I’ve noticed a common phenomenon. Let’s call it the boomerang effect.
Lament the rise of an opinion or policy without noticing how your preferred policies helped cause it.
Vaccination rates down — because you wrecked the reputation of vaccines during the pandemic by over claiming.
Anti-immigrant feeling leading to difficulties for legal immigrants — because you welcomed millions of illegal immigrants and prevented them being deported.
Prosecution of political opponents — because you did it too.
Dislike seeing people cancelled for their opinions — because you started it.
Rising climate scepticism — because you censored reasonable criticism of climate extremism.
Anger at trans rights activists — because you shouted down concerns about men pretending to be women in sports and prisons.
Government attacks on universities — because you turned them into ideological madrassas.
Patriotic nationalism turning uglier — because you told people flags were racist.
Criticism of judges — because they became nakedly political.
Defunding of biotechnology — because you failed to call out dangerous gain-of-function virology as the likely cause of the death of 20 million+ people.
Etc etc
Matt Ridley, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-27.
January 4, 2026
QotD: The boomerang effect
January 3, 2026
America’s secret UBI programs
On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds puts the Somali daycare scandal into its proper perspective: it’s not old-fashioned graft but something far bigger and far more destructive to the pillars of western society:
The explosive unveiling of the wildly extensive Somali-run daycare scams in Minnesota has drawn attention to a huge shadow economy, and not just in Minnesota. America, it turns out, is full of people, companies, and organizations that basically live off of fraud. We’re not talking old-fashioned waste, like $600 hammers or $1200 toilet seats. We’re talking about entities whose sole reason for existence consists of being a conduit for taxpayer money to flow directly to the people controlling them, with some of the proceeds being diverted to politicians and political organizations.
People are noticing.
This reverses an old joke told by my Nigerian relatives. A Nigerian visits his rich relative in the United States and is awed by the penthouse apartment, the limo, the private jet and so forth. “How did you make so much money?” he asks. The relative points out the window. “See that bridge? 15%. See that shopping mall? 15%. See that train station? 15%.”
The visitor, inspired, returns home to Nigeria and becomes fabulously wealthy. His rich cousin from America visits and says “How did you make so much money so fast?”
“You see that bridge over there?”
“Nope,” responds the confused relative. The Nigerian cousin points at himself and says “One hundred percent!”
Well, this joke has now been turned around. Leaving aside that we don’t really even build train stations, bridges, or even shopping malls in this country anymore, now it’s America where people are pocketing one hundred percent and not even trying to actually deliver any goods or services. That the people doing this are mostly Africans only adds to the irony.
But what happened?
Well, several things. At base, people defraud the government for the same reason that dogs lick themselves — because they can. One of the things you find in these programs is that there are virtually no controls to ensure that the recipients of the money are legitimate, that the money is spent as promised — in essence, that the bridges get built. (Or, in the case of California, the high speed rail lines.) That lack of controls, of course, is no accident. The systems are designed to promote fraud and to make it hard to catch or punish.
Second, the culture is weaker. In a high trust society, people get angry when there is fraud and move to punish and ostracize the perpetrators. In a low-trust society, people expect it.
Older generations of politicians used to engage more in what George Washington “Boss” Plunkitt called “honest graft”. He defined honest graft as legally exploiting insider knowledge and opportunities from one’s position for personal financial gain, while also benefiting the public or party. A classic example he gave was learning about upcoming public projects (like a new park or bridge) and buying nearby land cheaply before the plans became public, then selling it at a profit to the city. He famously summarized it as: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” comparing it to savvy stock trading on Wall Street. In contrast, dishonest graft involved outright illegal acts, such as blackmail, embezzlement, or extortion (e.g., shaking down gamblers or saloon keepers).
God knows what he would have said about simply taking money for nothing. Would his reaction have been horror? Or admiration?
Is The Matrix a Right-Wing Story?
Feral Historian
Published 2 Jan 2026This is gonna be one of those crazy comment feed vids … The film has made its mark on American political discourse, not only with the adopting of some of its terminology but with opposing sides claiming the story as their own. The Matrix resonates for reasons far beyond authorial intent or individual pieces of inspiration, it has transcended that. And yet, as much as it resonates with the Right, perhaps it shouldn’t when we get to the core of it.
This one really has to be considered in its entirety. Trying to argue about individual sentences in isolation on this one is to miss the point entirely.
(more…)
QotD: “Fumbling towards bicameralism”
And yet, “self-deception” shouldn’t be possible. How can you lie to your self? It raises all kinds of heavy epistemological issues, explored in a fun little book called Self-Deception by philosopher Herbert Fingarette. As I recall (it has been years since I’ve read it), Fingarette ends up advancing a kind of split-consciousness theory, too, as the only internally consistent one. How could it be otherwise? The “liar’s paradox” is a fun little game to play in the first class meeting of Logic 101, but nobody can really live that way … and yet we do deceive ourselves, all the time, and no one more than SJWs, whose lives indeed seem to be nothing but “self-deception.”
Bicamerality explains that. The “god” that lives in the smartphone says X today, so X it is. That same “god” says not-X tomorrow, so now it’s not-X! It’s not self-contradiction, it’s not self-deception, for the simple reason that there’s no real “self” at all.
Finally, it explains what might be the most frustrating thing about the Left, the thing that’s likely to end in a nuke or two here before too long: Their utter inability to see the glaringly obvious consequences of their actions. Those of us who tend to see “Leftism” as a big conspiracy love to point out that if they, the Left, were just stupid (childish, contrarian, herd animals, whatever), cold impersonal chance alone would guarantee that at least some of their fuckups would benefit us at least some of the time. Much like The Media’s “retractions” and “admissions” and so on, the “mistakes” always always always go in only one direction … ergo, they’re not mistakes.
That’s the reef on which we “emergent behavior” types always crash. To me, “emergent behavior” still seems like the best explanation … but however the behavior emerges, it’s always retarded. They’ve never made a non-stupid decision, not once, and it’s always stupid in exactly the same way. I remember waking up one morning to the sound of something crashing into my bedroom window. I figured it was a bird, which happens all the time, and it was … except that it kept happening, monotonously, every fifteen seconds or so. I got up to look, and here was a robin, smashing itself into the glass over and over and over again. It was early spring — mating season — and this stupid robin had mistaken its own reflection for a rival. I must’ve watched this bird slam himself into the glass for ten minutes, “attacking” his “rival”, before he knocked himself out cold …
That’s how the Left do. Always. They simply can’t learn, and they can’t change their pattern. The only explanation for that, therefore, must be that it’s programmed. Literally. Zero consciousness involved. They do what they do because they literally cannot do otherwise. Their “god” has put “rage” into their thumos. Just as Achilles would’ve literally jumped off a cliff had his “god” told him to, so the Left does … well, pretty much everything their teevee tells them to.
Needless to say, this has some important implications for practical action. How does one “get inside that OODA loop”, as the keyboard commandos like to say? In the land of the utterly unconscious, the one-brained man is king …
Severian, “Striving Towards Bicamerality”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-20.
Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
January 2, 2026
“You had to be unacceptably racist in 1993 to predict where South Africa would be in thirty years”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Wesley Yang posted the comment in the headline. Will Tanner responded:
You did not, in fact. You just had to be paying attention
By 1993, South Africa was the only First World country left in Africa
America and the UN chased Belgium out of the Congo, and it collapsed into decades of civil war and famine
Mugabe destroyed Rhodesia after we aided the Soviets in helping him win. Angola and Mozambique became hells after Salazar died, the Carnation Revolution happened, and they were given up. Kenya and Sierre Leone all showed the hellish state of things that came with decolonization in the name of “democracy”
South Africa was the last man standing. It had a nuclear program. It had a space program. It had clean, reliable water and electricity. It had a thriving industrial sector. Crime was problematic, but not out of control
Now all of that was gone, for the same reason the Congo is a mess and Zimbabwe went from being the breadbasket of Africa to a famine-ridden mess: decolonization and equity
Anyone who paid attention could have predicted that. Maintaining First World life requires a First World mindset; that dies when handed over to race communists who are happy to backslide into the Stone Age if doing so means “equality” exists
And so South Africa went from First World to Third
And John Carter responded in turn:
When you stand back and look at this from ten thousand feet, a very dark pattern emerges.
In the aftermath of WWII, the newly established globalist institutions were used to give moral and financial support to decolonization movements, thereby chasing European countries out of what became the third world.
A governance structure that had successfully brought order, prosperity, and civilization to much of the planet was dismantled, leaving behind a chaotic mess of war and poverty.
Those same globalist organizations then embarked on a program of “foreign aid” that dramatically increased the size of that immiserated third world population (without actually improving conditions for them).
At the same time, their agents were busy at work within the governments of the former colonial powers, changing their immigration policies to allow immigration from more or less anywhere. Countries began adopting “multiculturalism” in the name of fighting “racism” … A newly developed postwar concept, which the media and education arms of the globalist project indoctrinated the youth to consider the worst of all possible sins.
Once the ideological and legal ground had been prepared in the former colonial powers, migration via legal and irregular pathways commenced, facilitated by — of course — the very same set of globalist NGOs that chased Europe out of the colonies.
Somehow, this new form of colonization is a good thing. Somehow, the European peoples enjoy none of the rights of “national self-determination” accorded to “indigenous” peoples which had been invoked to end colonialism.
As the populations of the third world were exploding thanks to the foreign aid being provided by globalist organizations, fertility in the first world fell off a cliff. The pill, abortion, feminism drawing women into universities and careers and therefore away from marriage and child-bearing, no-fault divorce destroying the family, and a gender war incited to new levels of bitter intensity every year which estranged the sexes, all served to reduce the white birth rate.
White fertility crashed just as the population bomb that had been set in the third world exploded, with the gates left open by carefully constructed legal frameworks that made immigration very easy and deportation very, very hard.
Update, 3 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
QotD: From Rousseau to Marx, Hegel to Gramsci
The fundamentals are clear enough. The New Left in America, which is the conveyor belt for everything from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) Green New Deal to Black Lives Matter, can trace its genetic roots back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who almost single-handedly upturned centuries of Western philosophical and theological wisdom.
Instead of believing that man is fallen, fatally flawed, and prone to selfishness and evil, Rousseau denied the reality of thousands of years of human history and posited that man is inherently good. Further, this goodness could be maximized by engineering society away from individual rights and liberties, prioritizing communal good, communal needs, and the communal will.
Thus civilization built according to how man actually behaves in real life fell out of favor; and eventually, Karl Marx’s collectivist ideology predicated on the subversion of individual human souls to the common interest (as defined by political leaders) gained steam.
Like an ideological scrapbooker, Marx picked and purloined the ideas of others to build his theory. Socialism is but a temporary stepping stone towards the eventual and inevitable end-state of all mankind, the utopian “Worker’s Paradise.” Marx stole the “inevitability” factor from Hegel and his eponymous “dialectic.”
Hegel, a profoundly religious man, unlike the rabidly and militantly atheist Marx, saw the history of man as a perpetual progression, a series of qualitative improvements in our collective lot as one new idea (antithesis) impacted upon an existing idea (thesis) and resulted in an improved conceptualization (synthesis) that has more truth value than the previous two ideas combined. This progression, so Hegel believed, would increase our enlightenment, until we perceived the ultimate synthesis, the purest version of truth’s expression, which is God himself.
Marx took Hegel’s key inevitability dynamic and removed the metaphysical elements. For Marx the intangible was irrelevant. His “dialectic materialism” posits that thesis and antithesis are instead expressions of the inherent conflict within society — the clash between the have and have nots, the oppressor and the oppressed, the capitalist and the exploited workers — which will result in a final revolution permanently removing class distinction and conflict from society.
This garbage is what Karl Marx sold the world with his books Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. And incredibly, some people believed this rubbish. So much so that they used it as a blueprint to sabotage and subvert multiple nations around the world, starting with czarist Russia and stretching all the way to Cuba and China. But then there was a problem. In all their attempts to effect a Communist revolution west of the Russian Empire, Marx’s followers would fail. America was an especially tough nut for Marxists to crack, because of how our nation was born.
America’s Founders, knowing full well that man is fallen and tends toward the selfish and the bad, built America with a system of separation of powers and also bequeathed us a written Constitution founded not on some absurd utopian collectivist vision of society, but built upon the recognition of the liberty of the individual and the unalienable God-given rights we each possess. Despite the advent of Progressive presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, America remained staunch in its resistance to socialism. Marx’s disciples, however, were not ready to surrender.
This is where the influence of a hunchback Italian cripple comes in.
Antonio Francesco Gramsci is the ideational grandfather to all that threatens modern America and our freedoms today, from AOC’s Green New Deal to the violence of Antifa. His writings, penned in an Italian prison cell, would be leveraged by the Hungarian Jewish writer and politician, Gyӧrgy Lukacs, each sharing the same conviction: Communism had failed in established Western democracies — as opposed to the backward and mostly peasant society of czarist Russia — because these societies are too resilient and too developed. For Marxism to flourish in the rest of Europe and America, these “bourgeois” societies must be dismantled piece by piece. From the inside.
The conceptual progeny of that realization leads straight to the panoply of Democratic Party articles of belief today — from Obamacare’s unprecedented intrusion into private healthcare choices to the anti-scientific insanity of transgenderism and beyond. This isn’t a random accusation, devoid of context. It’s not some accusation floating in space. The path from Gramsci and Lukacs to Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is a path that may be mapped historically, geographically, and institutionally.
Sebastian Gorka, “From Alinsky to AOC: Will Communism Finally Win in America?”, American Greatness, 2020-07-29.
Update, 3 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
December 31, 2025
Do you want tribalism? Because this is how you get tribalism
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort asks the key questions about where our “elites” are taking us:
What’s the point? No, tell me, what’s the point?
What’s the point of laws if judges reinterpret them until they protect everyone except the people who obey them?
What’s the point of defending a nation if the same system refuses to defend your family from criminals it imported on purpose?
What’s the point of paying taxes if they fund fraud, reward deception, and subsidize parallel systems that never owed this place loyalty?
What’s the point of working, building, serving, if your labor is redistributed to those who broke the rules to get here?
What’s the point of accountability if paperwork matters more than reality, and intent matters less than optics?
I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is that any human with a brain is going to retreat to whatever group rewards his values and sacrifice. If it isn’t the nation, it becomes the tribe. And when it becomes the tribe, this American experiment is over.
A warrior can endure hardship, loss, and some long odds. What he cannot endure is betrayal by design.
When a nation stops enforcing its boundaries, its laws, and its obligations to its own people, it doesn’t just lose control, IT BURNS THE VERY WILL REQUIRED TO DEFEND IT.
I want something to defend that I believe in. We all do. I take the oath deadly serious. But one begins to wonder after awhile if that makes for a patriot or a sucker.
If a Soldier can follow it and die in defense of his country, but on the other side of the coin, there is a politician who can spit on it and get rich while importing and funding pirates … it really makes one wonder: What’s it all for?
@POTUS we know what problems you face. It’s not lost on us. But we are running out of time sir.
One of the things that makes these kinds of scam viable in western culture is that we are high-trust cultures with default assumptions that most people are not trying to exploit kindness and charity. This breaks down quickly once you introduce enough people from low-trust and tribal cultures:
The fraudulent spending of taxpayer dollars we are seeing uncovered nationally all rotates around the essential goodness of the American people.
Daycare for children? Of course — we don’t want our children or parents to suffer because Mom has to work.
Foodbanks? We don’t want anyone to starve. Our nation is better than that.
Homeless shelters? Homelessness is a scourge upon the American dream. We’re better than that.
Home elder care? The generations before us deserve dignity and respect. How could anyone oppose that?
Deep down we are a charitable and giving nation unlike most others. That sense of goodness and charity has been hijacked and exploited by foreign predators for their own material gain.
We need to wise up and toughen up, and understand that not every siren song of charity is on the level, particularly when our tax dollars are involved.
(Also, this reality gives an added layer of meaning to the concept of “suicidal empathy”.)
Ian at The Bugscuffle Gazette explains that importing the third world means that you need to expect your culture will start becoming more like the third world:
It says something1 about he state of Legacy Media when a 20-something kid with an iPhone can do a better imitation of 60 Minutes than 60 Minutes can.
No, Gentle Readers, I am not — in any way — surprised that Somalian immigrants in Minnesota are happily committing fraud — remember, do, that I grew up in Africa.
One of the things that endear Americans — and Western Europeans in general — to me is the sheer naiveté displayed by same. The ability of the average American to remain convinced that the entire World is just like them is rather cute.2
Folks, fraud and bribery is the norm in the Third World. In tribal cultures fraud and bribery are not only the norm, but are the rule.
If the average American reader takes nothing else from this essay, please understand that fraud and bribery are not crimes in the Third World; that fraud and bribery are not only not crimes in tribal society, but they are expected, required, and a perfectly acceptable part of every day tribal life.
And Somalia is not only Third World, but it is excessively tribal.
So, I’m not really mad at the Somalis. You can’t get mad at a gopher for digging up your yard. Gophers got to dig, and tribal cultures got to tribal.
That by no means signals that I don’t think the fraudsters should be excused. Hell, no. Public trials, and if found guilty — maximum sentences. Those lacking in U.S. citizenship, once the full prison sentence is completed, loaded onto a C-5 Galaxy and bodily pitched off of the ramp onto a random Somalian airport tarmac.3
What has stoked my ire is the fact that the Somalis used one of the most heavily-regulated industries to commit their fraud — that should have everyone up in arms.
Childcare is the responsibility of at least one Minnesota State agency — probably more — and will have mandated State-level inspections and audits.
Let me re-state that: Minnesota government employees would be legally-required and paid to walk their happy little arses into those businesses and use their Mk1 Mod 0 Eyeballs to look around at least once a year. If you were an inspector for whichever Minnesota agency(ies) regulates child care facilities, and you never filed a “Hey, something ain’t right” report, it’s time for a Come-To-Jesus Meeting in a brightly-lit room with humour-impaired law enforcement types.
If nothing else, the fact that one of these allegedly fraudulent pre-schools not only mis-spelled “Learning” as “Learing”, but mis-spelled the name of the street in the publicly-posted address should have been a red flag to someone.4
This sheer dollar amount of fraud, over this amount of time, and using this many separate corporate entities means that multiple people in the Minnesota State government knew something stunk to high heaven.
Minnesota government employees who knew of this fraud need to do the maximum allowed felony time.
- Not, you know, anything good.
- The ability of the average American leader — who is supposed to know better — to do the same is aggravating and dangerous.
- Bringing the aeroplane to a full stop during this process not absolutely required.
- Us cynical retired law enforcement types call this a “clue”.
December 30, 2025
“This is where Canada is now”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison handily sums up the state of the nation:
I’ve reached the point most people hit right before systems fail.
The point where facts stop working.
Charts don’t matter. Reports don’t matter. Evidence doesn’t matter. You can post receipts until your fingers cramp and political partisans will still clap, chant, and rationalize while the house fills with smoke. They are not misinformed. They are committed. And commitment beats reality every time.
That’s where Canada is now.
The Liberals and the NDP no longer govern with outcomes in mind. They govern with narratives. If the story sounds compassionate, the damage underneath is waved away as acceptable collateral. Housing explodes. Healthcare buckles. Food banks flood. Productivity sinks. And if you point to any of it, you’re told to be kinder, quieter, or more patient.
Patience is a luxury people without power can’t afford.
What scares me isn’t just the policies. It’s the psychology. We are watching a ruling class that confuses control with competence and optics with success. Every failure is met with more management, more spending, more moral language, and less accountability. When reality resists, they don’t change course. They tighten.
That’s where Mark Carney enters the picture, and why he should worry anyone paying attention.
Carney doesn’t speak like a democratic leader. He speaks like a risk officer explaining why losses are necessary. “Sacrifice.” “Stability.” “Confidence.” These are not solutions. They are words used when the model is failing but the managers refuse to admit it. In his world, the problem is never the plan. It’s public resistance to the plan.
That mindset is poison in a democracy.
The Liberals broke affordability and papered it over with subsidies. The NDP cheered and demanded more of the same. Now Carney offers to professionalize the decline. Smoother language. Tighter controls. Bigger levers. Less dissent. He doesn’t promise prosperity. He promises management.
Here’s the part people don’t want to hear.
You can’t fix a country by overruling its citizens.
You can’t tax, regulate, borrow, and moralize your way out of shortages.
You can’t feed kids, house families, or staff hospitals with press releases.And when governments start treating criticism as a threat rather than a warning, history tells us what comes next. Not reform. Hardening. Surveillance language. Emergency logic. Ever broader definitions of “harm”. Ever fewer off ramps.
This is how civilizations don’t collapse in a bang. They collapse in meetings.
I don’t expect to convince partisans anymore. That window is gone. This is a warning, not an argument.
If you are still cheering while food banks replace paycheques, while hospitals ration care, while housing becomes a privilege, while leaders talk about sacrifice without ever naming their own, understand this: they are not fiddling while Rome burns. They are insisting the fire is necessary.
And once that belief sets in, facts won’t save us. Only consequences will.
By then, our children are already in the smoke.
December 29, 2025
The war against white men didn’t start in 2015
Janice Fiamengo responds to Jacob Savage’s essay on the “lost generation” of young white men who have been subject to open and explicit discrimination in education, employment, and loudly denounced for noticing this:
Most people who have discussed Savage’s essay accept his time frame: that the exclusion of white men took place mainly over the past ten to fifteen years. But this is not true. It has been going on for much longer than that, as Nathan Glazer made clear in his comprehensive Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, first published in 1975 and updated in 1987. Government initiatives to provide jobs for women and racial minorities, particularly blacks, were rooted in the equal rights legislation of the 1960s, implemented later that decade and aggressively expanded in the 1970s and 1980s. The National Organization for Women under the leadership of Betty Friedan, for example, brought a lawsuit against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to force it to comply with federal legislation, and sued the country’s 1300 largest corporations for alleged sex discrimination.
Anyone wishing to read a detailed prehistory of what Savage has chronicled can also consult Martin Loney’s extensively documented The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada (1998), which shows how what was called equity hiring in Canada spread across areas such as the police force, firefighting, the civil service, crown corporations, law, teaching, academia, and elsewhere, beginning in the 1980s. What Glazer’s and Loney’s research shows is that discrimination against white men in employment is far more deeply embedded than most people realize and has affected many more men than is currently recognized.
It is ridiculous to castigate Boomer white men, as it seems popular now to do, for allegedly implementing and benefiting from diversity policies. The last thing that should be encouraged is for younger white men to turn their anger on older white men. Many of these older men themselves faced active discrimination, psychological warfare, divorce-rape, and immiseration. Every organ of the culture told them it was time to change, get with it, stop being Archie Bunker, recognize the superior merits of the women and racial minorities their people had allegedly oppressed for so long. White women were by far the majority and most enthusiastic architects and proponents of equity hiring, bullied in turn by the black and brown women with whom they originally formed their alliance against white men (and all men, with a few exceptions).
Older white men may have secured (tenuous) positions of power, but they had no power in themselves as white men. Most of them knew they could find themselves disgraced, friendless, and jobless as the result of an unpopular decision or an unguarded statement. Accusations of sexual misconduct to take such men out of their positions were not confined to millennial males.
I was in the academic job market in 1997, and diversity hiring was already commonplace then. Everyone knew it was going on, and it was signaled both explicitly and implicitly in the advertisements that encouraged applications from women and visible minorities. My friend Steve Brule remembers when affirmative action was brought in at the large chemical company where he worked in 1984. At the beginning, it was said that these programs would be time-limited, lasting only for a short season. Instead, they lasted for well over 40 years and are still going strong.
It is foolish to imagine that such discrimination is now going to lie down and die. There have been a number of occasions over the last few years in which that was confidently predicted (remember Claudine Gay?) and did not occur. Already the diversity advocates, who are legion, are marshalling their counter-arguments and nit-picking the evidence, finding (or lying about) the ways in which what Savage described hasn’t really happened, recalibrating numbers, rationalizing and justifying them. Thousands of academics will spend years joining forces to discredit claims about discrimination, recasting them as a MAGA or Groyper lament and a dangerous attack on the legitimate (but still inadequate!) gains made by valiant women and long-oppressed racial minorities. Recently for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle, in an ostensibly critical article, is still playing with false justifications and outlandish untruths, saying the following about the rationale for equity hiring:
… One could say of course it’s unfair, but repairing the legacy of slavery and sexism is a hard problem, and sometimes hard problems have unfair solutions. It wasn’t fair to round up huge numbers of men born between 1914 and 1927 and send them off to fight the Nazis, but that was the only way to win.
One might argue that, but I haven’t seen anyone do so. No one seems brave enough to state baldly that we should penalize White men born in 1988 for hiring decisions that were made in 1985 by another White guy who was born in 1930. Instead what I’ve seen is a lot of deflection.
What bizarre nonsense, what spurious claims even if her point is that such logic is ugly. Discrimination in favor of white men has been illegal since 1964, and affirmative action/equity hiring was already fully in place by the mid-1980s when the “white guy who was born in 1930” was allegedly discriminating in his hiring practices. As McArdle inadvertently shows, we’ve been operating on the basis of deliberately-perpetrated false beliefs for years, beliefs that the intelligentsia adhered to and promulgated.
On the City Journal Substack, Renu Mukherjee argues that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is correct that “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is stop discriminating on the basis of race”:
First, public opinion is clear: Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds have long opposed the use of racial and identity-based preferences. While this trend extends to employment, I’ve studied it extensively in the context of college admissions. The data underscore Americans’ strong support for colorblind meritocracy.
One year before the Supreme Court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether an applicant’s race or ethnicity should be a factor in the college admissions process. 74 percent of respondents said that it should not, including 79 percent of whites, 59 percent of blacks, 68 percent of Hispanics, and 63 percent of Asian Americans. By way of comparison, 93 percent of Americans said that high-school grades should be a factor in college admissions, and 85 percent said the same about standardized test scores. Several surveys since then have produced similar results.
A May 2023 study that I co-authored with my Manhattan Institute colleague Michael Hartney reinforces this point. Through an original survey experiment on the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we asked Americans to play the role of an admissions officer and decide between two competing medical-school applicants. While the applicants’ accomplishments were randomly varied, the specific pair of applicants that respondents saw always consisted of an Asian American male and a black male.
Our objective was to determine whether, and when, Americans believe diversity should take precedence over merit in medical-school admissions. We found that even when respondents were informed that the medical school lacked diversity, the vast majority made their admissions decisions based on merit — in this case, college grades and MCAT scores — not race.
A few months prior to the publication of that paper, for a separate report, I reviewed hundreds of survey questions on affirmative action stored on the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research’s online database. I found that Americans are most likely to say that they oppose “affirmative action” when survey language explicitly describes the policy as providing “preferential treatment” or “preferences” for a given group. This suggests a deep American aversion to racial and gender-based favoritism — which is why Democrats, when pushing policies rooted in such ideology, tend to rely on euphemisms. Republicans should not do what even Democrats know doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, they have sounded like they might. Several prominent Republicans have taken to the social media platform X to argue that “Heritage Americans” — those who can trace their lineage to the Founding era — are inherently superior to more recent arrivals. In doing so, they suggest that the former are entitled to preferential treatment on the basis of ancestry. Here, the logic is that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.
Republican leaders, such as Vice President JD Vance, should reject such grievance-based politics. These ideas were unpopular when Democrats pushed them, and they will be unpopular when Republicans try them, too.
Will 2026 finally be the year Canada abandons food cartels?
For reasons unknown, Canadian politicians both left and right have been willing to sacrifice almost anything in trade negotiations except the cosy protectionist scheme we call “supply management”, which enriches a tiny number of farmers in Ontario and Quebec by keeping grocery prices significantly higher than the free market price. On his Substack, The Food Professor predicts that Prime Minister Carney will be forced to give up this market-rigging, anti-consumer scheme in the coming year:
Image from Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University
As we enter 2026, several forces are converging to reshape Canada’s food economy. Consumer empowerment — amplified by social media — continues to accelerate, while geopolitics, particularly tensions with our southern neighbour, are becoming increasingly disruptive. Together, these dynamics will push food policy issues that once lived in technical silos into the public spotlight.
At the top of that list sits CUSMA and supply management. Prime Minister Carney has signaled firmness on market access, backed by legislation that shields supply management from parliamentary debate. That protection, however, is unlikely to endure. Even if the United States has little genuine interest in exporting more dairy to Canada — and even if Canadian consumers show limited appetite for it — President Trump now understands, far better than during his first term, that supply management is a potent political wedge. The system protects roughly 9,400 dairy farmers who exert disproportionate influence over agricultural policy, while compensation payments continue to flow without any meaningful reduction in production or market share. For a growing number of Canadians, this arrangement increasingly resembles a closed loop rather than a public good. The irony is that global demand for dairy is rising and Canadian milk should be part of that growth story. Instead, the system prioritizes insulation over ambition — a missed opportunity at a time when competitiveness should matter most.
January 1 also marks the formal implementation of new front-of-package nutrition labels. Although these symbols have been appearing on shelves for some time, many consumers either overlook them or misunderstand their purpose. Their real impact has been largely invisible to the public: they have already reshaped how food companies formulate products, invest in research, and redesign portfolios. Whether the labels meaningfully change consumer behaviour remains debatable, but their influence on product development is no longer.
[…]
Finally, 2026 coincides with the United Nations’ International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists — a timely moment to reset the debate around meat consumption and livestock production. Rangelands underpin global meat systems by converting grasslands — often unsuitable for crops — into high-quality protein. In a world where demand for animal protein continues to grow, portraying livestock as inherently incompatible with sustainability ignores nutritional, economic, and ecological realities. Well-managed grazing supports rural livelihoods, strengthens export economies, and can enhance biodiversity and soil health rather than undermine them. If policymakers are serious about food security, climate resilience, and affordability, 2026 should mark a shift away from apologizing for meat production and toward recognizing livestock as a strategic pillar of resilient food systems — not a sector to be regulated out of existence
December 28, 2025
It may seem petty to deny entry to EUrocrats, but it’s all they will understand
At first, I thought it was just another bout of Trump being deliberately petty over trivial stuff, but on reflection, it’s actually a neat way to bring home the message to the EU bureaucrats personally that they will be held responsible for their actions:
RE: Free Speech & Denying Visas to Euro Autocrats
The very most Orwellian mind game happening in the world today is the way authoritarian globalists are attempting to redefine the concept of “free speech”.
In America, “free speech” has long meant that we are free to say or write virtually anything without fear of government intervention or suppression. It is this ability to express whatever we want that makes it “free”.
The authoritarian globalists, however, have stood this on its head. They have decided that in order for their citizens to be “free”, they must be free of ever hearing or reading any speech that might offend someone or sow doubt as to government policies. To these fascists, “free speech” means GOVERNMENT MODERATED speech which somehow — through its moderation — sets people “free” from ever hearing conflicting views. As I said — straight out of Orwell.
Europe is, of course, the hotbed of this fascist redefinition of what free speech means, but we in America have only narrowly escaped this plague by electing Trump. Remember, Biden and his team were reliant on institutionally stamping out so-called “disinformation” as a means of control over the populace. We must be ever vigilant here in the USA that such thuggish government criminality never again be allowed to prosper.
I think it is very important that every citizen of the USA and the world understand the depths of depravity these people will sink to in order to control ordinary people. This is about mind control, and nothing else.
Ultimately, the value of true free speech is that it embraces the idea that we all have agency over ourselves; that we are free individuals who can and should hear conflicting views, and decide for ourselves what is true and just, and what is untrue and unjust. This is sovereignty over the self, and unfortunately Europe has never let go of the concept of serfdom, so self-sovereignty is a threat that must be stamped out.
The Trump Administration has been prescient, bold and effective in denying visas to the Eurotrash autocrats who would see free speech reduced to whatever speech unelected bureaucrats deem acceptable. I cannot commend Trump enough for the thoughtfulness and importance of that action.
In a world where almost all humans are linked by essentially the same communications platform, only one world leader is truly standing for free speech: Donald Trump. And I thank him for it. We all should — even the TDS sufferers.
For a relevant example, Dries Van Langenhove:
Update, 29 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
December 27, 2025
Diversity is not our strength, no matter how many times they say it is
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter responds to a post from Martin Sellner on the visible results of institutionalized “diversity”:
These are the consequences of anti-white policies!
“DEI” has robbed an entire white generation of their careers and thus the realization of their life plans.
The infographics show the impact of the “DEI” policies on a whole generation of white male millennials.
The young white men whose lives were derailed by this psychosis amount to millions of quiet personal tragedies — careers that didn’t launch, marriages that never happened, children who were never born.
But the civilizational fallout is even worse.
The diversity shoved into the places that should have gone to talented young white men has proven itself unequal to the task, to put it mildly. They weren’t smart enough to be mentored for the positions they occupied. As the boomers shuffle away into retirement, they’ll take their knowledge and skills with them — knowledge and skills that weren’t passed onto the diversity (which was incapable of learning it), but also weren’t passed on to talented young white men (who could have mastered it, but were prevented from doing so). Since the diversity is too dumb to master that material, it’s certainly too dumb to pass it on. The chain of knowledge transmission is broken.
Autodidacticism only goes so far. There’s only so much you can learn from books and YouTube videos. There’s ultimately no replacement for hands on professional training. Those talented young white men have gotten very good at podcasting, trading crypto, growing their presence in the attention economy … But by and large they haven’t been allowed to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. Maybe that won’t matter in the end because of AI, but in the meantime, if you think the quality of everything has nosedived throughout the Cancelled Years, you really haven’t seen anything yet. The dwindling old guard of white male boomers is the only force keeping the lights on. When they leave, the real darkness closes in.
December 24, 2025
The real agenda
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Karl Harrison makes a case for fighting against the key element of the federal government’s all-encompassing drive to control the lives of Canadians because it’s the one that will enable all the other controls to operate:
All Canadians should read this carefully:
“They are flooding Parliament with distraction bills so the public is overwhelmed and cannot see the one bill that makes the entire system possible. More than a dozen federal bills are advancing simultaneously — each attacking a different pillar of Canadian freedom but S206 is the key. They fall into clear clusters:
Bills attacking due process and court rights.
Bill S-206 — Administrative Monetary Penalties (the central pillar) enables penalties without hearings, judges, trials, or common-law protections.
Bill C-63 — Online Harms Act. Undefined “harm”, digital speech penalties, CRTC enforcement authority.
Bill C-27 — Digital Charter Act. Creates federal AI regulators empowered to issue compliance orders without court oversight.
Bill C-52 — Beneficial Ownership Transparency. Expands federal surveillance and administrative enforcement.Bills attacking parliamentary supremacy (power shift to agencies).
Bill C-26 — Critical Cyber Systems Act. Sweeping regulation by order-in-council, bypassing Parliament.
Bill C-11 — Online Streaming Act. Gives the CRTC unprecedented control over content curation and digital reach.
Bill C-18 — Online News Act. Allows federal regulators to determine access to, and compensation for, digital journalism.Bills attacking property rights.
Bill C-234 — Agricultural Fuel Restrictions. Expands federal control over farm operations and production.
Bill S-241 — Jane Goodall Act. Sweeping biosafety authority over wildlife, land, and private property.
Bill C-49 — Atlantic Accord Amendments. Expands federal control over offshore land, climate restrictions, and energy development.Bills attacking freedom of speech and assembly
Bill C-63 — Online Harms Act. Criminalizes undefined “harm”, empowers bureaucrats to judge speech.
Bill C-261 — Misleading Communications Act. Penalties for “misleading” speech — undefined and discretionary.
Bill C-70 — Foreign Interference Act. Mass surveillance powers with vague thresholds.Bill attacking religion freedom.
Bill C-9 — “Harmful Conduct” Redefinition. Allows the state to regulate spiritual beliefs and pastoral work under “harm”.The critical pattern. Different bills, different sectors and different rights being attacked. But here is the truth: Every single one of these bills depends on ONE central enforcement pillar, and that pillar is:
Bill S-206 — The Administrative Penalty SwitchBill S-206, the hub of the entire system, gives federal departments the power to issue penalties without:
▪︎ a hearing
▪︎ a judge
▪︎ a trial
▪︎ due process
▪︎ common-law protections
▪︎ judicial review in practiceIt turns federal agencies into their own courts — investigator, prosecutor, judge, and enforcer. No democracy on Earth should tolerate this.
This is the enforcement engine behind:
▪︎ Digital ID
▪︎ CBDCs
▪︎ Carbon allowances
▪︎ Biosafety / One Health rules
▪︎ Smart-meter penalties
▪︎ Travel scoring
▪︎ Online speech controls
▪︎ Zoning & land-use mandatesData alone cannot control a population. They need the power to punish. S-206 provides it. Remove the keystone → the arch collapses.
Why scatter us with other bills? Because if Canadians focus on S-206, the agenda dies The distraction bills serve one purpose:
▪︎ to scatter attention and exhaust the public.
▪︎ to keep citizens debating side issues
▪︎ to hide the enforcement bill under noise
▪︎ to make resistance impossible to organize
▪︎ to create outrage fatigue
This is how large control systems are built — through distraction around the edges while the core is slipped into place.What are they building – and why S-206 is the core. Here is the architecture of the planned digital-governance system:
▪︎ Digital ID → who you are
▪︎ CBDCs → what you buy
▪︎ Carbon scoring → how you move & heat your home
December 23, 2025
How Black WWII Veterans Ignited the Civil Rights Movement – W2W 058
TimeGhost History
Published 22 Dec 2025Decades before the words Black Lives Matter existed, Black American veterans were already fighting the same battle at home. After World War II, hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers returned from the frontlines of Europe and Asia believing they had earned the rights they had defended abroad. Instead, they were met with segregation, voter suppression, police violence, and terror under Jim Crow laws.
This episode explores how Black WWII veterans became a driving force behind the early Civil Rights Movement — joining the NAACP, challenging segregation in court, organizing protests, and refusing to accept second-class citizenship in the nation they had fought to protect.
From the brutal blinding of veteran Isaac Woodard Jr., to landmark legal battles led by Thurgood Marshall, from the Journey of Reconciliation to Brown v. Board of Education, this is the story of how the fight for freedom moved from foreign battlefields to American streets, courtrooms, buses, and classrooms.
We follow the rise of mass nonviolent resistance through figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the creation of the SCLC — while also confronting the violent backlash, political resistance, and human cost that defined the struggle.
This is not just the history of civil rights legislation. It is the story of veterans who refused to stop fighting — and a reminder that equality in the United States has never been automatic, inevitable, or finished.
(more…)
December 21, 2025
Women are walking away from the corporate world
On her Substack, Elizabeth Nickson starts her most recent post with the shocking headline that “400,000 women left the workforce this year”:
Digging into these reports, it seems the problem is that no one wants to mentor young women, as seniors traditionally have done for young men. No one seems to want to promote women as equally as they do men. Also women don’t want to “work as hard”. They aren’t “as ambitious” as men.
Also women do twice as much uncompensated labor as men, taking on the great majority of household chores, and, as well, are expected to organize the Christmas party. Not me, I might add — on a personal note. I cook. He does everything else.(editors note)
This means they are over-burdened and resentful and they are quitting. Four hundred thousand women left the workforce in 2025, putting down their tools and refusing to spend their lives working for “the man”.
The reports and accompanying “analyses” in the mainstream cry that government and corporations should do more! More of other people’s money chasing a fruitless dream that goes against human nature and sets sex against sex, turns family dynamics into a conflict zone, and takes away yet another chunk of private life to be traded on the market.
Quitting is the right choice.
Rather than leaving a job they love, they are quitting for a better life. As one creator said, “Women, during the pandemic, got a sense of what it felt like to not be tied to a desk five days a week in an office. Women started to expand their dreams, expand what was inside of them, and they started to really tun into what was in their gut and in their heart. And a lot of that was ‘I don’t want to work for somebody else’s dreams. I want to spend more time with my kids, I want to spend more time in community, I want to launch a business, I wanna a robust side hustle. I want to be an author, I want to be a content creator.’ I’m excited to see what women build when they are untethered to a corporate job. For a lot of millennial women, it’s I’m going to do something better, I’m gonna do something different.”
This in fact, is enormously exciting to me. Because our towns and cities are bereft of female genius — which is not moving widgets around for McKinsey. Our main streets are mostly barren wastes of utility, and the only town center in most places is the parking lot of a big box store. Unless you live in a tourist town and then it’s commercial cosplaying of an earlier better time.
Charitable work is equally as utilitarian, and the assignment of care of the weak to government is brutal and failing. There are more homeless, more lost and broken people every single year. It’s as if the vast, resplendently-funded homeless bureaucracies think that filing quarterly and annual reports filled with noble-sounding “initiatives” is the same as actually solving the problem. I had one middle-class woman warrior in my house say that they were trying to get more hookers on the streets of good neighborhoods. These people are literally, insane.
Women individuating and returning to a private life indicates they are yearning after a more traditional and based occupation for women and I’m not talking about submission, early child bearing and a boss daddy. My pioneer family women, all ten thousand of them ran small businesses, a home farm, the general store, did bookkeeping, ran a workshop, and/or (usually and) some kind of business in town that was charitable, before that was taken over by corporatism and the ravenous maw of the public service who never saw an innovation they didn’t want to ruin by systematizing and ripping out the heart and purpose.
That and only that is the history of women in America, not this cobbled together whining, mewling, weak, oppressed, screeching, “stressed”, “exhausted”, victim. Women, from 1600-1950 had real problems to solve. They were fully adult.
The generations since tried corporate life. It sucked. And they’re not going back. I think this is a forerunner of the life pattern of women into the future. In fact, in millennial-world, one person with a W-2 job and one person with an entrepreneurial spirit is touted as how you game the system to perfection. Taxes are limited, security is up-levelled, and you can actually build something together, rather than both partners slaving away in the globalist maw.
I expect this to take flight almost immediately.
Because women in corporate life?
Nightmare.
This is what these reports are ignoring. Senior officers do not want to mentor or promote women because they are nightmares to work with. They have been trained by their universities and culture to be ideological freaks, demanding and whining and surreptitiously tearing each other down. There was a study done in the 80’s, before ideology took over social research, that found women in corporate life practiced Power Dead Even, which meant crabs in a bucket, baby. If someone was perceived as too powerful, tear them down.
Introduce that into corporate “culture” and nothing gets done. No wonder senior executives don’t mentor or promote women.
Update, 22 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
