Carney. Fans of the legendary American columnist Michael Kinsley will surely think of it as a “Kinsley gaffe”, i.e., an obviously true statement that is nevertheless bound to get a politician in trouble.
[…]
Eto was talking about rice because the prices for it in Japan have gone through the roof, the clouds and the stratosphere. And rice plays a role in the Japanese culture and diet for which there is no analogue in omnivorous Canada. For precisely that reason, rice is supply-managed there in much the same way our dairy, eggs and poultry are — i.e., through confiscatory tariffs on foreign products, along with a mafia of politically powerful producer cooperatives who operate under supply quotas.
If you read Canadian news, you can recite the effects of this, whether or not you’re capable of finding Japan on a map of Japan. Their supply-management system is, like ours, a major headache for counterparties in trade negotiations. Their farmers, like Canada’s, are dwindling in number and aging out of the business. They are sometimes paid to destroy crops. Farm costs for machinery and supplies are subject to inflation. And sometimes the system for domestic demand forecasting blows a tire.
It’s a constant high-wire act for Japanese governments, who still have official responsibility for the national rice supply under wartime statute. If store-shelf prices get too high, and consumers start to make trouble, the cabinet must consider loosening tariff barriers and releasing rice from the national strategic reserve. The LDP ministry has done both these things in the face of hallucinatory prices, and so the farmers are now just as ticked off as the buying public.
QotD: Cancellation of the Avro Arrow and destruction of the prototypes
The first project of this new company was the C-102 Jetliner, the first commercial inter-city jet to fly in North America in 1949, and the second [civilian] jet to fly in the world, behind the trans-oceanic British Comet. After being test flown successfully for three years and with potential orders pending, the Jetliner project was cancelled, allegedly in favour of committing all company resources to the development of the military sub-sonic CF-100. The Arrow was to be the successor to the latter, designed to intercept and destroy if need be, incoming supersonic bombers coming across the North Pole, from the then Soviet Union.
The Arrow was a sleek, twin engine, delta winged aircraft embodying many advanced features such as fly-by-wire controls, titanium and magnesium alloys for light weight and resistance to frictional heat, transistorized electronics and an advanced engine, the Iroquois. While some other aircraft may have included some of these advanced features, what made the Arrow unique was that all of them were built into this one singular aircraft.
Adding insult to injury, the five flying preproduction aircraft, including all technical documentation, tooling and jigs and fixtures and others in various stages of assembly, were ordered destroyed. Why was a project being hailed by aviation experts around the world, suddenly cancelled? In the absence of clear facts and in the presence of rumour and innuendo, debates have raged back and forth as to the reasons, sparking a series of myths and misconceptions about the entire affair.
In 1988, the late Canadian historian, Professor Desmond Morton, lamented the fact that he could not obtain any government archival documents on the Arrow, assuming they even existed. Out of interest, I decided to try my own hand in this endeavour. Since then I have uncovered and have had declassified thousands upon thousands of records including many Secret and Top Secret, ranging from memos, reports both scientific and financial, to minutes of meetings and letters. The list includes some from the United States and Great Britain as well.
Those documents which I deemed more critical, I have either quoted from or have reproduced in my books, with full references. Following is a discussion of some of the myths and misconceptions that the documents have helped clarify.
Arrow Destruction
Perhaps one of the most enduring myths is that the destruction of the completed Arrows and all else, was ordered by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, due to his hatred of the President of A.V. Roe, Crawford Gordon. Alternatively, it has been argued that it was Gordon who had everything destroyed as a spite against the Prime Minister. Neither account is true.
The government records from the Department of National Defence clearly show the order to destroy came from the Minister of National Defence, George R. Pearkes, after receiving that recommendation from Hugh Campbell, Chief of the Air Staff, and after conferring with numerous others including the Deputy Minister of National Defence and the Minister of the Department of Defence Production. The documents contain the signatures of those involved, all of whom would later deny publicly having any knowledge of the destruction, leaving the Prime Minister to be subsequently vilified for it. In fact, the paper trail ends with Minister Pearkes. The matter was not discussed with the Prime Minister at all.
Even today, when the Department decides to dispose of something – it does not matter if it is an aircraft, a tank, a ship or some other equipment – there is no need to seek approval or even advise the Prime Minister as to the manner of its disposal. In fact, all departments dispose of their equipment through an arm of the government. At the time it was called Crown Assets Disposal, but today it is renamed GC Surplus. The name may change yet again.
Palmiro Campagna, “The Avro Arrow: Exploding the Myths and Misconceptions”, Dominion Review, 2025-02-20.
May 24, 2025
German democracy trembles as the extremely extreme extreme right AfD aren’t going to be banned
eugyppius updates us on the continued shaky state of German democracy, as the scary extremely extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party seems to have somehow escaped being banned from participation in politics due to some ridiculous “lack of substantive evidence” excuse:
Last week, a supersecret assessment of Alternative für Deutschland by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) leaked to the press. This document was supposed to prove, in excruciating detail, why the AfD are so evil and so fascist and so Nazi and so Hitler, and in this way make a preliminary case for banning the party. In fact its contents turned out to be such an arrant joke that it sapped all remaining momentum within the German political class to prohibit the AfD. I suspect even the “right-wing extremist” classification of the AfD is now in jeopardy and may well be thrown out by the courts, that is how bad this much-heralded supersecret assessment turned out to be.
It took a few days for the full impact of the report’s idiocy to really sink in. That’s how it is with really stupid things – the incredulity they inspire must first dissipate. Finally, though, on Tuesday of this week, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt announced that the dubious evidence marshaled by the BfV was “not sufficient” to support ban proceedings. Dobrindt also said that the whole debate had become “counterproductive” and that it was time to begin finding ways to “end social polarisation”, whatever that means. Hours later, it emerged that Chancellor Friedrich Merz had ordered the entire CDU leadership never to say another word about banning the AfD. If everyone will just shut up, Merz believes his party can “avoid further debate” and avoid “giving voters the impression that the CDU is aiming to eliminate a rival party” – which is of course exactly what the CDU were hoping to do until the BfV fucked everything up with their retarded 1,108-page collection of dyspeptic Facebook-grade political takes.
There’s still a few scattered calls for ban proceedings coming from the left, but their heart isn’t in it and they don’t matter anyway. Without Union votes, no ban application will ever get to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Raed Saleh, an extremely obnoxious politician who heads the SPD faction in the Berlin House of Representatives, whined to the press this morning about how “appalling and disgraceful” it is that outlawing the opposition is no longer on the table and that his party is now being asked to “engage in political debate” with the AfD instead. Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig, also of the SPD, likewise fervently hopes that the AfD might still be banned and she thinks the Interior Ministry should spend more time “evaluating” that BfV dumpster-fire assessment. Since Hubig is Justice Minister and not Interior Minister it doesn’t really matter what she thinks the Interior Ministry should be doing. I don’t understand why so many are citing Hubig’s remarks like they mean anything.
The implosion of this ban-the-AfD arc seems like kind of a big deal to me. Since 2021, the party have been “under suspicion” of right-wing extremism, but despite four years of snooping the BfV have been able to come up with nothing that is not some combination of legally irrelevant, harmless, banal, uninteresting, stupid and a complete waste of government resources. At some point, you have to put the question: If the AfD are so evil and so Nazi and so fascist and so Hitler, why can’t anybody, anywhere, adduce any evidence of their evil Nazi Hitler fascism?
May 23, 2025
“‘[D]isrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”
William M. Briggs uses the most recent installation of a statue of a black woman in highly public spaces to explore the idea that even black people “have Black Fatigue”:
Statues of fat ugly lumpen surly ill-kempt statues of black women, all in poses to accentuate their quarrelsome uselessness, are being placed in prominent places in the West. The Latest, rising like a creature in a 1960s Japanese monster movie, is in Times Square. The person who created these blots of bad taste said they were “a way of ‘disrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”.
He’s right. These figures do represent triumph. DIE requires elevating the least and representing them as the best, and forcing all to pretend the charade is real. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a more perfect representation of the true spirit of DIE than these misshapen piles of metal. They demand you say they are equivalent to great men whose statues we are no longer allowed to have.
If it were only statues, there would be no story. But everybody knows that bad black behavior of all kind is being ignored, excused or outright celebrated.
One example will suffice. After the lifelong thug and criminal lowlife George Floyd met his expected end — poisoning himself with drugs and engaging in all manner of misbehavior — our rulers and “elites” fell to their knees, even in Congress itself, to show their adoration of black criminality. Not to mention Floyd’s own statues which cropped up like poisonous mushrooms, each encouraging emulation of Floyd’s exasperating antics.
It’s so bad now that parents of white kids murdered by blacks rush out to forgive or excuse the killers, lest anybody dare to think they would condemn bad black behavior.
The question is why.
Before you answer, understand this is not only your “racist” Uncle Sergeant Briggs asking this question. Blacks themselves are asking.
There is an entire growing genre of YouTube videos of blacks telling us they grow weary of the constant misadventure of “ratchet blacks” (their word, not mine) and our culture’s welcoming attitude toward them. Take “Why Black Fatigue Is On The Rise“. Black fatigue is the natural exhaustion from having to deal routinely with with misbehaving blacks, where “dealing with” means having to pretend, while in polite society, we are not seeing what we are all seeing.
Watch just the first two minutes if you haven’t the time for more. The man in the inset quite rightly points out that blacks are now, as everybody always wanted, being judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. The problem is the content of their character, or at least the character of those who are celebrated for misdeeds. As one commenter to the video said, the problem are blacks who are “Offended by everything. Ashamed of nothing. Entitled to everything. Responsible for nothing.”
The natural desire for separation, and to be with ones’ own, leads blacks to label blacks not confirming to expected behavior as “acting white”. The natural solution would be a formal separation: you go your way, we go ours. That, of course, would never be countenanced, and is anyway not desired by the majority. One thing absolutely demanded by our elites is “diversity”, by which they mean strict uniformity of belief. Our betters weep fake tears over things like colonization, which we know are fake because when we ask them to let us go our own way they say no.
If we can’t separate, then we have to find a way to get along with each other. Whatever this way is, it can’t have a basis in transparent lies.
May 22, 2025
Lucy Connolly, political prisoner
I’m no firebrand on social media — I’d probably have a lot more followers if I were — but I can easily imagine a situation like the one that got Lucy Connolly sent off to the British gulags for an ill-judged social media post:
In what has become an emblematic case of the UK’s betrayal of free speech, Lucy Connolly has now lost her appeal for early release. This mother and childminder had posted an offensive tweet in the direct aftermath of the Southport murders, in which a psychopath brutally attacked children with a knife at a yoga class. She had believed the false claim that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker, and written online that she had no objection to people burning down hotels where immigrants were residing.
The tweet was taken as evidence that Connolly had intended to “stir up racial hatred” and incite violence during the febrile climate of the summer riots. It had been deleted within hours, no violence occurred as a result, and yet she was sentenced to 31 months in prison. Given that the severity of Connolly’s sentence was doubtless related to unofficial government pressure on the judiciary, many have made the case that Connolly is a political prisoner.
For all our shared revulsion at the tweet, we must remember that we are still talking here about words, not actions. It was completely right that Philip Prescott, a man who attacked a mosque as part of a mob during the riots, was sentenced to 28 months in jail. But Connolly has received an even longer sentence having committed no acts of violence at all. Many rapists and paedophiles have been treated far more leniently. I know of no sound argument that could possibility justify this state of affairs. It is the very definition of two-tier justice.
Let’s get the caveats out of the way. Nobody is defending what Connolly wrote. It was unpleasant, rash, misjudged, and much else besides. Here is the post in full.
Grim stuff. But it by no means fulfils any serious definition of incitement to violence. For one thing, she is not calling on hotels to be torched, but is rather making clear that she would not care if that occurred. This distinction is key, but has been overlooked. Moreover, Connolly has zero influence or clout. It is not as though anyone reading this could have taken it as an instruction or order and acted accordingly. Those wishing to appreciate the full context of why Connolly behaved as rashly as she did should read this excellent piece by Allison Pearson for The Telegraph.
It should go without saying that in a free society some people are going to say ghastly things. That’s the price we pay for liberty. The judge in this case made a statement in his ruling that has been widely interpreted as political: “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive. There is always a very small minority of people who will seek an excuse to use violence and disorder causing injury, damage, loss and fear to wholly innocent members of the public and sentences for those who incite racial hatred and disharmony in our society are intended to both punish and deter.”
Trump, “the American Mussolini”, versus ever-so-democratic Mark Carney
In the National Post, John Robson contrasts the authoritarian dictator at the helm of the American ship of state with our peaceful, democratic, and fully accountable to the voters prime minister:
President Donald Trump greets Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at the West Wing entrance of the White House.
(Official White House Photo by Gabriel B Kotico)
It was the best of budgets, it was the worst of budgets, it was the age of restraint, it was the age of profligacy, it was the epoch of the legislature, it was the epoch of the executive, it was the season of open debate, it was the season of closed doors, it was the spring of Canada, it was the winter of America. Or possibly the other way around.
The confusion arises because as a patriotic Canadian I keep hearing how U.S. President Donald Trump is an American Mussolini who has abolished the last vestiges of the old Republic, so we should drink rye not bourbon or some other decisive action easily performed while sitting down. Yet the news media mysteriously insist that the Bad Orange Man is having trouble getting his budget through some quaint relic called the United States Congress while Green Mark Carney isn’t bothering to get his spending plans rubber-stamped by some quaint relic called the Canadian Parliament. How can it be?
Tuesday’s the Morning newsletter from the New York Times, which is no MAGA outlet, reads: “Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump’s legislative agenda.” But with only three spare votes in the House, “there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don’t agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they’re too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them.”
Likewise The Atlantic, part of the thundering herd of independent liberal American minds, says: “The struggle to pass Donald Trump’s second-term agenda in Congress has never been between Republicans and Democrats … it’s been a battle between the House and Senate GOP, between moderates and hard-liners, and, most salient, between Republicans and reality.”
Egad. What manner of rambunctious folly is this? Open debate within the Maximum Leader’s own party? Dictatorship! By contrast here in decorous Canada can someone remind me which inane or malicious measures from former prime minister Justin Trudeau were ever put at risk by the principled courage, truculence or mere pandering even of his NDP coalition non-partners, let alone the trained seals in red?
Periodically one would bark. But which ever bit? To be sure, as the Canadian Press noted on Sunday, “Prime Minister Mark Carney says the Liberal government will present a federal budget in the fall, allowing time for clarity on some key economic and fiscal issues to emerge”. But if there’s going to be a brawl, it will be inside his office, or head, with his finance minister promising to brush aside Parliament with an “economic statement” before Carney overrode him, saying the government would introduce “a much more comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget in the fall”.
May 21, 2025
Canadian voters got fooled again
Roxanne Halverson on Canadian voter gullibility that Mark Carney and the Liberals took full advantage of in the election campaign:
Offer not applicable in Canada, apparently.
Liberals voters on your elbows up crusade — do you feel foolish, do you feel shamed? Are you ready to admit that you were duped? That you were played like the fiddle in the Devil went down to Georgia. How does it feel to know that you fell for Mark Carney’s fear mongering fabricated crisis that made him Prime Minister. Or is your Trump Derangement Syndrome so severe that you cannot recognize how the Liberals used it and used you to win an election they didn’t deserve to win. It wouldn’t be so bad if only you had to pay the price, but unlike the phony COVID mantra, of we’re all in this together, we really are all in this nightmare together for another possible four years of Liberal rule and corruption, and we’re all going to pay the price. That includes those of us who didn’t get fooled again, but most of us are the same ones who also didn’t get fooled in the last three elections that gave the country the Liberals under Justin Trudeau for a decade of destruction.
Did you see the interview Prime Minister Mark Carney did with Sky News Australia?
You really should watch it. Because in it he admits what those of us who didn’t vote for him knew, and what he, himself also knew. There was never any real threat from Trump to annex Canada. And when pushed on it by the Sky News interviewer Samantha Washington who asks if he inflated the threat as political tool to inflame voters who hated Donald Trump, Carney dances around it saying one minute it wasn’t a threat and the next minute, well he thought it was and so did the Canadian people and well maybe he did use it to kind of stir them up. Essentially he was trying to dodge the fact that he lied and knew all along that Trump wasn’t really going to make Canada the 51st state.
So, let’s begin with the Trump threat — the existential threat to the existence of our country! According to Carney, Trump “wanted to take Canada, he wanted to break it“. But when asked by Washington about that ‘existential threat’, Carney walked it back. In his words, “No the existence is not at stake, it was more of economic crisis, and had a heavy element of national security comes with it, the extent to which we will be cooperating with others, particularly with the United States“.
Now wait a minute, Carney told voters — the elbows uppers — that Canada’s existence was at stake. And now he’s adding in a national security element? I don’t recall Trump ever saying anything about invading Canada or threatening our national security, in fact it was quite the opposite, he said the United States would always protect Canada for any foreign threat. His interest in national security had to do with Canada’s porous border and the fentanyl trade that the Liberals chose to ignore. This response is a typical Carney word salad dancing around answering the question. Something he seems to have in common with his predecessor Justin Trudeau. But at its core, he says, no Canada’s existence was never in danger.
Yet, he repeatedly told crowds at rallies that the US wanted to break us, when it was really just an economic crisis — something Canada has faced many times before, often due to bad Liberal policies.
But that’s what Mark Carney, with the help of his cartel media echo chamber, drummed into the heads of the elbows up crowd during his leadership campaign and during his entire election campaign. Trump was going to come and take our country — “he wants our resources, he wants our land, and he wants our water“.
Now here’s another word salad, walking back the ‘threat’ from Trump. When Washington asked him why he met with Trump when he was still disrespecting Canada by talking about making it the 51st state, even during their meeting in the Oval Office, which he said it, as she described it, “right to your face“. According to Carney this was ‘different’, and then he delivers another word salad because apparently, “Trump was expressing a desire … he had shifted from an expectation to a desire for that to happen. He was also coming from a place where he recognized that that wasn’t going to happen. I made it clear to him in that context.”
May 20, 2025
Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis
News broke the other day that former President Joe Biden is suffering from a highly advanced cancer and it only reinforces the questions about who was really performing the role of the President during Biden’s term in office:
Well, now it almost isn’t funny anymore.
Here’s the progression of the Democrats’ desperate attempts to shame you out of talking about Joe Biden’s mental and physical health:
“Stop talking about this because it’s not true.”
“Stop talking about this because he’s not the president anymore.”
“Stop talking about this because he has cancer.”You may notice a pattern.
I think it was Andrew Klavan who made me realize the First Commandment of the Democratic Party: Thou shalt STFU. All their gaslighting, shaming, whataboutism, and other dishonest rhetorical techniques are attempts to stop you from talking about whichever lie they’re telling at that particular moment.
Why would they stop at cancer?
A lot of medical professionals are pointing out that a prostate cancer diagnosis doesn’t just come out of the blue like this. It’s easily detectable in blood work, it takes years and years to progress, and it should’ve been detected at his last annual physical.
Even Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (an oncologist, Rahm’s older brother, and certainly no MAGA-head) says Biden must have learned of this diagnosis many years ago.
If Biden was undergoing cancer treatments during his presidency — remember all those unexplained trips to Delaware? — it would explain a lot of his behavior. “Chemo brain”. And of course he and Jill would keep it under wraps, because it would only strengthen a 25th Amendment challenge.
Who else knew about this, and when did they know it?
And who the hell was performing the duties of the president of the United States for four years?
Keep in mind that Joe Biden loves using his personal tragedies as a Get Out of Jail Free card. We heard it in that just-released Robert Hur audio from October 2023, when Biden deflected a question he didn’t want to answer about his handling of classified documents by complaining that his son Beau died. He couldn’t remember the exact year, but he used it as an excuse anyway.
If he’ll use his dead son, why wouldn’t he use a cancer diagnosis?
eugyppius also notes that such an advanced case can’t have just popped up recently, reinforcing the notion that his term in office was partially or completely a “regency”:
Yesterday evening, Joe Biden’s office announced that the former president had been diagnosed “with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones“. Biden must have had this cancer for a long time for it to have spread that far, and thus it seems very strange that someone receiving presidential levels of medical care should have been diagnosed only just last week. Many in our circles posit that insiders have known about Biden’s illness for years, but that they have kept his diagnosis and treatment under wraps for political reasons. Among other things, they argue that this explains a July 2022 gaffe in which Biden complained that environmental pollution is “why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer“.1
In fact, I think a simple cover-up is the most harmless possibility here. It’s likely that doctors have diagnosed Biden’s cancer so late because the former president was subject to a high degree of isolation and medical neglect while in office. Perhaps family and close advisers carefully managed Biden’s annual physicals to avoid any inconvenient findings as part of a broader campaign to hide his dementia. Alternatively, it’s possible that signs of cancer were discovered at some point, but that Biden’s inner circle avoided confirming the diagnosis or pursuing treatment. Either way, the late diagnosis and the advanced cancer together suggest that Biden has been left sick and untreated for a long time.
As I wrote last year, Biden’s presidency was an informal and unacknowledged regency. Biden himself did not have the mental capacity to rule on his own, and so a confined circle of close advisers and family effectively directed the actions of the presidential office on his behalf.
Importantly, this regency was not “the White House” or “Biden’s staff” or “the Democratic Party” in general. It was much smaller than all of those things. The regents worked hard to obscure Biden’s dementia from Congress, from large parts of Biden’s own campaign, from the Democratic Party and from many others within Biden’s White House. They ensured that even internal meetings unfolded in highly scripted and predetermined ways, so that cabinet and other officials could not gain a clear idea of Biden’s mental state. They berated and intimidated anyone voicing concern about the president’s health behind the scenes. And they had very simple reasons for doing all of this: If Biden’s dementia were to become common knowledge and not merely an object of private suspicion (however widespread), the regency would be shown up as illegitimate and potentially broken.
Regents exercise power by restricting access to their charge and restricting their charge’s access to information and the outside world. It is thus unsurprising to find that Biden’s regents subjected him to strict social isolation, particularly towards the end of his term …
1. The White House clarified that Biden was referencing his earlier diagnoses for non-melanoma skin cancer.
The Death of Marat
Daniel Jupp uses the famous Jacques-Louis David painting of the 1793 assassination of French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday to illuminate the twisted dealings of the various radical factions within the larger revolutionary movement:
La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat) by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)
From the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the most famous and celebrated works of art in European history is a painting about a political assassination. That painting is The Death of Marat (La Mort de Marat in French) by Jacques-Louis David. It was painted in 1793. David was already one of the most respected French artists of the 18th century, a leader of French Neoclassical art. He was also himself a political figure, a prominent member of the Montagnard faction (itself a subset of the Jacobins) and a member of the revolutionary Committee of General Security.
It’s an overtly political painting in every way, created by a man who was as much a French Revolutionary politician as he was an established and esteemed artist. It’s about a shocking political event, and it was crafted as an exercise in propaganda. […] The painting shows us Marat in his bath, immediately after being assassinated by Charlotte Corday on the July 13, 1793. It is a beautifully composed image of political martyrdom. Marat’s posture, for anyone with the slightest awareness of Western art traditions, immediately shows where the sympathies of the artist lie (and also, where the sympathies of the artist lie).
Marat’s pose is, of course, a deliberate mirroring of the pose of Christ in hundreds if not thousands of Western art traditional depictions of the Crucifixion. The pale, slim but muscular figure, marked by the assassin’s blade but in a manner that might be compared to the puncture wound inflicted by the Spear of Longinus or to the stigmata nail wounds of crucifixion on Christ himself, has that peculiar serenity in death that other artists place in depictions of Jesus. The blood is present as proof of supreme sacrifice, but artistically minimised, prevented from distracting from the clean, shining, almost marble-like flesh of the deceased, who is already a kind of heroic statue in repose, fixed for the admiration of the ages. The dead man has a gentle, compassionate smile on his lips, as if interrupted in the process of forgiving his murderer. The angle, the gentleness, the delicacy of it all suggests Christ-like self sacrifice, as if Marat has chosen his death knowingly, given his life willingly.
Here is the martyr of the Revolution. A new Christ, as good as the old one … if not better.
[…]
It’s at this point that we should mention the central dishonesties here. Christian self sacrifice and martyrdom is a very different thing to one politically radical extremist being murdered by another. Marat was, in reality, about as far away from this movingly gentle depiction of him as one could imagine. As one of the most radical and zealous figures of the Revolution, Marat was a lesson for the ages in the exact opposite way to the one that David depicts. He wasn’t a gentle figure of self sacrifice. He wasn’t a Lamb bringing Peace in the manner of Christ. He wasn’t an innocent. He was a brutal, grasping, rapacious sadist. He was one of the leaders of the storming of the Bastille, and that too has symbolic and practical importance – the terrible monarchical regime had hardly anyone in its most hated prison, whereas the Revolutionary “liberators” soon stuffed it full of their political enemies.
Even at a point where many murders were already being committed, Marat was noted as an unusually brutal proponent of Revolutionary excess. His assassin was from a rival, supplanted Jacobin faction, the Girondists. The Girondists too had supported the earliest uses of violence, riot and uprising within France, and were a “war party” who wanted to export the Revolution abroad and topple monarchical dynasties across Europe. These two factions did not really differ on whether you should murder your political enemies or not, but the Girondists were at times embarrassed by Montagnard violence when it was at its most indiscriminate. The Girondists tended to be the most intellectualised of the Revolutionaries. They were the writers of pamphlets and doctrines of great length and increasingly mind-numbing tediousness. Marat, although also a street-level gutter pamphleteer, was much more of a bloody handed man of action, more akin to a modern terrorist. But the two were aligned in the creation of the bloodshed, even if the Girondins wanted it to be more focused and controlled and ultimately directed outside France:
Temperament largely accounts for the dividing line between the parties. The Girondins were doctrinaires and theorists rather than men of action. They initially encouraged armed petitions, but then were dismayed when this led to the émeute (riot) of 20 June 1792. Jean-Marie Roland was typical of their spirit, turning the Ministry of the Exterior into a publishing office for tracts on civic virtues while riotous mobs were burning the châteaux unchecked in the provinces.
The split between the two factions came to a head as a fall out from the September Massacres of 1792. Marat, a leader of the peasant sans-culottes mobs, was personally engaged in the orgy of bloodshed. Girondist leaders were alarmed, already sensing that previously aligned Revolutionaries or widespread mob violence could turn on them. Typically, the Girondists took defensive measures that were mainly concentrated on written statements, declarations or on bureaucratic ministries, whereas the Montagnards gradually took control of revolutionary militias and the people who were prepared to actually decide, at the point of a sword or via the barrel of a musket, who got killed and when. Neither side could be described as moderates, but one side were more ruthlessly pragmatic, which is why it was the Girondists who ended up being put on the execution lists of the Terror.
At the time that Corday assassinated Marat, Girondists had already been ousted from positions of power and arrested. Marat, along with Danton and Robespierre, was one of their three most prominent denouncers and enemies. Corday stated that she had “killed one man so that 100,000 could be saved”. It’s clear that she had hoped her action would save her arrested Girondin allies and personal friends, but it had the opposite effect and sealed their subsequent trial and executions.
