Quotulatiousness

May 12, 2026

First One Nation party MP elected in Australian by-election

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

After the surge in support for populist Reform Party candidates in the British local elections, Australia’s populist One Nation party achieved their first member of the House of Representatives in a by-election in Farrer, with David Farley receiving 57% of the votes:

Australia’s One Nation party has won its first lower-house seat in a moment that’s been described as a political earthquake. As with Reform’s success in the council elections here, its significance is already being argued over.

The fact remains that One Nation candidate David Farley won over 57 per cent of the tally in Farrer, a vast regional constituency in New South Wales, a weathervane election that was triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley after she was ousted as leader of the opposition conservative Liberal Party.

Saturday’s poll was the first federal test of One Nation’s support after the party recorded the second-highest number of votes out of any political party in the South Australian state election in March and, importantly, since the change of leadership of the Liberal Coalition opposition. With it, as I predicted a week or two ago, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party broke through Australia’s political glass ceiling.

Why and how? Well, for one significant reason. In response to her rise in the Australian polls, for the first time Ms Hanson and her party were endorsed by the opposition Liberal and Country (National) Party coalition. Blessed with two new leaders – two men prepared to defy the woke establishment and media – they “preferenced” the One Party candidate ensuring One Nation won the seat. Don’t forget Pauline Hanson has been far more of a persona non grata to the Australian establishment elite than Nigel Farage has to ours. I can’t see him having the chutzpah to turn up to Parliament wearing a full burqa!

Far better than anything I can write to capture the significance of the moment is David Flint’s account in Spectator Australia, titled “The Farrer earthquake: how the commentariat got it wrong“.

It is so good that I feel sure that Editor Rowan Dean will forgive me for quoting big chunks from it:

    The political establishment is in a state of shock … When Sky News Australia took the unprecedented step of calling the Farrer by-election for One Nation at an extraordinarily early hour, it wasn’t just calling a seat; it was announcing the end of an era. For the first time in Australian history, One Nation has captured a House of Representatives seat at an election, and if the current opinion polls are any indication, it is merely the first of many.

And that is the point. He goes on:

    The “commentariat” – that insulated class of pundits and pollsters – has spent years repeating the tired myth that One Nation is a party of complaint but not of policy …

    Farrer has proven that the commentariat’s “no-policies” narrative was a delusion. Australians are not merely “protesting”; they are voting for a platform of common sense, consistently put forward by Pauline Hanson and Senator Malcolm Roberts – one that the major parties have long since abandoned.

Flint argues that it presages the death of the major party monopoly: “The result reflects a deep-seated exhaustion with the status quo. Labor is no longer the party of the worker; it has become the party of the inner-city elite. The Greens, far from being environmentalists, seem content to see our landscape ruined by industrial ‘renewables’ to enrich foreign interests – propping up what Donald Trump rightly called the ‘world’s biggest fraud’. In contrast, voters have responded to a leader who tells the simple truth.”

Something something hoist, something something petard

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

The Liberal party, both federally and provincially, have been massive fans of immigration for decades. Any kind of restriction on foreigners being allowed into the country was seen as tantamount to treason, in Liberal eyes. This resulted in a lot of votes for Liberal candidates in election after election, as most immigrants associated their welcome in Canada with the party most associated with pro-immigration policies. On the weekend, this happy little virtuous circle suddenly broke in the Toronto-area provincial riding of Scarborough Southwest, and the party is left wondering what is going on:

AI-generated image from Upper Canadian Cavalier

There is a particular flavour of humiliation reserved for the courtier who discovers, too late, that the rules he wrote for everyone else now apply to him. On Saturday afternoon in Scarborough Southwest, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith tasted it. The former federal Minister of Housing, the man Mark Carney himself had blessed to retain his Beaches–East York seat while parachuting into a provincial nomination as a launchpad for the Ontario Liberal leadership, lost. He lost to a man named Ahsanul Hafiz, a Bangladeshi immigrant who had arrived as an international student two decades ago, who had been forced during the campaign to answer for old social media posts of himself posing with firearms and calling for the death penalty of a Bangladeshi politician. Hafiz won not because he was a more accomplished man, not because he had a deeper grasp of public policy, not because he carried the gravitas of a former Crown minister of the Dominion. He won because he could deliver more bodies to a high school gymnasium on a Saturday afternoon than the Oxford-trained lawyer with the cabinet pedigree could.

This is the open secret of Liberal politics in Canada in the year 2026. The white Liberal cannot win his own nomination battles anymore. Not on the merits. Not on the organisation. Not on the strength of his name or the depth of his rolodex. He can only win when the party machinery he himself built bends the rules in his favour, locks the gate behind him, and quietly disqualifies the rivals who would otherwise eat him alive. When the machinery fails, as it failed in Scarborough Southwest, the result is what we saw on the weekend: the dauphin of the Carney court, the heir presumptive, sent home with a participation ribbon and a press release about how concerned he is of the democratic process.

The democratic process. We shall return to that phrase, because it has done a great deal of work for the Liberal Party of Canada these past sixty years, and it deserves the close inspection of an honest mind.

The Scarborough Lesson

Consider the bare arithmetic of what happened. Erskine-Smith is, by every measure the Laurentian establishment recognises, the kind of man the Liberal Party manufactures for leadership. Queen’s University, then Oxford for the BCL. A successful federal MP since 2015. A cabinet minister under both Trudeau and Carney. The blessing of the Prime Minister himself to remain a sitting federal MP while contesting a provincial nomination, an arrangement of breathtaking entitlement that would have been denied to anyone of lesser standing. He had every advantage the system can confer on a chosen son.

And yet the Bangladeshi grocer down the street had more votes.

Three thousand five hundred members were on the final voting list. The Bangladeshi community of Scarborough Southwest, organised through its mosques, its community associations, its weekly newspaper the Weekly Bangla Mail, its television station NRB TV, had decided some time ago that this riding belonged to them. Doly Begum, the former NDP MPP turned federal Liberal, had won the by-election three weeks earlier as the first Bangladeshi-Canadian elected to Parliament. The provincial nomination was the next obvious prize. Three of the four candidates running were of Bangladeshi origin. The fourth was Erskine-Smith.

You can imagine the scene at the high school. The folding tables, the volunteer scrutineers, families arriving in groups of six and eight, elderly grandmothers helped to their seats by grandsons. And against this, the dispersed and atomised liberal professionals of the riding, the kind of people who attend brunches in the Beaches and write earnest letters to the Toronto Star about housing policy. There was no contest. The grandmothers won. They will always win. They were always going to win. Anyone who has spent five minutes thinking honestly about what mass non-European immigration into a Westminster system actually means could have told you so.

This is not a scandal, it is not foreign interference. It is not even when properly understood, a failure of the Liberal Party. It is what democracy looks like when you transplant a foreign communal politics into a parliamentary system that was built for atomised individuals voting their conscience as Englishmen. The system the Liberals constructed across two generations, the system of mass importation without integration, of multiculturalism as official ideology, of the ethnic vote as the quiet hydraulic engine of every Liberal majority, has finally arrived at its terminal stage. The body has now grown larger than the head, and the head has noticed.

At Without Diminishment, Dakota Jeffery-Petts, who once worked as a volunteer on Erskine-Smith’s 2015 campaign, writes:

In Canada, the nomination process remains a glaring national security loophole. These contests are treated as private club matters rather than public democratic exercises. They lack the oversight of a neutral authority. This creates a low-cost, and at times entirely cost-free, environment providing a high-reward entry point for foreign interference.

All you need to do is speak sweet lies to members and constituents. In doing so, you create a motivated interest group that can effectively hand-pick a representative in a safe seat, bypassing the general electorate entirely.

When 3,580 memberships appear overnight in a single riding, we must ask: whose interests are being served? Are they Canadian interests, or diaspora interests?

The primary duty of an elected official, after all, is to the national and public interest. But when a candidate’s mandate is derived from a narrow, diaspora-specific recruitment drive, often centred on grievances or political movements from the old country, that candidate becomes a delegate for a foreign interest rather than a representative of Ontario and the Ontarians in that riding.

The result illustrates the danger of fragmented national and local loyalties.

Multiculturalism, when left without a strong framework of national identity, allows for the importation of foreign conflicts into our legislative halls. We are seeing the rise of a political class that views a seat in a Canadian legislature as a platform for foreign advocacy, rather than a tool for national or provincial governance.

This capture of our nomination process by diaspora activism is the ultimate sign of a hollowed-out democracy. If the gates to our legislatures are guarded by whoever can mobilise the largest bloc of unintegrated interests, then the concept of a Canadian mandate becomes meaningless.

We are effectively outsourcing our leadership selection to the highest bidder, or to the most aggressive foreign-aligned organiser. The decision by the Ontario Liberal Party to allow this surge, and the subsequent defeat of one of the more prominent politicians in the province, shows a party that has lost its way.

By prioritising raw numbers over the quality and loyalty of its candidates, the Ontario Liberals have signalled that they are comfortable being a vessel for proxies acting on behalf of foreign interests, despite the hardships facing so many Ontarians.

QotD: “… this pattern will be immune to all but the most draconian interventions, such as legally-imposed quotas”

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

In many nations and for many people, the sex difference in occupational attainment is a social pathology that begs for corrective intervention. The ultimate societal goal for many is equal numbers of high-achieving men and women across high-status fields, including those that typically draw more of one sex or the other (e.g., men in engineering). Here, I place the sex difference favoring men in occupational attainment in an evolutionary perspective and show that this pattern will be immune to all but the most draconian interventions, such as legally-imposed quotas. The reason for this is simple: The relation between social dominance and reproductive success is typically stronger for males than for females, and this in turn favors the evolution of traits that facilitate male status striving.

[…] the achievement of social status and some degree of success in culturally-important domains are more strongly related to men’s than women’s reproductive prospects and success. The sex difference here is found in hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agricultural societies, as well as in early empires, developing nations, and the modern world. One result is that men have an evolved motivation to increase their social status and to attempt to gain control of culturally-important resources, whether these resources are cows or cash. Women of course also benefit from improved status and resource control, but the evolutionary costs and benefits differ for each sex and have resulted in stronger status-related motivations and behaviors (e.g., long work hours) in men than women.

The expression of men’s status striving strongly contributes to the sex difference in occupational attainment that continually frustrates gender activists and thwarts policy edicts aimed at equality of outcomes. […] sex differences in status striving manifest in modern contexts and […] these are entirely consistent with broader patterns found across human cultures, human history, and in most species.

David C. Geary, “Sex Differences in Occupational Attainment are Here to Stay”, Quillette, 2020-11-02.

May 11, 2026

Were the Nazis socialists?

Filed under: Germany, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If you’re ever bored and want to kick off an argument online, you can take either side of this statement and watch the signal-to-noise ratio drop precipitously. The NSDAP, the Nazis, began as one of the many, many groups of angry young Germans in the days after the end of the First World War. The full name of the party — the National Socialist German Worker’s Party — indicates who the original party founders thought would be the engine of their political rise. They were explicitly anti-communist, as the spectre of the Russian Revolution terrified many Germans, but German socialism was still within the Overton Window of political debate.

Lots of arguments about this one.

Many people assume Nazis could not have been socialists, despite all the time and energy they devoted to jumping up and down screaming “We are socialists!”, because they were “right-wing” and socialism is supposed to be “left-wing”.

Except “right-wing” and “left-wing” don’t have rigid definitions outside the context of the French revolution. In any other context, they’re just a metaphor.

So why did the NATIONAL Socialist German Workers’ Party and the INTERNATIONAL Marxist-Leninist Socialist Workers’ Movement hate each other so much?

It’s pretty obvious when you look at the names.

National.

International.

To Nazis, the race and culture of a people are everything. They are what the state is supposed to represent. Ein Volk, as they would say. The purpose of Nazi socialism is to control capital assets, subordinating them to the will and welfare of the ethnostate.

But Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish all ethnostates. They are a globalist movement, seeking to place all capital assets under the control of a universal proletariat in theory, which is in practice represented by one world government.

Thus, Nazis sought to use socialist policies for the welfare of the German people and Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish “German” as a meaningful distinction, along with all other cultures.

The antipathy between Nazis and communists was a sectarian struggle within socialism. Same methods, but different sacred groups.

Since the defeat of National Socialism by International Socialism in WW2, all modern socialism is pretty much of the international variety.

This does, however, suggest that there is a contrast between National Capitalism and International Capitalism as well.

Which is the source of the current sectarian struggle between elements of the American right wing.

Update, 12 May: 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.

“We’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle”

Filed under: China, History, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

You have to have noticed that progressives all seem to have recently decide en masse that we need to liquidate eliminate expropriate the billionaire class. It’s been done in the past, and modern progressives seem to be unable to spot the pattern, even as they work hard to bring it back to life by constantly scapegoating the wealthy (machine translated from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post):

Lydia is putting her finger on something that no one wants to name clearly: we’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle.

The script is documented, archived, and it repeats itself identically for a century. Before every mass massacre carried out in the name of Marxism, there are always 5 to 15 years of public designation of a category of people as “the enemy to be taken down”. Not a debate on public policies. Not a critique of inequalities. A methodical dehumanization of an entire class.

In the USSR in the 1920s, it was the kulaks. Lenin wrote as early as 1918 that it was necessary to “exterminate the kulaks as a class”, an expression repeated word for word by Stalin ten years later. Result: 4 million peasants deported, several million dead in the Holodomor.

In Maoist China, it was the landlords and “class enemies”. Mao orchestrates public “struggle sessions” where neighbors, children, former employees are forced to denounce, humiliate, and beat. Tally from the land reform alone: 1 to 2 million executions, not counting what follows.

In Cambodia, it was the “new people”: city dwellers, intellectuals, people wearing glasses. Khmer Rouge propaganda designated them for years as parasites before massacring them. 1.7 million dead in 4 years.

Now look at what’s happening in the United States in 2026.

Hasan Piker, who reaches millions of young men on Twitch, speaks openly of the “blood of f***ing capitalists”. Not in 1968 in a Trotskyist cell, in 2026 on the platform most watched by 18-25 year olds.

Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York, films viral videos in front of billionaires’ buildings, exactly where Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated last year by Luigi Mangione. The latter was turned into a pop icon by a part of the American left in less than 48 hours. T-shirts, fan art, romanticization of the murderer.

This isn’t “political passion”. It’s phase 1 of the protocol. The public designation of a category of humans as legitimately hateable, followed by the valorization of those who take action.

The “normal” reaction of a healthy democracy should be the immediate social and professional isolation of these voices. What’s happening: they top podcast charts, they’re elected officials, and they get favorable media coverage.

History doesn’t stutter. It copy-pastes. And the first victims are always surprised to discover, too late, that the speech they found “a bit excessive but oh well” was actually the clear warning that a pit was being dug for them.

Lydia is right to say it. And she’ll be even more right in five years when we reread these tweets.

And more:

And if you’re reading this thinking, “This doesn’t concern me, I’m not a billionaire”, stop for two seconds and really think about it.

Because that’s exactly what the Russian peasants told themselves in 1918 when people started talking about the “bourgeois”. They applauded, or they looked the other way. It wasn’t their problem. They weren’t rich.

Ten years later, they were called kulaks. And “kulak“, in Stalinist practice, meant any peasant who owned one more cow than his neighbor, who had dared to hire a seasonal worker, who had a slightly better-kept barn. 4 million deported. Several million dead.

That’s exactly what the small Chinese shopkeepers told themselves in 1949, when Mao went after the “great landowners”. Not their problem. They just ran a little store. Five years later, they too were classified as “class enemies”, stripped of everything, publicly humiliated, sometimes beaten to death by their own neighbors.

That’s exactly what the Cambodian schoolteachers told themselves in 1970, when the Khmer Rouge talked about “urban exploiters”. Not their problem. They barely earned enough to live on. In 1975, knowing how to read was enough to sign your death warrant.

The communist mechanism NEVER stops at the ultra-rich. Never. It’s a historical law as solid as gravity.

Why? Because fundamentally, the communist doesn’t hate wealth. He hates individual emancipation. He hates the very idea that a man can build something that belongs to him, decide his own life, refuse the collective. Private property isn’t an economic detail to him — it’s the metaphysical enemy. Because someone who owns something is someone who can say no.

So if you have an apartment you spent 15 years paying off, you’re concerned. If you have a small business, a shop, a sole proprietorship, you’re concerned. If you have a savings plan, a bank book, stocks, you’re concerned. If you have a family home in the provinces, you’re concerned. If you work hard to pass something on to your kids, you’re at the top of the next lists.

Billionaires are just the first course. Always. Because there are few of them and they’re easy to point out. They’re the appetizers for the machine. The main course, historically, is you.

And meanwhile, a lot of people read threads like this, nod their heads, and don’t share. Don’t comment. Don’t take a stand. Out of fear of being labeled “right-wing”, “reactionary”, “too political on LinkedIn”. Out of comfort. Out of social cowardice.

Know that this silence has a precise historical cost. Every time a society has tipped into this madness, it did so because the reasonable majority stayed silent too long, thinking it would all blow over on its own.

It never blows over on its own.

May 9, 2026

Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell, by Simon Heffer

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

I think it’s fair to say that Enoch Powell is having a moment, nearly sixty years after he shocked the establishment with his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. He became a pariah even in his own party, and his political career never recovered … but his warnings have more than been fulfilled over the intervening decades. In The Critic, Jeremy Black reviews the recently reprinted 1998 biography of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer:

Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.

The new imprint of this important biography provides an opportunity to reread one of the most skilful works on British political history published over the last half century. As with Heffer’s other books, it is also very well written — although might I offer a plea for leaving aside sentences such as “He still saw no reason to lay off Heath”?

Before turning to the substance, it is worth considering the Foreword. Written this January, it underlines Powell’s significance to many issues, notably: “His deep scepticism about the confluence of America’s interest with those of Britain”. I am, however, dubious about the proposition that “Powell was, quite simply, one of the foremost Conservative thinkers in living memory, possibly the greatest since Burke”. Leaving aside the question of whether Burke can be described as Conservative or even, prior to the 1790s, as conservative, and, separately, the implicit dig at claims for Disraeli whom Heffer is on the record as describing as a Charlatan, I myself would make the case for Salisbury, while agreeing that Macmillan, Hailsham and MacLeod did not measure up to Powell. He returned the damage done him by Macmillan with “bilious” reviews of his Memoirs.

While I am sceptical of the claim that Powell was a great Conservative thinker in the cosmic sense, he was an impressive critic of many of the shibboleths of establishment Conservatism from the 1960s to the 1980s, including on immigration, the nuclear deterrent, the Common Market, the American alliance, Northern Ireland, and economic policy.

A significant aspect of the intellectual character of Powell was the return of this one-time atheist to the Church in the late 1940s, the subject of the “Interlude” “Powell and God” in the book. There is, as Salisbury and Cowling among others underlined, a significant link between Conservatism and the Church of England, and Powell, like Thatcher, can be profitably discussed in these terms, with Thatcher far less convincing.

The discussion of Powell’s elision from public debate is also interesting. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1998, the biography was kept on print-on-demand until cancelled in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. Heffer compares the treatment of Powell to that of Orwell in facing difficulties in publishing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For several years, Heffer found it impossible to persuade a publisher to republish the book and suggests that this was due to a craven fear of public opinion “real or perceived”, one about which Orwell had warned not least when referring to “intellectual cowardice”. The publisher he has found, it has to be said, is another instance of the very valuable work being done by non-metropolitan concerns.

Starmer thinks local elections’ message is for Labour to move faster on their progressive agenda

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

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer — who many commentators have for months been describing as a “dead man walking” — somehow manages to find an interpretation for the Labour Party’s disastrous local election results, and thinks voters just sent a message that he needs to move faster and more vigorously to implement their vision. That’s certainly a take.

Nigel Farage is certainly enjoying the outcome:

Partial council election results in England, 8 May 2026.
Graphic from the Daily Mail

Hurrah for the Tealshirts! Nigel Farage emerged from Havering Town Hall looking smug even by his standards. For years, he has been written off, denied the respect — and peerage — he feels he deserves, forced to scrape by on gifts from well-wishers, and now he was showing them all, wreaking havoc on both Labour and Conservatives.

Nothing could hold the party back, not the endless terrible comments from Reform candidates who for some reason believe Farage agrees with them, not even a huge bribery scandal involving the party leader in Wales. Today Havering, tomorrow Westminster!

Elsewhere, people were gloomier. James Cleverly explained to the BBC that winning elections isn’t the goal of politics. The Conservatives aren’t interested in here today, gone tomorrow popularity, it turns out. They just want to govern well. Which leaves a couple of questions about the last decade and a half.

David Lammy told anyone who would listen that you don’t change pilot mid-flight. Better, he didn’t add, to wait until the plane has hit the ground.

The real show of the morning was the confrontation on the BBC between Cleverly’s colleague Vicky Atkins and their former fellow Tory, Robert Jenrick. Atkins and Jenrick have a long friendship going back to the time when he was the anti-Farage candidate in Newark in 2014, through the time he was an anti-Brexit MP supporting David Cameron, his days in Theresa May’s government, his early backing of Boris Johnson, his years in the Cabinet, all the way to his realisation this year that he’d never believed any of the things he’d been telling the voters.

“Robert and I haven’t actually spoken to each other since I supported his leadership campaign,” Atkins announced, and the rest of us fastened our seatbelts for a bumpy ride. “I’m surprised that he’s so quick to can all of the work that he did when he was in government.”

Next to her, Jenrick looked like a man who has arrived at a school parents evening to discover that his ex-wife got there first and has been filling people in on the reason she cut the crotches out of all his suits. But Atkins was just getting started. “Nobody should believe the snake oil salesmen,” she said. Jenrick had accused the Tories of messing things up. “Rob was part of the team that made those mistakes.”

Jenrick made another bid to get the conversation back on track. “The question is about honesty and trustworthiness,” he said. You could have used Atkins’ expression at that moment to freeze lava.

At the time of this Daily Mail report from James Tapfield and David Wilcock, the demands from Labour MPs for Starmer to resign hadn’t quite reached the “red alert” level yet:

Partial council election results in England, 8 May 2026.
Graphic from the Daily Mail

Keir Starmer is desperately fighting to subdue a Labour revolt tonight after a local elections bloodbath saw the party routed on English councils, and destroyed in Wales and Scotland.

Loyalist ministers and MPs have been deployed in a frantic bid to prop up the PM, after a series of backbenchers broke cover to demand his resignation.

So far no Cabinet ministers have publicly joined the mutiny – a moment that many believe would be the final nail in Sir Keir’s coffin.

Rachel Reeves and David Lammy were among those backing Sir Keir – but there has been an ominous lack of vocal support from Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood. London Mayor Sadiq Khan released a statement saying the results in the capital were ‘bitterly disappointing’ and the threat to the party is ‘existential’ – without mentioning the PM.

The civil war reignited this evening after Labour’s Welsh leader, Baroness Morgan, humiliatingly lost her own seat as the party’s tally of the 96 Senedd members was slashed to just nine. In a jibe at the PM, she said the Government nationally must ‘change course’.

Until yesterday Labour held nearly half the seats at the Welsh Parliament, and has never failed to top an election in the country – regarded as its birthplace.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has also conceded defeat at Holyrood, saying they had ‘lost the argument’ and pointing the finger at Sir Keir.

Meanwhile, the Greens have dealt a hammer blow by taking the mayoralty in deep-red bastion Hackney, as well as Lewisham – signposting more misery to come in London. The Labour leader in Camden – Sir Keir’s own council – has been defeated by Zack Polanski’s candidate.

Even some Labour stalwarts are reading the tea leaves correctly:

Argentina not in the news

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Martin Varsavsky illustrates the real situation in Argentina after Javier Milei was elected as opposed to the dystopian nightmare imagined by the western media:

“Argentine flag” by papajuan74 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

After more than two years of Milei, the international press still does not understand what is happening in Argentina.

The narrative abroad is “shock therapy, social pain, fragile coalition”. That frame misses the actual mechanism. Argentina did not have a budget problem. It had a printing problem. From 2003 to 2023 the central bank financed deficit after deficit until the peso lost 99 percent of its value against the dollar. Annual inflation hit 211 percent in 2023. Half the country was poor. That was the floor.

What changed is not vibes. It is arithmetic. The fiscal deficit was eliminated for the first time in 16 years. Monthly inflation fell from 25 percent to low single digits. The central bank stopped printing to fund the Treasury. Country risk dropped from over 2,500 basis points to a fraction of that. Argentine sovereign debt, which used to trade like a default option, began behaving like normal emerging market paper.

Critics say poverty rose. It did, briefly, because removing price controls and subsidies revealed the real prices of energy, transport and food that the state had been hiding with debt. Once measured honestly, poverty has been falling fast. Real wages are recovering. Mortgages in pesos are reappearing, something that had not been possible in a generation.

This matters beyond Argentina. It is the clearest live experiment in whether a developed-style economy can be rebuilt by pulling the state out of places it never belonged. Spain, Italy and France should be paying attention. A country does not get poor because it lacks resources. It gets poor because its political class learned to live off printing money and calling it social policy.

Argentina spent 80 years proving that. It is now spending two years proving the opposite.

May 8, 2026

National Indigenous History Month in Ontario schools

Filed under: Cancon, Education, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Igor Stravinsky outlines what Ontario schools will be focusing on this June instead of in addition to the normal provincial school curriculum:

Image from the Senate of Canada via Woke Watch Canada

50+ years ago, public schools in Ontario started the day with Bible readings and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Critical Theory, the philosophical and pedagogical approach in force these days in schools is the new religion. It is based on the (unproven) premise that society is rife with power structures, inequalities, and oppression, and asserts that education is inherently political rather than neutral. “Marginalized” students (non-Whites, especially males, plus Whites who are not heterosexual or able-bodied) are to be “centered”. This supposedly promotes “Social Justice”, which is basically the absurd and asinine idea that every aspect of society should be represented by all conceivable identity groups in proportion to their numbers in the general population. It is equality of outcome, not opportunity.

As Indigenous people rank high on the pyramid of oppression, every day is a day of Indigenous recognition in most public schools in Ontario. Students are asked to stand quietly every morning to hear the Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, which is the same text day after day, just like the Lord’s Prayer used to be. But June is special. It is National Indigenous History Month.

During June, students can expect to get hit with an extra large dose of affirmation of their original social justice sin. If you can’t trace your ancestry back to a person who lived here before first contact between Europeans and Indigenous people, then you are a “settler colonist”. This technically means anyone, but of course the main targets of the social justice warriors are European descended people. Just immigrated from Poland last week? Start groveling. You’re White, and that’s that.

The themes of the month are really the same as the ones presented to students all year, just more intensively: Prior to contact with Europeans, Indigenous people lived in peace and harmony with each other and lived sustainably and in sync with nature. Settler ways are depicted as based on greed and a reckless plundering of the lands, along with utter disregard for the wise ways of living of the Indigenous people, who were to be forcibly assimilated into Western ways.

Of course, students in our schools should be learning about the history of Indigenous people, just as they should be learning about the conditions in which so many Indigenous people struggle and suffer today. But that is not the objective of Indigenous History Month or any of the other long list of Annual Indigenous Days of Significance. This year, National Indigenous Peoples day, June 21st, falls on Fathers Day. Luckily, it is a Sunday, so schools won’t be able to erase that. Social Justice warriors hate Fathers Day even more than Mothers Day. If there is one thing they can’t stand, it’s the nuclear family.

Also this year, the fifth anniversary of the false claim by the Kamloops Indian Band that the remains of 215 murdered residential school children had been confirmed in the apple orchard outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (May 27) will have just passed. Even the band itself now admits, on their website, that all that was discovered was soil “anomalies”. The technician who performed the ground penetrating radar survey told them there were 200 targets of interest and only excavations could confirm burials (she initially identified 215 but reduced that to 200 when she discovered, after the fact, the part of her survey area had already been excavated and no one had found any bodies there). Of course, even if you found burials, you would need forensic work to determine the identity of the bodies and the cause of death. The band has been paid over 12 million dollars to do that work but they haven’t done anything.

May 7, 2026

Great success! Honda “postpones” their Ontario EV project

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As part of their mindless fanboyism for anything remotely related to “Net Zero”, the federal government and the Ontario provincial government have been serving up subsidies for electric vehicles and hastening the “inevitable transition” away from internal combustion vehicles. Through legislation and regulation, they’ve been doing everything they can to close down the traditional car and truck manufacturing sector and replace them with zero emission vehicles. The various governments have handed out subsidies amounting to billions, and yet one after another after another the much ballyhoo’d EV factories, battery plants, and other futuristic projects fall by the wayside, leaving very little in exchange for those billions:

There was a time, not very long ago, when Liberal politicians treated EV battery announcements like moon landings.

Hard hats. Safety glasses. Giant ceremonial cheques. Breathless speeches about “the future”. Every battery plant was “historic”. Every subsidy package was “transformational”. Every corporate press conference looked like a motivational seminar for people who think buzzwords are infrastructure.

All we were missing was a fog machine and Bono.

Meanwhile ordinary Canadians were standing in grocery aisles doing mental math over bacon prices, delaying dental work, and wondering whether they could survive another winter utility bill without sacrificing whatever scraps remained of their savings.

But while Canadians were trying to keep their heads above water, Ottawa was busy launching one of the most expensive industrial subsidy experiments in modern Canadian history.

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

The Honda EV project in Ontario was supposed to be one of the crown jewels of this brave new green economy. Politicians lined up in hard hats and safety glasses like a traveling theatre troupe performing The Future Is Here. Canadians were assured this was proof the country was becoming an EV superpower.

Turns out it may have been more of a very expensive PowerPoint presentation with taxpayer financing attached.

[…]

In March 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Mark Carney as an informal economic adviser during the COVID recovery period. Over the following years, Carney increasingly promoted “green transition” investment frameworks, climate-linked financial systems, ESG-focused economic planning, and massive public-private investment partnerships tied to decarbonization strategies.

Which is important context now, because the EV subsidy era did not emerge out of thin air. It grew out of a broader worldview that treated government-directed green investment as both economic policy and moral mission. The assumption underneath all of this was breathtakingly simple:

“If government wants it badly enough, reality will cooperate.”

That is usually where things begin going sideways.

Canadians were told the EV transition was inevitable. Questions about affordability, charging infrastructure, winter range, electrical grid capacity, or consumer demand were often brushed aside like annoying little details raised by peasants who simply lacked sufficient enlightenment.

Then came the subsidy gold rush.

[…]

Corporations are not charities. They are not loyal patriots. They are not emotionally attached to government slogans.

They follow incentives. They chase profitability. They change direction when conditions change.

That is exactly what Honda did.

Meanwhile Canadians are left holding the bill for another “historic transformation” that produced:

  • endless announcements
  • glossy photo ops
  • consultant buzzwords
  • government self-congratulation
  • escalating subsidy exposure
  • and corporate renegotiations every time market conditions shifted
  • while producing no completed Honda EV manufacturing hub and no fleet of Canadian-built EVs rolling proudly off Ontario assembly lines.

What remains instead is a stalled megaproject, a confused tariff policy, a government spinning contradictory narratives depending on the week, and taxpayers once again discovering they were voluntold into becoming venture capitalists for political vanity projects.

Apparently this is what “economic leadership” looks like now.

Hard hats. Press releases. Fifty-plus billion dollars in EV-related exposure. And a factory plan slowly evaporating into the mist while Chinese EVs roll through the front gate anyway.

Pay no attention to the Laurentian Elite behind the curtain!

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

Canada before Confederation was largely run by the Family Compact, an informal oligarchy of wealthy and influential families who had a virtual monopoly on social advancement, political appointments, and the justice system. As kids we were all told in school that this all withered away and now we live in a wonderfully meritocratic society (that’s also a genocidal racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic dystopia, but those are later lessons after the land acknowledgements). They didn’t fade away, of course, and the behind-the-scenes power brokers are still there, still wielding informal but widespread control over the government and the economy. We just call them the Laurentian Elite, so that’s totally different than the bad old Family Compact, eh?

The Laurentians very effectively keep themselves out of the public eye. Most Canadians don’t even know this class exists. So, they are in that sense a shadowy cabal.

Of course Canadians want prosperity and whatever. Everyone does. Of course they think this is the purpose of the government. Of course the government’s messaging is largely around economics.

The government’s actual activities, however, are immensely economically destructive. This is because of their religious fanaticism. Canadians believe in “peace, order, and good government”. The Laurentians believe in multiculturalism, mass immigration, gender woo, and climate change. They just lie about these things being good for the economy. It’s now obvious that they are very bad for the economy, and yet, they continue, so.

The gimmigration restrictions are a joke. The government is continuing to hand out PRs and passports like Halloween candy, and turd worlders are continuing to grab them like the black kids who think the whole basket is all just for them. It is allowing TFWs to flood the asylum system, which it uses as a back door to keep them in the country. The numbers they publish are a bullshit accounting game, but even if they’re to be believed, letting in hundreds of thousands of new PRs every year isn’t a reduction from anything but the truly insane spike in 2022-24.

The housing market is fucked, yes, but I’m skeptical this is because immigration has been “reduced”. It’s more likely that a decade of zero economic growth, rapid inflation, even more rapid asset inflation, shit jobs, and high taxes means that no one can afford the overpriced housing, so no one buys it. The shoebox condos they threw up all over Toronto are a contributing factor: no one wants to spend $500,000 on a 500 square foot condo, so no one does. Investors can’t afford to sell for less, so they sit on them. Developers look at tens of thousands of units of unsold inventory, and refuse to start new projects. Whole system is seized up because of many years of malinvestment, not because the government has meaningfully reduced the invasion.

You say that Canadians will go back to Laurentian rule once the excesses are curbed. That presumes Laurentian rule slackened for even a moment, and that the Laurentians have any intention of curbing their excesses. Neither of these are true. They are doubling down on everything. Destroying Canada — as one element in the destruction of Western civilization — is a religious imperative for them. Nor was their power ever threatened, because it is propped up by brainwashed parasitic client groups — boomers, women, immigrants — that now comprise the bulk of the country.

The “pivot” was about two weeks of campaign rhetoric, during which a fast-talking globalist banker gave the boomers a reach-around about “British and French heritage”, which dazzled the affection-starved senile coots because it was the first time they’d heard something nice about themselves in a generation. Since then there’s been no rollback in DEI. No rollback in gender woo. No rollback in net zero. No rollback in Internet censorship. To the contrary, it has been full steam ahead on every single one of their hateful programs.

No revolution? You’re probably right, although the Freedom Convoy suggests that there are possibilities. Nevertheless the most likely scenario is that Canada devolves into Argentina Del Norte, its bones picked by vultures posing as patriots, kept in power by the most mind-raped boomers on planet Earth.

I do not think this is a good thing, obviously. I love my country very much. I suppose the reason for my vehemence on this matter is that I do not see any future for Canada with the Laurentians remaining in charge. We cannot work with them. They aren’t going to change. They aren’t going to slow down. They need to be removed, prosecuted for high treason, their assets seized, their oligopolies nationalized, and many of them sent to the gallows. Absent this, Canada is doomed.

QotD: The loss of male spaces led to today’s epidemic of male loneliness

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

Before men were lonely, there were places.

Places where men showed up without an agenda. Where conversation happened sideways, not face-to-face. Where no one asked men to perform vulnerability, explain themselves, or justify their presence.

Those places didn’t disappear because men rejected connection. They disappeared because our culture decided male-only spaces were no longer acceptable. And once they were gone, men were told that their resulting loneliness was a personal failure.

There has been a noticeable shift in recent months. A growing number of articles now
acknowledge male loneliness and even gesture toward men’s emotional needs. On the surface, this looks like progress — and in one narrow sense, it is. For decades, male loneliness was either ignored or mocked.

But many of these pieces commit the same quiet betrayal.

After briefly acknowledging that men are lonely, many articles abandon subtlety altogether and place responsibility squarely on men themselves. Men don’t open up enough. Men don’t try hard enough. Men don’t build friendships properly. Men resist emotional growth.

What is missing is the most obvious factor of all: our culture systematically dismantled the spaces where men and boys once formed friendships.

Men Did Not “Forget” How to Connect, They Lost the Places Where Connection Happened

Male friendships have never primarily formed through structured emotional disclosure. They formed through shoulder to shoulder shared activity, regular presence, and low-pressure companionship. Men bonded by working alongside one another, not by facing one another across a table and “processing”.

For generations, this happened naturally in male-only spaces:

  • Service clubs
  • Fraternal organizations
  • Trade guilds and apprenticeships
  • Male sports leagues
  • Scout troops
  • Men’s religious groups
  • Informal gathering places like barbershops and workshops

These environments weren’t about exclusion. They were containers — places where boys learned how to be men from men, and where adult men maintained connection without self-consciousness or surveillance.

Now consider what has happened.

  • Barbershops are co-ed and transactional.
  • Service clubs are now largely co-ed, and the informal freedoms that supported male bonding in male-only environments have largely disappeared.
  • Community sports are co-ed or heavily regulated.
  • Even the Boy Scouts are co-ed.

One by one, male spaces disappeared — not because men abandoned them, but because our culture increasingly viewed male-only environments as suspicious, outdated, or morally problematic.

The Asymmetry No One Wants to Name

At the same time male spaces were dismantled, female-only spaces proliferated.

  • Women-only gyms are accepted.
  • Women-only scholarships are celebrated.
  • Women-only commissions exist at every level of government.
  • Women-only networking events, parking, subway cars, retreats, and support groups are commonplace.

“Women-only” is understood as necessary, protective, and empowering.

“Men-only”, by contrast, is treated as exclusionary at best and dangerous at worst.

The result is an unspoken rule that everyone knows but few admit:

Women may gather without men. Men may not gather without women.

This is not equality. It is a double standard — and it has consequences.

Tom Golden, “The Quiet Lie Behind Male Loneliness”, Men Are Good, 2026-01-05.

May 6, 2026

“I don’t want a solution, I want to dismantle our socio-economic system!”

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

On his Substack, Christopher Snowden explains how “public health” is just another of the many, many anti-capitalist branches of progressive belief:

Some people don’t really want to solve problems. They want to change the world for other reasons. That was the argument I made in Not Invented Here last year, a multi-author IEA publication that essentially elaborated on this meme …

One example is obesity, which we are told can only be tackled by fundamentally changing the food environment, banning advertising, taxing more products and demonising “Big Food”. None of this has ever actually worked anywhere. We do, however, now have GLP-1 drugs that work wonders for many people.

Plenty of “public health” academics are notably resistant to “fat jabs” because what they really want is to fundamentally change the food environment, ban advertising, tax more products and demonise “Big Food”.

Take this article from three self-described “public health scholars” in JAMA Health Forum, for example. They object to obesity being framed as a “a disease requiring individual treatment” because, they say, it undermines public support for government action. They even complain that “medical societies consistently argue that we do need to both prevent and treat obesity” because treatment — i.e. losing weight — is something that individuals can do for themselves. Moreover, studies have shown that when the public hear about people losing weight on their own initiative, they are less likely to support population-wide policies such as food taxation.

    Broadcasting a “we need to do both” message, it turns out, is a counterproductive communications strategy for addressing the obesity epidemic. Studies message-testing obesity narratives find that public support for government action is highest when obesity is framed as the result of food industry manipulation and addresses toxic food environments.

The authors don’t seem particularly interested in whether this narrative is true. The main thing is that it can “build support for addressing upstream drivers of the obesity epidemic”. They conclude that medical professionals should stop talking about GLP-1 drugs in public and bang on about “BiG fOoD” instead.

    While we acknowledge that public and media discourse often expect clinicians to comment on treatment efficacy and emergent therapies, in an ideal world, the medical community would move discussions about GLP-1 drugs targeting causes of individual cases in-house, while using its credibility and authority publicly to amplify much needed political discussions about the root causes of increasing obesity incidence.

    This messaging should include concrete policy proposals targeting unhealthy food environments shifting the debate toward the structural causes of the obesity epidemic, such as World Health Organization–recommended sugar taxes and other policies that would effectively reverse the rise in ultraprocessed food production, marketing, and consumption and, importantly, the corporate power that has so far prevented governments from enacting these policies.

You can see why they are worried about fat jabs. The drugs work by giving people artificial willpower and prove that if obese people simply eat less food they will stop being obese. It has nothing to do with advertising, price, availability or “corporate power”.

From the perspective of the authors, these drugs are a threat, but what exactly is their perspective? The first author, Luc Hagenaars, has written a lot about sugar taxes which he compiled for his PhD thesis. He also worked at the Dutch Ministry of Health in the early 2020s when the Netherlands was undergoing its anti-liberal counter-revolution. Last year, he wrote an article titled “The Ozempic Era Could Shift Blame for Obesity From Individuals to Commercial Food Systems” which made exactly the opposite argument to the one he is making here.

Update, 8 May: 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.

Carney panders to the Euro elites and his TDS-afflicted base

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Ben Woodfinden explains Prime Minister Mark Carney’s constant pandering on the international stage:

The average voter won’t care, but the more Carney lays out his worldview the more the contradictions and incongruences in his thinking (or lack of sincerity) become apparent.

In his famous Davos speech he said “we actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be”. But the way he talks about and sees Europe does not fit this, and this statement is bizarre.

We should absolutely be pursuing closer ties to Europe, but it is delusional if he actually believes the new international order will be “rebuilt out of Europe”.

Europe for all its grand aspirations cannot even defend Ukraine by itself and without American help. Europe would need something like 300,000 additional troops and €250 billion a year in extra defence spending just to deter Russia without the Americans.

NATO’s own Secretary General told the European Parliament in January that Europe “cannot at the moment provide nearly enough of what Ukraine needs to defend itself today, and to deter tomorrow”, and that without American weapons “we cannot keep Ukraine in the fight. Literally not.” Rutte told European lawmakers that anyone who thinks Europe can defend itself without the US should “keep on dreaming”. Four years into the most serious land war on the continent since 1945 and this is where we are. That is not a continent about to anchor a new international order.

The world order is quickly is reorganising, yes. But around a US-China axis, not Brussels. The eurozone is forecast to grow 0.9% this year. China at 4.5%. China accounts for roughly 30% of global growth, Europe’s share of global GDP keeps shrinking. Europe is just one of many players. Again if you take Carney seriously here, it’s silly. Build closer ties with Europe yes but do not believe this is the next superpower.

But I suspect this is actually just another sign that Carney is good at politics — he knows exactly what the Davos crowd, his boomer base and media admirers want to hear and he is very good at giving it to them. Flattery has done him enormous favours in European capitals. But telling European elites the future runs through them is not realism, it is the opposite of realism. It is telling people what they want to hear, not the truth.

L. Wayne Mathison also comments on Carney’s profound europhiliac positions:

Europe is not the model. It is the warning label.

High regulation. Weak growth. Expensive energy. Soft defence. Endless bureaucracy.

America built. Europe managed. America innovated. Europe regulated.

And Carney wants Canada rebuilt “out of Europe”?

No thanks. Canada needs strength, productivity, energy, defence, and sovereignty, not Brussels-style decline with better catering.

May 5, 2026

Seattle’s Mayor to wealthy residents: “Bye!”

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

I’ve heard many people praise Seattle as a great place to live with lots of amenities and a fantastic setting. Like a lot of places with those kinds of attractions, it also has a political scene that leans strongly to the left, as Mayor Katie Wilson recently highlighted:

“Seattle Skyline” by Atomic Taco is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Seattle’s socialist Mayor Katie Wilson has a message for prosperous people leaving Washington over the state’s soaring tax burden. “Bye!” she says with a laugh, to cheers from a largely progressive audience. Entrepreneurs and investors will certainly take that comment into account as they consider where to live and do business. We can be sure of that fact because recent research further supports the commonsense idea that people often leave high-tax states in search of lower tax bills.

Goodbye, Wealthy People!

Wilson’s comments came during an April 16 discussion about “The New Progressives” as part of Seattle University’s Conversations series. Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay fielded a series of questions by host Joni Balter and graduate student Ari Winter.

Asked about major companies leaving or threatening to leave over Seattle’s and Washington’s escalating tax burden, Zahilay acknowledged that “everything is a tradeoff” and “of course I think taxes can make companies make decisions about staying or leaving”. You wouldn’t necessarily want to live under his policies, but he sounds like he understands that his decisions may drive people out and impose costs on the community.

Wilson, a self-described “socialist“, was presented with a follow-up question by Winter. She was asked, “do you still think progressive taxes are an easy and promising solution?”

Wilson responded that it was “very, very exciting to see the billionaire tax pass the legislature” and described her history of advocating for higher taxes. She then cut to the heart of her response.

“I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if, you know, the ones that leave, like, bye!” she said with a wave and a snicker. The audience at the university event joined in with whoops and applause.

Wilson may want to practice her goodbyes. Fisher Investments moved from Washington to Texas to escape a new capital gains tax. Starbucks is building a corporate hub in Tennessee and moving jobs there, largely over tax concerns. Billionaire Jeff Bezos fled the state for Florida, also motivated by taxes.

“Jeff Bezos sold about $15 billion in stocks before the new law took effect, potentially saving over $1 billion in taxes”, the Washington Policy Center’s Chris Corry noted. “Moving his primary residency to Florida would ensure that any future stock sales would not be subject to the excise tax.”

Tech giant Microsoft criticized Washington’s tax environment and threatened to move jobs elsewhere.

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