Quotulatiousness

September 22, 2026

The future of online free speech for Canadians

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

The Liberals in Ottawa prefer not to hear uppity citizens yapping about Liberal policies, and having a majority in the House of Commons means that there’s very little chance that they won’t be able to ram through a bill to curtail the ability of Canadians to speak freely online — that’s why I put a “warrant canary” in my daily Substack summary of blog posts. On X, John Carter has some advice that may be helpful to Canadians who don’t agree with the government:

Carney is essentially trying to implement Yookay style online speech controls. With his stolen majority government, there’s no way to stop him, and so no reason to expect that he won’t succeed.

Canadian nationalists therefore need to start being smart. Use coded language. Avoid overt “hate speech”. Don’t advocate violence. Use positive messaging, love of country rather than hatred of other. Make their job as difficult as possible.

This is nothing the right hasn’t seen before. The bad old days of Twitter censorship are not so far behind us. Britain and Europe already have very similar laws. That hasn’t stopped their nationalist communities. Censorship doesn’t change the underlying social conditions. At worst it prevents people from being too direct. Furthermore, by forcing dissidents to be clever, it exerts a selective pressure that raises the intellectual level of dissidents, while making the censors themselves increasingly ridiculous.

Censors themselves are usually very stupid people. Coded language tends to go right over their tiny heads. They don’t handle satire well. It’s also very easy to mock a regime like this by parroting its own vocabulary. Elbows up, everyone. Diversity is our greatest strength.

State capacity is another factor. How many censors do they actually have? How competent are they? (diversity is our greatest strength!) How many people can they actually enforce these laws on? Every time someone gets dragged into court the state is burning a significant quantity of time, energy, and attention. The cost-benefit of tasking bureaucrats, police officers, lawyers, and judges to punish random shitposts is math that doesn’t math very well. The entire strategy relies on making an example of a few to cow the many. If the many aren’t cowed, because for instance despite the censorship they can see with their own eyes what’s actually happening to their country on the street, all censorship does is piss people off and further undermine the legitimacy of a regime that would not be resorting to censorship in the first place if its legitimacy was beyond reproach.

This is bad. I’m not looking forward to it. But panic won’t help. Keep your wits about you, stay calm, be smart.

September 21, 2026

A short check-in on what’s happening in Canada

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

As I’ve mentioned before, even though I’m Canadian I don’t cover a lot of Canadian stories unless it has broader international interest. That said, I do think it’s worth the effort for non-Canadians to occasionally get some insight into what new insanity is going on above the 49th Parallel. The Rewrite has a helpful summary of recent news from the Maple Gulag that may be of interest:

For a Canadian blog, I get a lot more non-Canadian visitors.

It looks like Canadians are about to cheerfully reconnect with what they were taught for a decade is their unforgivable colonial past. First, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), primarily citing unnamed sources, reported that Prime Minister Mark Carney was hoping to make Canada an associate member of the European Union. But then CTV News, quoting a senior PMO official, reported Canada wasn’t seeking EU membership “in any capacity.” Paul Wells wrote a column explaining how WSJ had torqued the story and then Carney, who tends to get truthy under pressure, as Brian Lilley pointed out, told reporters he wasn’t seeking anything called membership but something something else something something. A couple days later, EU President Ursula von der Leyen disagreed with that line when she declared in a speech that she wanted to join with Canada at the “highest level possible” and she’d be happy to welcome Canada as an “associate member.” In response, the Financial Times reported other EU leaders were thinking, uh, not so much about the whole thing but good luck Canada and the Daily Mail chimed in with news Brussels was in an uproar. Then, proving it was right all along, WSJ quoted a Canadian official saying “We were the ones who proposed associate membership”, which Carney and his office had denied.

US President Donald Trump said if Canada joins the EU with a hostile intent (the qualifier having been omitted in some Canadian reports), the USA will bring in more EU tariffs. Our PM recaptured headlines with a speech promoting an undefined but aspirational union and flew home to a nation that polls indicate is now wildly enthusiastic about embracing settler culture even while the Daily Telegraph said the whole thing was already unraveling.

The challenge for journalists was to make sense of all this prestidigitation while wondering if maybe they should have taken the time to ask who Carney was hanging out with during his recent vacay in Tuscany. Many were left wondering if PMMC could do this without Parliamentary approval which, as every working journalist should know, he can, partly because they let him. When it comes to treaties, it’s a one-man show. Credit the Toronto Star‘s Althia Raj for noting in regards to Carney’s plan to further privatize major airports that “The Liberal government has no mandate to do this”.

While The Line‘s Jen Gerson and others were taking umbrage with the PMO’s preference for foreign media, John Ivison was getting some decent insider dirt for National Post on how vigorously bureaucrats are resisting the PM’s need for speed — a concept with which they are notoriously unfamiliar.

A further chapeau to Brian Passifiume for the scoop on how, while Carney is urging us to buy Canadian, his government hired an American company to run his Toronto investor match making sessions.

I have frequently pointed out that the mystery of why Germans supported Hitler and the National Socialists in the 1930s comes down largely to the value of non-stop propaganda: ordinary Germans read the newspapers and listened to the radio and the messages they got were increasingly co-ordinated to praise the party and the work of its leader and to demonize enemies of the state. What brought it home to me was just how efficiently Canadian relic media spare no effort to praise our very own Dear Leader and belittle the opposition or private citizens who don’t automatically wave their elbows on demand:

Putting on the neuroscience hat for a minute.

When people are called “traitors” simply for saying Canada should negotiate a workable deal with the United States, something interesting is happening psychologically.

The brain has a fast threat-response pathway and a slower regulatory pathway. The amygdala can detect a perceived threat almost immediately and trigger a stress response.

When people feel they are losing control or fear social judgment, cortisol can rise. Under enough perceived threat, slower prefrontal-cortex functions such as weighing evidence, considering alternatives and regulating emotional reactions can become less dominant.

Now add politics.

If Trump, the United States, Canadian sovereignty and national loyalty become emotionally loaded symbols, a disagreement over tariffs can stop being treated as an economic question. It becomes: “Are you with us or against us?”

That is where tribal thinking can take over.

Calling somebody a traitor because they want negotiations is the fast response. The slower question is: What outcome produces the least economic damage for Canadians? What does retaliation cost us? What can Canada realistically gain through negotiation? What happens to workers, farmers and businesses if there is no deal?

You can oppose a deal after doing that analysis. You can support one. The important part is how you reached the conclusion.

I saw much the same psychological process during COVID. Questions that should have involved evidence, probabilities, costs, benefits and changing information often became tests of political identity and loyalty. Once that happens, people defend the tribe first and examine the evidence second.

The neuroscience doesn’t tell us which political side is automatically correct.

It does tell us why fear, loss of control, social judgment and group identity can push people toward rapid emotional responses, while stepping back and deliberately examining evidence requires more cognitive regulation.

Sometimes the most rational thing you can do is refuse the loyalty test and ask the boring question:

What actually works?

September 20, 2026

There are wedding gifts and there are wedding gifts

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

Gift-giving has been a thing since caveman days, they say, but sometimes gifts carry strings along with them that are impossible to ignore, or as The Grim Historian puts it, “never let a mobster pay for your wedding”:

Nothing says “just a wedding gift” like the benefactor whose role stayed secret until ProPublica had to put an arrow over his head.
Photo: Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram; annotation/source: ProPublica.

My Grandma Ella had a rule about gifts, usually delivered while waving a wooden spoon over a white apron so stippled with tomato sauce it could have been entered into evidence.

She would say, “Never accept gifts. That’s how a rich man turns you into a beggar.”

That may sound cynical, but no Italian survives a lifetime of weddings, funerals, Sunday dinners, and relatives saying “forget about it” without learning that generosity has a very long memory.

A gift creates an imbalance. You give me something. Now I am indebted to you. Sure, you may insist it is “just a gift.” But I have seen enough crisp white envelopes exchange hands to know there are gifts, and then there are … gifts.

Say I give you a hundred dollars and tomorrow you hand me a hundred dollars back, congratulations…we have invented banking. Or say you sign up for my breathtakingly grim history newsletter. I have provided you a service in exchange for your 5 ducats, but we are all clear on the bargain.

But suppose I give you something you can’t return. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now the books stay open. And a man who keeps your books open is not your friend. He owns a piece of you.

Which brings us to Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding and who owns him.

ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski reported this week that Umar Kremlev — a Russian businessman closely associated with Vladimir Putin — gifted Trump Jr. and Bettina Trump quite the wedding shindig in the Bahamas.

According to records and interviews ProPublica reviewed, Kremlev paid to rent a private island, covered an elaborate fireworks show, and had his team help organize the festivities. There were helicopters, seaplanes, oceanfront villas, and a five-tier funfetti cake flown in from Florida. So not exactly the crystal punch bowl from Aunt Linda.

Fortunately, after ProPublica published its story, the newlyweds fessed up. Yes, Don Jr. and Bettina Trump have a wealthy Russian benefactor (sorry, “friend”) granting party favors. Then they made a statement that would have my Italian grandmother shaking her mano fica.

“Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.”

Just a gift.

QotD: Brexit – the process is the punishment

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Shortly after the results of the Brexit referendum were declared and Mr. Cameron resigned as Prime Minister, the French newspaper, Le Figaro, published a little cartoon. Two French peasants are looking across the Channel towards England, and one says to the other (or words to this effect), “They do things differently over there. They pay attention to referendum results.”

Well, yes and no. There is little doubt that a large part of the political class, the upper bureaucracy and the intelligentsia did their very best to prevent, or at least obstruct, Britain’s departure from the European Union. The Prime Minister who followed Mr. Cameron, Mrs. May, was herself in favour of remaining, and yet she was put in charge of the negotiations on the British side. This was like putting an ardent pacifist in charge of an army, and indeed she managed to negotiate a deal that (from the British point of view) was the worst of both worlds.

It should have been obvious from the first that Brexit was an existential question for the European Union, as well as for Britain, of course. If Britain prospered, or simply failed to suffer greatly, after Brexit, this would have been a disaster for the European Union, in the populations of which there was significant and growing scepticism of or opposition to the “European Project” (it is the only project I know whose end is never stated, though I suspect it is a superstate in whose administration politics in the normal sense of elections, appeals to public opinion, etc., are not to be allowed to intrude). An example had to be made, and in effect has been made. No other member state will want to go through what Britain has gone through these last four years. The light must not be worth the candle.

Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.

September 19, 2026

Internal migration patterns in the United States

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s become a commonplace to see yet another tech company pulling up stakes and leaving California … and the state government seems determined to get rid of many of their biggest economic contributors with new legislation to make life harder for companies and wealthy individuals (see the second item, for instance). But it’s not just California losing population to other states:

Universities in the NCAA Southeastern Conference.
Map from Wikimedia Commons

Americans have long expressed their political preferences at the ballot box and their economic preferences with moving vans. Increasingly, they are expressing a third preference — where their children attend college — and the destination looks remarkably like the other two.

In 2025, North Carolina gained more than 84,000 residents from other states, more than any state in the union. Texas added over 67,000. California lost more than 229,000, and New York lost nearly 138,000, continuing a migration that has by now acquired the character of a rout rather than a trend. Yet few have noticed that the same states drawing families and factories are drawing something else: students, and with them, the institutions built to educate them.

For most of the 20th century, the hierarchy of American public higher education was as fixed as the Electoral College map of a one-party era. Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin — these were the names invoked when a public university wished to be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard. They remain formidable.

But formidable is no longer synonymous with singular.

Consider what the Southeastern Conference, or SEC — an organization whose reputation was built on forward passes rather than research grants — has quietly assembled. Texas A&M enrolls more than 79,000 students, a figure that would have seemed a typographical error a generation ago (see here and here). The University of Florida enrolls roughly 56,000 (see here, here, and here). Collectively, SEC institutions now educate more than half a million students, with total enrollment around 620,000 (see here and here), a statistic that ought to interest university presidents in blue states rather more than it apparently does.

This is not the result of some coordinated Southern strategy hatched in a statehouse. Universities are lagging indicators of demography, not leading ones. States that attract families acquire, in due course, college students. States that generate jobs retain their graduates rather than exporting them, as Rust Belt states have exported so much else.

States that welcome capital acquire, eventually, the tax base with which to build ambitious public institutions. Ambition, it turns out, is portable. The family that leaves Illinois for Tennessee brings its expectations for its children along with the furniture, and both eventually find a permanent address in Knoxville or some other city in the Volunteer State.

Affordability, too, plays its part, and Americans have noticed that a nationally respectable degree from a Southern flagship costs a fraction of what state flagships elsewhere demand for a comparable credential, at a moment when the public’s confidence in the value of a degree generally has become, to put it charitably, provisional.

One of California’s most impactful proposed pieces of legislation has been their “Billionaire tax”:

California’s proposed “billionaire’s tax” on the assets of wealthy state residents enjoys a slim lead in the polls leading up to the midterm elections, though so do two measures that, if they draw more votes, could render the scheme unenforceable. That makes for a high-stakes battle as many prosperous Californians are already fleeing to escape a tax that could force them to surrender ownership stakes in companies they’ve founded. Even if it doesn’t pass, a new report warns that the proposal is based on faulty research and could do vast economic damage.

[…]

The Wealth Tax Scheme Is Based on Unusual Accounting

Now, a new report finds the proposed wealth tax is not only dangerous for California’s economic prospects; it’s also based on bad research. According to the report’s author, Independent Institute research fellow Kristian Fors, “this proposal has been heavily influenced by the work of UC Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman to justify the concept of wealth taxation”. Saez and Zucman have generated news headlines with their claims that the wealthy are undertaxed in comparison to lower-income Americans. But as Fors points out, the estimate that drew so much news coverage claimed that “the overall tax rate for the top 400 richest households in the nation was 23 percent”, while just a year earlier, Saez and Zucman “estimated that the top 1 percent paid an overall tax rate of approximately 36 percent; the authors found a share of 41 percent for the top 0.001 percent of earners in the most recent year of their survey, a category encompassing billionaires and high multimillionaires”.

The discrepancy, according to Fors, comes from how the economists treat corporate income taxes. Conventional analysis assumes that corporate taxes burden shareholders, workers, and consumers as the tax gets passed on. That results in the earlier estimate of a 41 percent tax rate for the wealthiest. To reach their much lower 23 percent estimated rate, Saez and Zucman used a non-standard analysis — and while the results of that approach won news coverage, they weren’t subject to peer review.

“Saez and Zucman’s empirical work on the California billionaire tax proposal retains these same unconventional accounting practices from 2019 without addressing their conflict with the mainstream corporate tax incidence literature,” cautions Fors.

The Independent Institute report observes that privacy laws prevented Saez and Zucman from drawing on personal income tax and other financial records. They relied on the Forbes 400 list, and “a 2010 study by a group of IRS statisticians found that the Forbes 400 dramatically overestimates the net worth of individuals in their lifetimes when compared to probate records of their estates after death”. Adjusting for that discrepancy produces estimates of “an average effective tax rate of 38 percent between 2018 and 2020, as compared to the 24 percent claimed by Saez and Zucman for this period”.

September 18, 2026

Worrying about post-combat lawfare will crush initiative and morale

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Law, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As mentioned in Dr. Robert Lyman’s account yesterday, the British government wants to turn back the hands of time to change the rules of engagement under which British Army troops and police conducted themselves during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. It may be an exciting prospect for law firms, activists, and other anti-military groups, but it would set a terrible precedent for British use of military force from this moment onwards. At The Critic, Alexander Gray explains why this is a dangerous and stupid idea that should be dropped forever:

“British Army working during the Field Training Exercise” by U.S. Army Europe is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 .

The debate about the hounding of veterans through the courts has long been presented in terms of fairness. This is indeed one side of the story. No decent country should tolerate servicemen being dragged through repeated investigations decades after the events in question, often without new evidence and after previous inquiries have already reached their conclusions.

But focusing only on veterans misses an even more urgent point: this has become a national security threat.

Over the past two decades, the legal framework governing military operations has changed. Courts have increasingly applied standards developed for peacetime to scrutinise wartime situations of uncertainty and danger which often demand split-second judgement. Human rights law, designed principally to regulate relations between the state and individuals, has increasingly been applied to military operations, including to situations already governed by the Law of Armed Conflict.

This is having consequences on the battlefield. Personnel who believe that a lawful decision taken in combat may be reconstructed years later in a civilian courtroom are now incentivised to be more cautious, more process-driven and less willing to exercise initiative. That hesitation can slow decisions in situations where delay may place lives and the success of an operation at risk. The prospect of repeated investigations and prolonged legal uncertainty is also damaging morale and contributing to experienced personnel leaving the service, depriving the Armed Forces of skills and judgement that are difficult to replace.

This is why the Prosperity Institute has published the Military Operations Bill, presented to Parliament this week by Sir David Davis MP. It reasserts the principle that combat operations should be judged primarily by the Law of Armed Conflict. Courts have an important role in punishing wrongdoing, but they should not become alternative command structures reviewing military judgement from the safety of hindsight.

Update, 19 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

“The destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us”

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Europe, History, Media, Politics, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack Notes, John Carter points out the vast chasm between the capabilities of western nations and their timid aspirations for the future:

LeMO Erster Weltkrieg – Kriegsverlauf – Frühjahrsoffensive 1918
Photo from dhm.de

Western civilization is terrified of itself. The destructive power of our militaries is unparalleled in history. We can devastate continents in minutes. We can annihilate entire populations. We can reduce cities to rubble.

But we don’t.

The same is true of our industrial capability. We can erase mountains, redirect rivers, carve tunnels deep into bedrock, reshape entire landscapes as we please.

But we don’t.

The destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us. Meanwhile, the unintended consequences of unrestricted development — air pollution, water pollution, soil erosion, habitat destruction, even the sheer rampant ugliness of so much of postwar industry — has left us leery of just doing things.

In the postwar era we began binding ourselves ever more tightly with laws. International law to restrict the use of military force; environmental laws, labour laws, indigenous rights laws, and so on to govern the use of our industrial capacity. We did this for good reason. No one wants nuclear war, or even a repeat of World War Two. No one wants another Three Mile Island, another Chernobyl. With great power comes great responsibility, and no civilization has ever been more powerful.

But the result has been to paralyze us.

Our militaries watch helplessly as supplicants invade us with begging bowls held up as their battle standards, prohibited from shooting the unarmed boats by governments bound by international treaties to respect the human rights of anyone who claims to be seeking asylum. Meanwhile we find that it is almost impossible to build anything. High-speed rail, bridges, highways, housing — all of it is slowed to an imperceptible crawl by a regulatory overburden designed to do precisely that. Gulliver held down by Lilliputian strings of his own design, his flesh swarming with hungry ants.

The emerging political coalition of the right is largely comprised of those factions who have grown impatient with this artificial paralysis of the will. Why shouldn’t we use our military to assert ourselves abroad, and defend our borders at home? Why shouldn’t we turn loose the incredible power of modern, heavily automated, high-tech industry to build wonders on a scale never before known? Why shouldn’t we conquer space? Why shouldn’t we use biomedical science to make ourselves beautiful, brilliant, healthy and fit? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be powerful? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be strong? We shouldn’t we reach for greatness?

The opposition consists of all those factions who are horrified by this, terrified of the strength of Western civilization, intent on slowing it, stopping its engine, dismantling the machine, and salting the biocultural soil from which it grew. Third worldists, climatists, AI safetyists, pacifists, open-borders activists, misinformation censors, DEI ideologues, international human rights NGOs, all of these cooperate to throw sand in the gears, to sabotage the West, to subordinate it and ultimately to destroy it.

September 17, 2026

British government seeks to retroactively change the Rules of Engagement during “The Troubles”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m old enough to have had lengthy conversations with British soldiers and officers who were serving or had recently served in Northern Ireland at the tail end of “The Troubles”. It was a dangerous situation the troops found themselves in and the Rules of Engagement they worked under at least recognized that it wasn’t a normal day at the office back home. On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman explains why the current government’s plan to retroactively change the rules that governed the actions of the British military forces is one of the worst possible things they could do:

Lieutenant Robert Lyman in the Ballymurphy, 1983, in a photograph snapped by Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Elliott, CO of 1LI at the time. He was driving past in his Landrover and spotted a photo opportunity.
Photo via The War Room

For those who know me well, the idea that I might now be encouraging young men and women not to join the Armed Forces might sound that I had lost my marbles. I can assure you that is not the case. I am deadly serious. This government’s determination, building on the surrender of the previous Conservative government to the varying dictats of the ECHR, will drive an impossible moral and legal wedge between the people who the country ask to do its dirty work, and the government that sends them in harms way. It is an intolerable set of affairs that all sensible people in his country should oppose. What sort of perversity might think that this behaviour is acceptable from any government? I despair, yet it seems that this is precisely what our current morally impoverished government seems to desire.

[…]

The central concern is that the proposed changes will expose servicemen and women, many of whom have already undergone judicial scrutiny for actions undertaken during the Troubles, to further litigation and investigation. In practice, this is likely to encourage a new wave of cases brought by individuals seeking to revisit or reinterpret events from a campaign in which terrorist organisations such as the IRA and INLA were ultimately defeated.

The immediate implications are troubling enough. The longer-term precedent, however, is far more serious. If this legislation proceeds, it will send a clear message to today’s servicemen and women, that even after they have acted lawfully, completed investigations, and fulfilled their duty to the State, they may still face renewed legal jeopardy in later decades. It undermines the fundamental bond of trust between those who serve and the government that sends them into harm’s way.

Every member of the British Armed Forces operates within a strict and clearly defined legal framework. These rules, embodied in the Laws of Armed Conflict and implemented through Rules of Engagement (RoE), govern the use of force in military operations. During my own service, I spent countless hours learning these rules, teaching them to my soldiers, and ensuring they were followed in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and elsewhere.

This debate is not about whether soldiers should be above the law. Of course they are not, nor should they be. Rather, it is about whether the rules that governed military operations at the time can be retrospectively reinterpreted after a conflict has ended. The concern is that former adversaries will be able to pursue legal action against veterans for actions that were considered lawful under the Rules of Engagement in force at the time.

Today, Policy Exchange published an excellent report examining this issue in relation to former members of the SAS who served in Northern Ireland. The report sets out the problem clearly and persuasively, concluding that the proposed changes should be abandoned. I agree.

Predictably, some MPs have defended the legislation. Diane Abbott, for example, has argued on X that opposition to the changes amounts to “a call for armed forces personnel to be placed above the law.” That characterisation is deeply misleading. The debate has never been about exempting soldiers from the law. It is about subjecting veterans to repeated investigations and additional layers of judicial scrutiny many years after the events in question, often in ways that were never demanded of those they fought against on behalf of the nation.

At its core, this issue is one of fairness. It raises questions about double standards, retrospective judgment, and the constant shifting of the goalposts. Veterans who served under one set of rules are now being told that those rules may no longer be sufficient protection against further legal action.

You don’t hate the relic media nearly as much as they deserve

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

The relic media in Canada has — thanks to generous government subsidies — become a maple-flavoured version of the North Korean news media, but even in the United States where there’s still a somewhat competitive market, most media outlets are delighted to act as unpaid propagandists … and have been that way for generations:

Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for lying about Stalin’s Ukraine famine while millions starved. His employer, the New York Times, never returned that prize. The institutional rot ran deeper than one reporter.

In 1936, Times Moscow correspondent Harold Denny watched the first of Stalin’s Great Purge trials and reported the proceedings as credible. The defendants, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev among them, confessed to plotting murder and sabotage. Denny saw no obvious coercion and wrote accordingly. The NKVD had spent weeks breaking these men through sleep deprivation, threats against their families, and relentless psychological torture until they would say anything in open court.

Every confession was fabricated. Every defendant was executed anyway. Stalin murdered roughly 750,000 people during the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938, and the Times gave the operation a veneer of legitimacy at its most critical moment.

Central planners require a monopoly on information to survive. When the newspaper of record in the most powerful capitalist country on earth launders your show trials as fair proceedings, you buy yourself years of Western political goodwill. Stalin purchased that goodwill with useful idiots who confused proximity to power with insight.

You pay for this dynamic today every time an institution that failed catastrophically keeps its credentials, its prizes, and its authority to declare what counts as credible journalism.

Duranty would have been proud of Time magazine had he been alive today.

QotD: Boris Johnson

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

Some generous souls are claiming it’s not Boris’s fault — which may be true, up to a point, of which more in a moment — but whoever is to blame one thing is abundantly clear: Britain is a failed state, the Sick Man of Europe, and those of us who grew up believing that to have been born British was to have won the lottery in life have now been sorely disabused of the notion.

How can this possibly have happened to the land of Magna Carta and English Common Law, the heroic seafaring nation which coloured the atlas pink and stamped its character on half the world’s nations from Australia and the U.S. to India and South Africa, that invented most of the world’s best sports, produced most of its greatest literature, beat Philip II of Spain, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler and discovered almost everything worth discovering?

Just when did Britain become so incredibly, embarrassingly shit?

Well, it’s easy to blame Boris, as I have done on occasion, for being a priapic lard-butted lightweight chancer who should never have been given the keys to Number 10. As we’ve learned to our cost, he’s all mouth and no trousers, great for an impromptu bon mot or jolly photo op but perfectly useless in times of crisis, being too easily led, having no opinions of his own, the backbone of sponge and the moral character of a Plecostomus catfish.

James Delingpole, “Britain is now the sick man of Europe”, Breitbart, 2020-08-14.

September 16, 2026

The new front in the British “flag war” – Welsh castles

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

You may have heard that at least one municipal government in England is trying to ban private citizens flying both the Union flag and the St. George’s Cross, yet actively encouraging the use of other national or political flags. On Substack, Paul Embery shows just how far the anti-British/anti-English activists are willing to go … in this case all the way to Wales (where, yes, there’s already some local anti-English sentiment to start with):

Pakistani flags fly over medieval walls in Cardiff.
Photo from X via Paul Embery

SOMETIMES it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Britain’s political elites are engaged in some sort of private game to see just how far they can test the patience of the native population before it snaps.

A people who were, and still are, remarkably tolerant in all sorts of ways, including towards those from minority backgrounds and cultures, seem daily to have their good faith exploited.

Only someone who had been living under a rock for the past couple of decades could have failed to notice the gulf that has emerged between our political institutions and everyday folk living outside of our fashionable cities and university towns.

That gulf – which is widening still – explains why a palpable sense of polarisation exists across many parts of the country today.

The latest attempt to stir the pot comes courtesy of Cardiff council, which recently decided to fly the flag of Pakistan from the city’s castle – one of the Welsh nation’s most historic and iconic sites. The flag was apparently hoisted in celebration of Pakistan’s independence day and stayed there over two days (a similar thing happened in 2024 — see image).

Needless to say, a row swiftly broke out, with Reform voices locally and nationally attacking the decision and in return facing accusations from their political opponents – who seemed to close ranks around the issue very tightly – that they were seeking to incite hatred and division.

Recent history tells us that anyone who expresses even mild disapproval about this type of virtuous ingratiation of foreign nationalities and cultures by our public bodies is likely to face taunts of being some kind of embittered xenophobe or reactionary. And, usually, the condemnation will be accompanied by a lecture trumpeting the merits of living in a diverse and multicultural society.

But those who harbour misgivings surely have a point. Because such acts do rank as a kind of provocation. It’s one thing seeking to foster good relations with other nations and cultures – such an approach is eminently sensible – but it’s another thing entirely indulging those nations and cultures to such a degree that many indigenous citizens begin to feel their own country is losing its historical identity and turning into something resembling a supersized version of the Olympic village. And that is where many Britons feel their country is now.

That Pakistan is a member of the Commonwealth did not appear to be the prompt for Cardiff Council’s decision, for no councillor seems to have cited that justification in defence of it. Moreover, the colours of non-Commonwealth nations, such as Poland, have also been displayed over the castle in recent times.

“Oh, it’s only a flag, and it’s just for two days”, the citizens-of-nowhere will argue. Except that it isn’t only a flag, and it isn’t just two days. What we have seen over the past couple of decades is a subtle but concerted effort on the part of Britain’s elite class to embed the ideology of cosmopolitan universalism across all areas of our public life.

These people are globalists in every sense. They see our country as a shop, not a home.

They believe in permissive migration policies, free trade libertarianism and technocratic supranationalism – all things to which large chunks of the population are hostile.

Update: I’ve heard that it helps to actually include the URL …

Update the second, 17 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Veterans of the GWOT “saw things with our own eyes that are hard for others to believe”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Cynical Publius explains why some of the strongest opposition to Islamification comes from people who’ve seen Islamic culture up close in countries where it’s the majority religion:

Does this photo of Afghan men watching a young boy dance give you the creeps? It should.

Have you noticed that the community that is most vocal in warning about the Islamification of the USA is the GWOT veterans’ community?

That’s because we saw things with our own eyes that are hard for others to believe:

  1. The treatment of women as chattel property. Goats are treated better than daughters — no exaggeration.
  2. Widespread pedophilia and bestiality while at the same time people we call “LGBTQ+” in the West are subject to barbaric methods of execution.
  3. An absolute lack of freedom of religion.
  4. Wanton disregard for human life.
  5. Insanely paranoid antisemitism straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
  6. Wholly corrupt governments; bribery as a uniform standard.
  7. Tribalism to an extreme: tribe trumps truth and justice, always.
  8. In the Gulf Arab countries, “Third Country Nationals” from poor Muslim countries engaged in menial labor and literally treated as slaves.
  9. Absolute confidence that Islam will violently conquer the rest of the world, and a belief that this is just and proper.
  10. Acceptance of the idea that lying can be and is necessary and proper.

These are not one-off observations; these are widespread norms that are easily observed and experienced in day-to-day life in any nation that accepts Sharia law. ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE COMMONPLACE. Having seen this stuff up close and personal across the entire Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa, American veterans have unwittingly become like the prophets of old, warning everyone else of the dangers we have seen that we never wish to see come ashore in America.

Yet somehow our voices are not being heard sufficiently, and we now see literal Communists wishing to import these evil practices to the USA en masse, as a path to their own power.

Guess what Commies? It’s the other way around, you are the ones being used and when the Green forces dispose of you Red forces, it’s not going to be pretty.

Wise up.

Update, 17 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 15, 2026

“I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose free will”

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

For some reason, the idea that humans don’t really have free will is very popular among progressives, even if they know individually that they have free will they believe most of the rest of humanity somehow doesn’t:

A simplified free will taxonomy
Image by Richardbrucebaxter via Wikimedia Commons.

A fashionable view of human behavior holds that because everything has a cause, no one is truly responsible for their actions.

In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment”, he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in Free Will (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep and then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.

Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.

The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.

Stuart Doyle offers a useful analogy that challenges this claim. Suppose we ask whether an apple is red. The determinist looks closer. He realizes the apple is nothing but atoms. Because no individual atom is red, he concludes the apple can’t really be red. The error is obvious. Color exists at the scale of the apple, not at the scale of an atom.

Free will works the same way. A choice exists at the scale of a person thinking, weighing and deciding. Looking at the molecules underneath and finding no choice there doesn’t prove that choice is an illusion.

A Fall election seems quite likely

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

One of the advantages of a Westminster-style parliamentary system is that election dates are not fixed, so that the Prime Minister can take advantage of perceived opportunities to win majorities when they arise. It must be very tempting to Mark Carney to call an election as soon as he can, as the Elbozos are still waving their arms and chanting his praises for “standing up to the Bad Orange Man”. His latest notion of trying to add Canada to the European Union as some sort of “associate member” is also popular among people who think that Canada should be more like Europe (the Venn diagram of Elbozos and Europhiles is almost a perfect circle). On X, Jay Currie stares into the abyss of yet another Liberal majority government with a renewed electoral mandate:

The Prime Minister of all the Canadas is prepping for his Davos 2.0 speech to the European Parliament on the 17th when, apparently, he is going to propose that Canada become some sort of associate member of the EU. God help us.

The developed world can be thought of as two camps: the progressives and, for want of a better term the nationalists (could be traditionalists but that is only one strain within the nationalist camp). The supra nationalist institutions, EU, UN etc are progressive to their core.

Progressives see borders as barriers to progress, believe diversity is strength, see international action as the only way to defeat the horror of “climate change”, want international controls on speech, technology and public health.

For progressives individual rights, the rule of law, property are all barriers to the greatest good for the greatest number. Citizenship is an antique concept best left in the 20th century.

Most importantly progressives see the state, rules and regulations, a constantly refreshed “New World Order” and managed decline as both beneficial and inevitable. Arc of History and all.

Nationalists begin with the tiniest unit in society, the individual, and take that unit seriously. What rights does an individual have? If you start there you automatically circumscribe the power of the state. You also set the state’s direction.

Taking individual rights seriously creates a state in which individuals matter, there their voluntary associations beginning with families, matter. “The greater good” is no more than a suggestion when it comes to protecting individual rights.

The Europe of the EU came out of the ashes of a world in which individuals were subjects rather than citizens (with the notable and sporadic exception of post Revolutionary France) and the concept of individual rights was fragile at best.

The progressive intent of the EU was to treat “Europeans” as interchangeable economic units whose value was locked to group identity and which must be prepared to share the burdens imposed for the greater good.

Nationalism was seen as regressive as was patriotism and the insistence that individuals had rights which over rode the “common good”. After all, the horrors of WWI and II were the products of patriotic nationalism.

The progressive European project worked quite well for the first twenty or so years when Marshall plan aid funded the rebuilding of Europe and membership in the EU was relatively restricted. Expansion and mass immigration strained the Community.

Part of the reason the EU worked quite well in the early years was that its goals were relatively modest, a trading bloc with harmonized economic regulation left individual countries to work out their social, legal and rights structures.

As with any progressive institution the modest goals of the early years were gradually replaced with “ambition”. The 1985 Schengen Agreement eliminated hard borders within the EU. The European Convention on Human Rights harmonized the rights of Europeans.

Part of the progressive ambition was the creation of a hitherto unknown entity known as “the European” superficially similar in concept to “the American”. Questions of nationality could be submerged as this new entity stepped into the world.

For the progressive camp the “European” was a giant step forward into a post national future. As indeed it was for a tiny minority of bureaucrats, academics, journalists, financiers and other members of a self appointed cognitive elite.

People who objected to this grand homogenization of the nations of Europe were obviously frightened of the inevitable future because, well, they were not well educated and, entre nous, not too bright.

For the “Europeans” the great cause of the 21st century was laid out in Rio in 1993 when a conference convened by Canadian Maurice Strong sounded the alarm about “global warming” currently rebranded “climate change”.

Now there was a global threat demanding a supra-national response where the “Europeans” could assume a leadership role by…well, by shipping all of their heavy industry offshore and building very expensive windmills and mandating electric cars.

To no one’s very great surprise the Europeans have managed to de-industrialize and regulate themselves to the point of actual poverty. Fortunately, it was all for the global greater good so the Europeans could congratulate themselves.

Not content with climate virtue, the Europeans (though not the regressive nationalist yobs) took it upon themselves to welcome millions of migrants. An act of humanity and also shrewd as the Europeans had given up having children.

Of course, the idea had been trial-ballooned recently to get Carney-friendly headlines ready in advance:

September 14, 2026

Performative Canadian politics again

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Prime Minister Mark Carney came to power promising that he was the best-qualified to deal with the US government on trade issues. Canadians assumed that this meant he’d be able to get as fair a trade deal with President Trump’s administration as possible. What he really meant was that he could do the most damage to cross-border trade relations in order to “pivot” to the EU and to China. He never intended to settle US-Canadian trade conditions, and his actions clearly show he was always putting the negotiations dead last in his priority list. And, thanks to the government’s generous subsidies to the relic media, instead of grilling him and his ministers for their blatant failures, they instead try to hold the opposition to account for things they have no control over.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison points out that it makes no economic sense for Canada to become part of the European Union as Carney now says he’s working toward:

This strikes me as remarkably stupid economic strategy.

Diversifying Canadian trade makes sense. Pretending Europe can somehow replace the economic relationship we have with the United States does not.

The United States is next door. Our railways, pipelines, electricity grids, manufacturing supply chains and energy markets have been integrated for generations. Even after the trade fight intensified, 71.7% of Canadian merchandise exports still went to the United States in 2025.

And Canada already has CETA with the European Union. Roughly 98% of EU tariff lines on Canadian goods became duty-free when CETA took effect, eventually rising to about 99%. If Canadian companies see profitable opportunities in Europe, they already have extraordinarily good market access.

So what exactly do we gain from some invented “associate membership” beyond CETA?

Potentially European regulatory obligations, political entanglements, financial contributions and pressure to harmonize Canadian rules with decisions made in Brussels, all to sell more goods across an ocean to markets that cannot duplicate the geographic advantage of the United States.

Norway rejected EU membership twice. Iceland opened accession negotiations and eventually walked away without joining. Both understood that you can have close economic relations with Europe without surrendering unnecessary national autonomy.

Canada should trade aggressively with Europe, Asia and everyone else who wants our products. But our first priority should be fixing the relationship with our largest customer, removing our own interprovincial trade barriers, building pipelines and ports, and making Canada competitive again.

Picking a fight with the neighbour who buys most of your exports and then announcing that Brussels might become your new best friend isn’t economic sophistication.

It looks like desperation dressed up as grand strategy.

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