Troy Westwood @TroyWestwood
The only thing more important than “free speech” is protecting society from disinformation.Troy is trying to sound enlightened, but unfortunately he has the IQ of a lobster. “The only thing more important than ‘free speech’ is protecting society from disinformation.”
Translation: “I’m terrified of ideas I don’t like, so please, Big Brother, put a nanny filter on everyone else’s brain … just to keep us all safe, of course.”
Nothing says “I trust the marketplace of ideas” quite like demanding a government-approved Ministry of Truth to decide what’s true for the rest of us. Bonus points for implying that the plebs can’t possibly sort fact from fiction without an elite class holding their hand.
Truly the hallmark of a deep thinker. Admitting you don’t believe people are capable of handling freedom, then dressing it up as noble concern for society.
If free speech is dangerous, the most dangerous speech of all is the one declaring that some authority should get to silence the rest. But don’t worry, comrade, they’ll only censor the bad information. Promise.
Another swing and a miss for Troy.
Martyupnorth, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-28.
April 4, 2026
QotD: Protect us from “disinformation”, Big Brother!
April 2, 2026
Modern-day serial killers are called “Doctor”
At Science is not the answer, William M. Briggs explains why these are the long-foretold “hard times”:
Poor John Wayne Gacy. Reports are that the infamous mass murderer was looking up from his perch in Hell, musing about the more than thirty people he raped, tortured, then butchered and said “I was born too early”.
He was right.
If he had only waited a few short years to begin his horror spree, not only would he not have been arrested and executed, he would have received glowing tributes, warm praise from his colleagues, and he would have been paid by the state for every person he killed. And he would have had a much, much higher score than a mere 33 (official count).
Tale the case of modern-day born-on-time serial killer Dr — doctor, doctor — Ellen Wiebe. She beats Gacy’s score by more than ten times. She is credited with slaughtering over 500 people in Canada’s MAiD program. As impressive as that tally is, it is incomplete. It doesn’t count the lives inside would-be mothers she ended, for she is also an abortionist. And she is still going strong, cheered on by the Canadian government. By the time she is done, Mao himself will be envious of her feats.
That its own government joyfully starts killing off its own people proves Canadian civilization has exhausted itself. It, and a great many other civilizations, are experiencing the last phase of the ancient cycle: hard men make good times, good times make soft men, soft men make hard times. The hard times are just coming upon them, and us, created by the good times the remarkable lives of our predecessors created for us.
There are small cycles and large. Small versions of this litany are always playing out: in individual lives, in select localities, in nations. These are easy to see. But there are also larger waves, harder to spot because they are so encompassing. They are global in scope and span eras. This is why even when riding down a Great Wave toward an abyss, it can seem, and be, for a time and in a place things are improving.
Our lives are short, we see most things only with immediacy; we extrapolate too easily, and we expect matters will play out in Hollywood time, as it were. The fault is expected because when history is presented it is foreshortened. Events which took centuries are completed in pages. It is almost impossible to put ourselves in the position of a man who lived in the latter stages of the Roman empire, who lived his entire life in reasonable enough times, and who didn’t see the end coming.
It is a great mistake to view the litany wholly, or even largely, in material terms. Certainly cushy living makes for sloth and fat men. But we are also spiritual (rational) creatures. When the bulk of our ideas are given to us in packaged “education”, and we don’t have to work from them, we are cursed by easy thinking, intellectual malaise. It’s true the West has largely given up Christianity, its ideas stale and uninspiring to most. But in the East it is the same. The great hope of Science has paled. Our customary motivating forces are no longer motivating, the great old visions no longer forceful as they once were. Largely. There are many local exceptions. But they are just that: exceptions.
We recall Emil Cioran, who said, “Every exhausted civilization awaits its barbarian, and every barbarian awaits his demon”. Our barbarians are no longer awaited (we are their demons). Rulers in the West are inviting them in. And making it a crime, in many places, to oppose the inflow. Such is their ardor to have strangers among us, it is hard not to argue that these rulers want to be put out of their misery.
The persistent wish to “seize the means of production”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Rational Animal explains why the din of progressives demanding that “the rich” be dispossessed of their property always leads to the worst kind of results:
This perfectly captures the parasite’s delusion: that wealth is static loot to be seized and redistributed.
Here’s what actually happens when you “repossess all their stuff”:
The producers will rebuild. They’ll create new wealth because that’s what they do. They identify opportunities, solve problems, innovate, build businesses, and generate value. Their wealth came from their minds, not magic.
The looters will consume what they stole at light speed and wind up with nothing. Because they never learned to produce. They only know how to take.
Look at every socialist revolution in history: seize the factories, the farms, the businesses. Within years, everything collapses. The factories stop producing. The farms stop yielding. The wealth evaporates. Venezuela. Cuba. Soviet Union. Zimbabwe. The pattern is identical.
Why? Because wealth isn’t stuff sitting in a vault. Wealth is the ongoing process of human intelligence applied to production. Confiscate a factory and you get the building. You don’t get the knowledge, vision, and competence that made it productive.
The “rich” you want to loot aren’t dragons hoarding gold. They’re producers creating value. Rob them and you rob everyone, including yourself.
You’ll be left with ruins and still blame capitalism.
Update: Fixed missing URL.
March 31, 2026
Reaction to Avi Lewis being elected federal NDP leader
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to an ill-informed snipe at @TheFoodProfessor for a post about Avi Lewis:
This take reads like someone who’s never had to meet a payroll or balance a ledger under real pressure.
Accusing the “Food Professor” of being bribed is just noise. No evidence, no numbers, just a conspiracy to avoid the actual argument. Classic move when the facts aren’t cooperating.
I ran a grocery business. Not a theory. Not a model. A real one. Thin margins, constant spoilage risk, price swings, labour costs, supplier pressure, and customers who notice every 10-cent increase. Grocery isn’t some gold mine. It’s a logistics grind with razor-thin profit.
Here’s the part people like this never mention:
Canada’s total grocery profits are roughly $6 billion. Spread that across 40 million people and you’re looking at maybe $12 a month per person if you wiped out every dollar of profit.So what’s the fantasy here?
Government steps in, runs stores “for the people”, eliminates profit… and somehow prices magically drop while efficiency improves?
Let’s test behaviour, not intentions.
What happens when you remove profit?
No incentive to optimize operations
No accountability for waste
Political hiring instead of performance hiring
Pricing driven by optics, not supply reality
Losses covered by taxpayers … meaning you, againYou don’t eliminate costs. You just hide them and move them.
I lived through high interest rates north of 20%, carried customer debt, and still had to make the numbers work. Government doesn’t operate under that discipline. It can fail indefinitely and call it policy.
Public grocery isn’t “not Marxist”. It’s not even that sophisticated. It’s just naive.
The real issue isn’t ideology. It’s a complete lack of understanding of how incentives drive outcomes.
You don’t fix affordability by replacing people who have to be efficient with a system that doesn’t.
You fix it by increasing competition, reducing regulatory drag, and letting supply actually respond.
Everything else is theatre.
In the National Post, Kelly McParland outlines the scale of challenge Lewis is facing to make the NDP electorally viable again:
Thumbnail of one of Avi Lewis’s campaign shorts
After two weeks on the road [Jagmeet Singh] finally conceded to reality, allowing that while “I would be honoured to serve as prime minister … I don’t want to presuppose the outcome of the election”.
Maybe Lewis should start straight off with that line, since choosing him as leader saves the party from pretending it expects to find itself in power. “The return of the NDP starts today!” Lewis declared in his victory speech, but as the most out-there ideologue of the candidates he defeated he’ll have a harder time convincing ordinary Canadians than he did winning over his fourth-place party. A film-maker and activist, he’s not just left-wing, but way off in a universe of his own.
His ambitions are dazzling: a Canada powered entirely by renewable energy in which everyone gets a guaranteed income, vast infrastructure projects are built to sustain the environment, farmers produce healthier, affordable, cleaner food while homebuilders concentrate on energy-efficient homes for lower income groups. All this paid for by an economy that somehow remains vibrant while its vital energy industry is crippled, jobs are lost, taxes are raised, royalties are increased, government spending balloons, the carbon tax is re-introduced and “the rich” are somehow found to have plenty of excess revenue to cover the costs.
Voters who continue to back the NDP will now know exactly what they’re casting their ballots for. That wasn’t always clear under previous leaders. Thomas Mulcair didn’t hate trade deals or pipelines enough to satisfy party stalwarts deeply hostile to both. To the unyielding, Singh did a deal with the devil when he agreed to prop up Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, even if the decision succeeded in squeezing out some policy victories.
Small victories aren’t in Lewis’s lexicon. He wants a revolution. “This is more than a rigged economy, it is a war on working people”, he declared on Sunday. “It is immoral, it is unCanadian and we cannot let it stand.”
March 30, 2026
Canada’s official bilingualism benefits only one of the two “founding” peoples
Canada has been officially a bilingual country for decades, but it hasn’t made most Canadians capable of effective use of both official languages, especially in the western half of the country. Instead, with the imposition of mandatory bilingualism for most federal civil service roles, it’s functioned as a strong bias in favour of bilingual Quebeckers and against Canadians from majority anglophone provinces. Given that government jobs have been growing at a far faster rate than private-sector jobs, this injustice is fuelling anger and support for separatism in the west:
This is why French Immersion schools function as “private schools for the middle class” … it provides access to lucrative and secure government jobs for the children of the bourgeoisie, excluding most working class kids.
It’s a uniquely ridiculous Canadian story.
Two Canadian pilots were killed in a freak accident at LaGuardia airport and yet Canadian news coverage has been dominated by outrage over the fact that the CEO of the pilots’ airline, Michael Rousseau of Air Canada, released a condolence video that had French captions but no spoken French!
Though one of the two dead pilots was French Canadian, near as I can tell, none of the anger at Rousseau’s video is coming from anyone associated with the victims themselves, but rather the Canadian political class and punditocracy. Prime Minister Carney denounced the video for lacking “judgment” and “compassion,” and a bunch of other politicians have said similar things, particularly in Quebec, where the legislature passed a unanimous motion demanding Rousseau’s resignation. There have been a ton of angry anti-Rousseau editorials in all the leading Canadian papers.
It is obviously a highly performative, almost ritualistic, almost religious outrage occurring mostly so members of the Canadian establishment can collectively affirm one of their shibboleths: the country’s elite should be bilingual.
On social media, however, the reaction has been quite different, with ordinary Canadians expressing frustration and annoyance at the distasteful nature of it all. Two men are dead and this is what our betters are yapping about? An old debate — long stigmatized, but never successfully suppressed — has resurfaced: why are we doing this bilingualism thing at all?
I’ve been arguing against the Canadian elite’s cult of official bilingualism for a very long time. To the extent I have a controversial reputation in Canada and don’t get invited on things very much, it’s in large part because I’m very outspoken on this issue, which is often treated as the one line you’re not allowed to cross. Hating trans people or saying October 7 wasn’t so bad … those are edgy opinions that can be forgiven. Questioning bilingualism is a much more unforgivably toxic take, because it’s seen as offending Quebeckers, and a lot of elite Canada wants to be on Quebec’s good side.
But I also feel this is one issue where I’m very, very obviously in the right, and where I have the least self-doubt. There aren’t many issues where I feel I could hold my own in some Jubilee-style “Surrounded” debate bro type thing, but this is one.
So, with that being said, let me attempt to engage with some of the arguments you see made in favor of not just official bilingualism, but the idea of Canada requiring a bilingual ruling class in particular.
Canada is a bilingual country, so it makes sense for the Canadian government, and other Canadian national institutions, to provide nationwide services in both French and English.
Canada is a bilingual country by law, but not by fact. Canada is in fact an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. According to the 2021 census, 87% of Canadians can speak English while 11% can speak only French and about 2% can speak neither. Of this four million Canadians who can only speak French, 96% are located in the province of Quebec. Excluding Quebec, the rate of Canadians who can speak English rises to 97.8%.
It’s sensible for things in Quebec to function mostly in the French language, given about 94% of people in the province can speak it. It’s sensible for things outside of Quebec to operate mostly in English for the same reason. In both Quebec and the rest of Canada there is a very small minority of people, mostly in urban centers, who cannot speak the dominant language of where they live, so it’s reasonable for accommodations to be made for their needs on a case-by-case, community-by-community basis.
What is decidedly not reasonable, however, is to blindly organize all public (and in some cases, private) operations in this country as if there exists some substantial unilingual French-speaking minority everywhere from Newfoundland to Nunavut that is helpless without services specifically tailored to them — a minority in need of French-speaking receptionists and clerks and cops and teachers and librarians and journalists and guides and managers and lawyers and judges and HR departments and all the rest, all accessible at all times, anywhere in Canada.
For Canada’s service sector to go above and beyond in seeking to accommodate the needs of a unilingual French population in provinces and territories outside of Quebec that either barely exists or is substantially overshadowed by other linguistic minorities is to engage in a preposterous misallocation of resources simply to pay tribute to a bilingual fantasy version of Canada that’s never actually existed.
Net Zero or mass immigration, pick one (or better, pick neither)
Lorenzo Warby points out the blindingly obvious (to anyone with common sense) fact that the top two pet projects of western transnationalist elites — Net Zero and mass third-world immigration — are in direct conflict with one another. But rather than choosing one form of societal suicide over the other, the healthy alternative is to absolutely reject both:
Culturally more homogeneous democracies are happier than more culturally diverse democracies. Also, in the Anglophone countries, where the centre-right won the most recent national election, happiness went up slightly. Where the centre-left won the most recent national election, happiness went down noticeably.
Australia is the latest developed democracy to experience conventional centre-right politics being threatened by a national populist surge. Just as country-club Republicans were Trumped, Gaullists were Le Penned, Forza Italia was Melonied, and the Tories are being Faraged, so the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.
What Australia has in common with the pattern in the UK, and the rise of AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, is the combination of Net Zero (or equivalent) with mass immigration leading to a national populist surge.
National populism well predates Net Zero. It does not predate the adoption of policies of elite display and elite benefit, particularly regarding immigration. The combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is, however, particularly conducive to surges electoral support for national populism, as we can see in the UK, Germany and now Australia.
It is not hard to see why. Mass prosperity rests on cheap energy: that is much more important than, for instance, free trade. The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.
As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:
by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.
Net Zero means raising the price of energy, thereby narrowing access to it, and, in particular, narrowing the range of economic activity that is commercially sustainable. Even without increasing the population, that will increase contestation over resources.
Add mass immigration to the mix, and that contestation becomes much worse. All the experienced costs of mass immigration — higher rents and house prices; increased congestion; downward pressure on wages and increased fiscal stress (if importing significant numbers of low-capital/skill immigrants); downward pressure on social trust and corrosive effects on the norms and rules that underpin institutions (if importing lots of people from very different cultures); increased crime (if importing significant numbers of people from higher crime cultures) — are then magnified.
March 28, 2026
Noelia Castillo Ramos, RIP
Celina provides the background information you certainly won’t get from skimming the mainstream media’s coverage of the death of twenty-five year old Noelia Castillo Ramos:
This is how broken the West has become. On Thursday, March 26, 2026, in a clinically sterile room within an assisted living facility in Barcelona, Spain, the government executed a twenty five year old paralysed rape victim. Her name was Noelia Castillo Ramos.1 Noelia did not die of a terminal illness, nor did she pass away from natural causes. Rather, she was administered a lethal injection by the Spanish state that had dismantled her family, forced her into a hostile and horribly dangerous environment, ignored her horrific violation, and ultimately deemed her broken existence too inconvenient to maintain.2
A still from Noelia Castillo’s Antena 3 interview on March 24.
While Noelia Castillo’s heart was stopped by a cocktail of state-sponsored chemicals, the unvetted migrant men who gang-raped her, shattered her mind, and drove her to fling herself from a fifth-floor window continue to walk the streets of Europe, entirely shielded from justice. They faced zero consequences. She faced the death penalty.
These were the last words that her grandmother said to Noelia: “I love you, my girl; someday we will be together again”.
The fate of Noelia Castillo stands as a single almost perfect, undeniable illustration of everything that is broken, evil, and actively suicidal about modern Western society under progressive, woke, open-border, and secular-left governance. Progressive Europe has functionally and legally decided that native European women and girls are a disposable commodity, just collateral damage in the grand suicidal project of multiculturalism.
“Avi Lewis isn’t just left-wing … He’s the Leap Manifesto come to life”
The federal New Democratic Party is having a leadership contest with the voting to be tallied this weekend. Avi Lewis is apparently the overwhelmingly odds-on candidate to take it on the first ballot, and as Fred DeLorey explains, it’s likely to be very bad news indeed … for the NDP’s provincial counterparts:
Maclean’s called it a decade ago. (Cover image: Maclean’s, April 25, 2016)
Pundits love to overcomplicate politics, but the math for this Sunday’s NDP leadership vote is painfully simple. For Avi Lewis to be denied a first-ballot victory, the other four candidates on the ballot need to somehow scrape together 50% plus one of the vote.
Let’s be brutally honest: that ain’t happening.
[…]
So, what does this imminent coronation mean for the NDP?
My gut tells me it’s an unmitigated disaster. Avi Lewis isn’t just left-wing; he’s arguably the most radical, far-left extremist to ever take the helm of a major Canadian political party. We’re talking about a guy who literally wants to nationalize our grocery stores, completely defund the Canadian military, and aggressively shut down our entire energy sector by next Tuesday. He’s the Leap Manifesto [Wiki] come to life.
And here is why this is a catastrophic problem for the broader NDP movement. Unlike the federal Liberals or Conservatives, the NDP is one highly integrated entity. There is no structural separation between their federal and provincial wings. Right now, the federal party is a broke, 6-seat laughingstock without official party status in the House of Commons. But provincially? The NDP is a powerhouse, currently sitting as the government or the Official Opposition in 6 of Canada’s 7 largest provinces.
Those provincial machines weren’t built on Leap Manifesto radicalism. Leaders like John Horgan, Wab Kinew, and Rachel Notley found massive success by dragging their parties to the pragmatic, business-friendly middle. Back in my home province of Nova Scotia, Darrell Dexter famously secured his historic majority by literally branding himself a “conservative progressive”.
Avi Lewis wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near that kind of pragmatism. As federal leader, his extreme views will instantly infect the brand of the entire integrated party. Every time he attacks the resource sector or champions a fringe socialist policy in Ottawa, Conservative and Liberal premiers are going to gleefully hang those quotes around the necks of every provincial NDP leader in the country. He isn’t just going to sink the federal party; he is going to drag the successful provincial wings down with him.
But then again, the world is changing rapidly, and usually in crazy ways. Maybe Canadians can be convinced that they desperately want Canada Post managing their produce aisles. Maybe the electorate is finally ready for a platform where your weekly ration of locally sourced lentils is delivered by a government-appointed bicycle courier.
I remain deeply unconvinced. But these days? Who knows.
QotD: The moment the American empire began to decline
There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans1 for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So … they just kept on looking.
The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy”. What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?
I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity.2 But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life. The United States spent trillions of dollars and caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million and a million people in Iraq alone. The goal of this was “regional transformation”, and we transformed the region all right. The war destabilized several neighboring regimes, which led them to collapse into anarchy and civil war. Consequences of that included millions more deaths and the near extinction of Christianity in the place it came from.
As an American, I didn’t feel any of this directly,3 but with the benefit of hindsight the war looks even more epochal for us. It marks, in so many ways, the turning point from our decades of unchallenged global supremacy to the current headlong charge into “multipolarity”. I know this may sound melodramatic, but I truly believe future historians will point to it as the moment that we squandered our empire. Remember, hegemonic empires work best when nobody thinks they’re an empire. True strength is not the ability to enforce your commands, it’s everybody being so desperate to please you that they spend all their time figuring out what you want, such that you don’t even have to issue edicts.
Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, American global dominance was so unquestioned we didn’t even have to swat down any challengers. This is a very good position for an empire to be in, because it means you don’t run the risk of blunders or surprise upset victories that make you look weak and encourage others to take a chance. Conversely, there’s a negative spiral where the hegemon has to start making demands of its clients, which makes the clients resentful and uncooperative, which in turn means that they have to be told what to do. All of this makes the hegemon-client relationship start to look less like a good “deal” and more purely extractive, which can rapidly lead the whole system to fall apart.
Iraq was the moment the American empire went into this negative cycle.
Even if you don’t agree with me about that, presumably you will agree that it was very bad for American soft power and prestige, bad for a number of friendly regimes in the area, and bad for our finances and our military readiness. So to anybody curious about the world, it seems very important to ask why we did this, why we thought it was a good idea, and how nobody predicted the ensuing debacle that seems so obvious in hindsight.
The conventional answers to these questions tend to be either “George W. Bush was dumb” or “Dick Cheney was evil”. I totally reject these as answers. Or I think at best they’re seriously incomplete: if the first Trump administration taught us anything, it’s that the US President can’t actually do very much on his own if the bureaucracy is set against him. The United States is an oligarchy, a kind of surface democracy; big decisions don’t happen without a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. More to the point, the decision to invade Iraq actually was endorsed and supported by pretty much every important politician and every institution, including the whole mainstream media and most of the Democratic Party. Blaming it on a single bad administration is too easy. It’s an excuse designed to avoid asking hard questions about how organizations filled with well-meaning people can go totally off the rails
Fortunately, Michael Mazarr has written the definitive4 book on this very question. It’s not a history of the Iraq War and occupation: it’s a history of the decision to invade Iraq, ending shortly after the tanks went steaming across the border. It’s an exhaustively-researched doorstopper composed out of hundreds and hundreds of interviews with officials working in the innards of the White House and of various federal bureaucracies and spy agencies, all aimed at answering a single question: “What were they thinking?”
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.
- Those plans were provided by the Russians, who prior to multiple rounds of NATO expansion were our allies.
- Given that almost everybody in the US mainstream, both Democrats and Republicans, were for it, this probably explains a lot about how I turned out.
- Sure, maybe someday we’ll have a fiscal crisis, but the incredible thing about America is that all the money wasted in Iraq still won’t be in the top 5 reasons for it. >
- “Definitive” is publisher-speak for “very, very long.”
March 27, 2026
QotD: The Pimp Hand Theory of Social Discourse
1) Acquiesce, by which is meant “try to bring whatever batshit insanity she won’t budge on into as much alignment with Reality as you possibly can”; or
2) Walk away, knowing that you’re not going to get laid ever again with her, or any of her friends, or anyone she might conceivably talk to, ever, in her entire life; or
3) Smack the bitch, which might end up with 2), but much more likely will get you …
… well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Most men — being the decent, civilized sort — would fill in the blank with anything from “arrested” to “beaten to a pulp by decent men”. But is it true? The Pimp Hand Theory says no.
Trump has shown the ho that is America his pimp hand, and it is strong.
Severian, commenting on “Kvetching Up With Karen”, Founding Questions, 2025-10-30.
March 26, 2026
An alternative reading of the American Revolution
As the majority of my current readers are Americans (or Chinese folks using VPNs to pretend to be Americans), the following could be interpreted as clickbait. Just sayin’.
Upper Canadian Cavalier suggests that the events leading up to the Anglo-Colonial unpleasantness of 1776 onwards have been subject to a preferred reading that tidies up all the inconvenient details and sweeps them under the rug of a revolution against “royal tyranny” (even though HRM King George III was much more liberal than he’s ever given credit for, and a revolution against “an elected Parliament” doesn’t have the right ring to it):
Declaration of Independence by John Turnbull (1756-1843), showing the Committee of Five (Adams, Livingston, Sherman, Jefferson, and Franklin) presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 28 June, 1776.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
The American founding narrative is a document produced by a litigation class to justify actions already taken. Its authors were not philosophers who became rebels. They were rebels who hired philosophers.
This is not a fringe position. It is not the invention of bitter foreigners or tenured radicals looking to dismantle something they never understood. It is the conclusion you reach when you put down the mythology and pick up the actual historical record, the ledgers, the court documents, the correspondence that was never meant to be read by posterity, the testimony of people who were there and whose version of events was systematically buried because they were on the losing side. The American Revolution is the most comprehensively mythologized event in the history of the English-speaking world, and the mythologizing began before the gunpowder had cleared.
Start with the money, because it almost always starts with the money. The Navigation Acts, which colonial propagandists framed as instruments of imperial oppression, were a trade regulatory system that had been in place for over a century and under which the colonies had grown from scattered coastal settlements into some of the most prosperous communities in the Atlantic world. The specific enforcement measures that triggered the revolutionary crisis came after the Seven Years War, a conflict in which Britain spent the modern equivalent of billions of pounds defending the American colonies against French and indigenous pressure across an entire continent. When the war ended in 1763, the British national debt had nearly doubled. Parliament looked at the colonies, looked at the bill, and suggested with what strikes any disinterested observer as elementary reasonableness that the people who had benefited most from the war might contribute something toward its cost.
The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed legal documents, newspapers, and pamphlets at rates that were substantially lower than what ordinary subjects in Britain were already paying. The Townshend Acts taxed glass, paint, paper, and tea, luxury goods, not necessities. At their peak, the total tax burden on the American colonies amounted to roughly one shilling per person per year. The average British subject at home was paying twenty-six shillings. The colonial merchant class, which had grown fat on a century of salutary neglect and profitable smuggling, responded to this modest request for contribution with riots, the formation of extralegal enforcement committees, the physical destruction of property, and the systematic intimidation of anyone who disagreed. They called this liberty.
John Hancock, whose signature on the Declaration of Independence is so oversized that his name became a synonym for a signature, was the wealthiest smuggler in colonial America. His fortune was built on molasses, wine, and dry goods moved outside the official imperial trade system at substantial profit. In 1768, British customs officials seized his sloop Liberty on evidence of wine smuggling. The seizure triggered a riot. The customs commissioners were driven from Boston under threat of violence and had to take refuge on a Royal Navy vessel in the harbor. Hancock was prosecuted and represented by John Adams, who got the charges dropped on procedural grounds. The same John Adams who would later write the Massachusetts Constitution. The same John Adams who, when asked to describe his greatest service to his country, cited his defense of the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre trial. These relationships are not incidental. They are the operating structure of the revolutionary movement.
The Boston Massacre has been taught to American schoolchildren for two hundred and fifty years as evidence of British brutality. Here is what actually happened. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a small detachment of British soldiers posted outside the Custom House was surrounded by a crowd estimated at several hundred people, who pelted them with ice, rocks, oyster shells, and pieces of coal, struck them with clubs and sticks, and screamed at them to fire, daring them repeatedly to shoot. Private Hugh Montgomery was knocked to the ground by a club blow. When he recovered he fired. The other soldiers, believing an order had been given, fired as well. Five people died. It was a tragedy. What happened next is the part that gets edited out of the curriculum. John Adams, cousin of the great agitator Samuel Adams, agreed to defend the soldiers and did so brilliantly. Six of the eight soldiers were acquitted outright. The remaining two were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and were released after being branded on the thumb, the standard punishment. The jury found that the crowd had been the aggressor. Adams later wrote that the case was one of the best pieces of service he ever rendered his country, by which he meant he had established a legal record that contradicted the propaganda his cousin was already distributing. The propaganda survived. The verdict did not make it into the textbooks.
Samuel Adams, the moral conscience of the Revolution, the man who could manufacture outrage from raw air, had a financial history that his hagiographers handle with extraordinary delicacy. He had inherited his father’s malting business and run it into insolvency. He had then served as a tax collector for the town of Boston and accumulated a personal shortfall of several thousand pounds, money he had collected and failed to remit, that the town had been attempting to recover from him through legal action for years. He was an active defendant in debt proceedings during the very period when he was organizing the Sons of Liberty and writing pamphlets about the tyranny of arbitrary taxation. The Revolution did not merely advance Samuel Adams’s political philosophy. It made his financial problems disappear. When you understand this, his extraordinary energy in the cause of independence begins to look less like principle and more like survival.
March 24, 2026
More political and philosophical illusions, left and right
Tom Kratman continues his discussion of the illusions that distort how people on the left and people on the right view reality:
There is an illusion – yes, on both sides – of guilt by association. This is related to, but not exactly the same as, the illusion of indistinguishability. How many nail-bomb-building moral sons of Bill Ayers are over on the modern American left? Can’t be too many, I think, based on the serious dearth of Earth-shattering kabooms we hear, or rather don’t hear, lately. How many hair-shirted and sandwich board clad – with said boards reading, “Repent! The end is near!” – folks are there on the religious right? Based on how the typical Christian lives, and those being by no means a particularly bad set of men and women, there aren’t all that many. How many Christians do you really think, given a button that would make the Westboro Baptist Church and all its members go poof, wouldn’t push that button twice, the first time slowly, for the emotional satisfaction (well, that and to savor the screaming1), and the second time, quickly, to make sure. How many leftists and liberals are dead set against gun control? More than a few.
Then there’s the illusion brought on by willful blindness. For example, “No enemies to the left!” said Alexander Kerenski, Prime Minister of Russia, in 1917. Pity Kerenski wasn’t able to see that the people to his left were largely intellectual idiots and dogmatic homicidal maniacs, and that there may have been people to his right who were considerably more reasonable and sane. He said that not too long before being tossed out on his ear by the Bolsheviks, who, interestingly enough, were to his left.
You don’t see as much of this – the notion that there are no enemies to the right – on the conservative side, by the way, though there is some. Still, the next time I see an actual conservative lining up with the American National Socialist Party,2 the KKK, or Stormfront will be the first.
Part of the problem here, I think, is that we take something – civilization, actually – so much for granted that we forget how hard it is to build or to hold onto, and so forget that we have something important in common with our more moderate political opponents. Thus, taking it for granted, we forget that common ground, see the opposition, and so line up with those more extreme sorts for whom civilization is probably just a burden they’d as soon be done with.
- Okay, maybe some would just push it the once.
- Which seems to have many trivial manifestations. You can find your own links, but why bother?
“Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book”
In The Critic, Ben Sexsmith reviews a new book by Matt Goodwin, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity:
Here is an exceptionally easy argument to make:
- Mass migration is ensuring that the historical majority in Britain is becoming a minority.
- This is the result of policies that have been pursued regardless of popular opinion.
- This has had many kinds of destructive consequences.
The first claim is so obviously true that one might as well deny the greenness of the grass. The second is proven by decades of broken promises (see Anthony Bowles’s article “Immigration and Consent” for more). The third requires argumentation, but I think that it is clear if one considers hideous incidences of terrorism, grooming gangs and violent censoriousness, as well as broader trends of economic dependency and electoral sectarianism.
Again, this is not a difficult argument to make. So why is it made so badly?
Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book. It reads like the book of a political operator extending his CV. The left-wing commentator Andy Twelves caused a stir on social media by pointing out various factual mistakes and what appear to be non-existent quotes. Twelves speculates that these “quotes” are the result of AI hallucinations, which is plausible, if not proven, in the light of the fact that two of Mr Goodwin’s sparse footnotes contain source information from ChatGPT.
Inasmuch as Suicide of a Nation makes a form of the argument sketched out the beginning of this article, there is truth to it. But it contains a fundamental problem — it assumes that this argument is so true that there is no requirement to make it well.
“Slop” is an overused term but it feels painfully appropriate for a book that is spoon fed to its audience. Goodwin, who had a long academic career before becoming a successful commentator, is not a man who lacks intelligence. But he writes as if he thinks his audience lacks it. “I did not write this book for the ruling class”, writes Goodwin, “I wrote it for the forgotten majority”. Alas, he seems to think that the average member of the “forgotten majority” has the reading level of a dimwitted 12-year-old. As well as being stylistically simple, the book is full of annoying paternal asides. “In the pages ahead I shall walk you through what is happening to the country …” “In the next chapter we will begin our journey …” Thank you, Mr Goodwin. Can we stop for ice cream?
The book is terribly derivative, with a title that reflects Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower and a subtitle — “Immigration, Islam, Identity” — that all but repeats that of Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe — “Immigration, Identity, Islam”. It is written in the humourless and colourless rhetorical style of AI. I’m not saying it was AI-generated. (Indeed, a brief assessment using AI checkers suggests that it was not.) I’m just saying that it might as well have been.
March 23, 2026
Reject multiculturalism as you would reject fake meat
Spaceman Spiff looks at the technocratic dream that we’d all give up on eating meat and instead switch to lab-grown, VC-funded, and Bill-Gates-approved fake meat. It failed utterly, of course, because despite all of the arguments the corporations and the astroturf activists could marshal, nobody wanted it. Vegetarians wouldn’t switch to eating something vaguely kinda-sorta meat-ish, and meat eaters were happy continuing their carnivorous habits. It had no real market, so it was a dud product.
Our technocratic elites have been pushing multiculturalism for even longer than they were pushing fake meat, but just as with fake meat, the more people encounter it, the less willing they are to accept it:
Multiculturalism is the belief many distinct cultures can live together and flourish rather than devolve into conflict.
This is false. It has never worked anywhere.
The world itself is multicultural. The solution that emerged to manage different groups was national borders. Each culture could segregate and live apart from others because they could not successfully live together.
As the failures of multiculturalism become impossible to hide, social engineers reach for ideas to make it work. The latest is civic nationalism. The fake meat of the social governance world.
For all human history we have relied upon the real thing, but now today’s social engineers believe they have discovered a superior recipe, one that avoids the hassle and expense of tradition.
Anyone can become someone like you as long as they conform to an arbitrary list of beliefs, behaviours, laws and customs. We can ignore ethnicity, heritage and history. We can manufacture instant populations with passports and certificates just as we can create synthetic meat by combining the ingredients ourselves.
Like fake meat it looks workable on paper. Not only that, it is presented as self-evidently reasonable. Why has nobody thought of this before? How convenient governments and corporations can import a new workforce and they magically become British, American or Chinese because they “share values” and observe laws.
America was the first to experiment, a necessity after the introduction of non-European immigration in the 1960s. Needless to say they didn’t need it before that.
The country found itself importing people with no historical connection to the American population through heritage or history. Far fewer of them married into the family than previous waves of immigrants from European nations. While importing the world America was becoming the world with its racial, ethnic and cultural tensions.
They convinced themselves they had always been a nation of immigrants and conveniently forgot how long it took even the Irish to assimilate into America despite their ostensible similarity to the founding stock.
Strenuous efforts to make this seem normal, despite its novelty, included the energetic emphasis on shared values or adopted customs since the newcomers were often strikingly different.
Civic nationalism seems to be based on the same faulty reasoning as synthetic meat. We can circumvent the traditional approach using innovation. Why live through centuries of strife for a nation to emerge when you can just hand out certificates and make everyone instantly like you because they claim to respect the law and promise to adopt new customs?
Initially this can seem to work. If a small number of skilled immigrants come they are typically absorbed. Most cultures can do this if the numbers are modest and especially if the newcomers intermarry, or their children do.
Even more so, in traditional societies, including our own until recently, the pressure to adapt was almost universal; no translators, no welfare, no slack whatsoever.
Large numbers of immigrants over short time scales retard the process of assimilation, and generous welfare programmes can derail it completely.
America is also big unlike European nations, so it has taken a while for the full effects to be felt.
Despite the endless hype, people reveal their preferences in their behaviour. They can move. Pro-immigrationists have complained about white flight for decades, one very obvious example of the failure of civic nationalism.
Image from Spaceman Spiff
Just like those inconveniently full supermarket shelves with their synthetic products no one will buy, people run from diversity when they can.
Civic nationalists, like climate zealots, resort to repeating their tired lines about their great intent, how amazing it is all meant to be if people would just get into the spirit of things.
But it is all fantasy. Literal fictions that exist only inside the heads of those who imagine utopia. Real life has its own ideas.
Update: Added missing URL.
Update the second, 24 March: 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.
Mapping the “Manosphere”
Janice Fiamengo says — and a lot will agree with here — that we can’t hate gender studies enough:
As Leo Kearse posted on Substack Notes – “When’s Louis Theroux doing a documentary on THIS manosphere? When’s he going to expose the idiocy of its leading proponents, such as Stella Creasy and Hannah Spencer?”
Nothing beats a threat narrative for a gender studies academic in search of relevance, and what more urgent than the dark corners of the internet where men (and the women who love them) allegedly spread misogyny and male supremacism.
Many academics now claim expertise in this area of gender studies, probing the volatile fragility and violent anxieties of manosphere men, and calling to repentance all who resist the feminist future. Many of these academics are women, making a sweet living warning about male “hate”, but there are plenty of male feminists as well, crusaders against others’ toxicity.
In “Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research“, four scholars of masculinity survey the latest research on digital media and violent extremism. Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua Roose, and Michael Flood claim to have read hundreds of studies of the manosphere, which they call an “online ecosystem of anti-women actors”.
According to them, the manosphere is brimming over with grievance-mongering, grift, and gynocidal fantasy. Nothing in it is good or sincere or well-intentioned. Various sub-genres of online content, including fitness advice, stoicism, and the tradwife lifestyle, are presented as outgrowths of misogynistic extremism from which millions of men and boys require rescue, by force if necessary.
A Roll Call of Buzzwords
The researchers make no distinction between manosphere content generally and what they call male supremacy — or, indeed, between those terms and a host of others, all pejorative. Their introductory paragraph alone provides a roll call of buzzwords that link any dissent from Marxist-feminist orthodoxy to misogynistic violence.
The manosphere, we’re told, is “bound by the belief that mainstream society is a misandrist conspiracy that disadvantages men”. Manosphere groups “frame contemporary gender politics as a ‘war against men'”. These groups also “frequently engage in misogynistic abuse as well as inciting violence against women”, thus creating an “online environment of accelerating harms”.
None of these statements is ever supported with evidence, but it is likely too much to expect evidence: the direct equation between male-positive advocacy and murderous misogyny is no longer a subject of academic debate, if it ever was. It is an axiom.
In one short paragraph, then, we move from non-feminist perspectives to “misandrist conspiracies”, and from belief in a “war against men” to “inciting violence” and “accelerating harms”. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with anti-feminist content will recognize the definitional sleights of hand. Are any of these academics genuinely familiar with the subject they are writing about? It seems more likely that they have taken a shortcut to a politically-approved position.
What about the mass of anti-feminist and male-positive content creators — Rick Bradford at The Illustrated Empathy Gap, Tom Golden at Men Are Good, Alison Tieman and company at Honey Badger Radio, Bettina Arndt at Bettina Arndt, Hannah Spier at Psychobabble, just to name a few — who come nowhere near “inciting violence against women”? On the contrary, they pursue a vision of mutual cooperation and accountability between the sexes by rejecting female privilege and paranoia. Is this manosphere content, or not?
Many men’s rights advocates — researchers like Stephen Baskerville, Paul Nathanson, James Nuzzo, David Shackleton, Gerard Casey, Helen Smith, and Grant Brown, just to name those I’ve been consulting most recently — simply document male disadvantage with evidence. They do not assert conspiracies or stoke grievance.
As for the “war against men”, have our researchers read any of the voluminous feminist writings that celebrate male death and openly advocate a world without them? When feminist leaders — many of them university professors — are not only allowed but actually celebrated for declaring their anti-male hatred and calling for a “decontamination of the earth“, what are sensible people to conclude about anti-male animus?
