The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 28 Jul 2026In Chicago, the Democratic Party chooses Adlai Stevenson as their candidate for the Presidential election to be held November 4th; he’ll square off against Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican candidate. Also, in the US, the steelworkers strike comes to an end. In Korea, torrential rains prevent action on the ground this week, though the UN continues its summer aerial bombing campaign of the north in the skies.
July 29, 2026
The Korean War Week 110 – The Democratic Candidate – July 28, 1952
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The changing nature of Canadian patriotism
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Jay Currie contrasts the kind of patriotism most Canadians grew up with against the politicized version hijacked by the Liberals as a tool in their never-ending quest to re-shape Canadians in their preferred image:
Sitting out here on the southern tip of Vancouver Island overlooking the Olympic mountains across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I am bemused by the Eastern Canadian debate on Canadian patriotism. @BenWoodfinden weighs in as does Auntie Andy @acoyne
The current version of the debate is focused on whether the Conservative Party is “patriotic enough”. In less fraught times that would translate to “love of Canada” but now it comes down to anti-American and, more importantly, anti-Trump enough.
Probably because, after twelve years of Trudeau/Carney there is very little “Canada” left to love. We’re a post-national, genocidal, nearly European entity ruled from an embattled Ottawa beset by Americans, Chinese and our own separatists.
From the Ottawa/Toronto point of view Canada’s singular attribute is our willingness to punch Trump right in the nose. And woe betide the traitors like Smith, Moe and Frechette who are not willing to get behind Captain Canada as he takes his roundhouse swings.
And the Conservative Party is failing on the patriotism front precisely because a significant part of it thinks punching the Yanks in the nose is possibly the dumbest thing they have ever heard. Why the Hell would we do that?
On the Auntie Andy/Woodfinden scale of patriotism this disqualifies the CPC from ever winning a federal election because only Canadian Patriots should be allowed to command the Ottawa ramparts eyes firmly fixed on the perfidious Yanks.
As a thought experiment try to define Canadian patriotism without reference to the US or Donald Trump. I assure you it can be done. The way you do it is begin with the ground you are on. Where is it? What is it? What can you see?
Now, think about your neighbours, the stores you go to, the pub you like, the golf course or soccer field or swimming pool you prefer, the schools you went to, the teams you played on, yes, your favourite NHL team, vacation spot, drive.
Essentially these and hundreds of other details are the ground truths of your Canada and it is that Canada where your patriotism begins. The Canadian flag, the Peace tower, your favourite version of “Oh, Canada” are all abstractions of this ground truth.
People don’t fight for “King and Country”, they fight for their children, their spouse, their parents, their neighbours. That is where the real loyalty lies. It’s acutely local and it accretes across time, across generations.
The Liberal Party project of the last half century has been to replace this hyper-localized patriotism with an synthetic, denatured, atomized Patriotism which defines itself by what it is against, not what it is for. It is a deeply unsatisfying project.
The fact the CPC is wary of this synthetic patriotism is to its credit. Looking at its messaging in the last election at least a part of the CPC understands that Canada is the ground you stand on, not an invention of Ottawa. It’s the right message.
At Without Diminishment, Carl Vallée identifies one of the structural strengths of the left that allow them to concentrate on achieving and maintaining power: unity of vision across all progressive parties.
Exit Trudeau, enter Carney.
It must be admitted that the Liberals have dominated the political landscape for much of the past century, enabling them to weave their own partisan symbols and values into the fabric of Canadian institutions.
The federal state as it exists today is a legacy of Liberal Party rule. Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms fundamentally changed the trajectory of this country, but the ideology underpinning it had begun to take shape even before his time. Whether one considers multiculturalism, mass immigration or the red maple leaf flag, Canada is a country whose institutions naturally lean, if not lurch, to the left.
Therefore, conservatives must swim against the current, almost perpetually. Why is this? I submit that it stems from the fact that Liberals in both English Canada and Quebec are ideologically closely aligned and share a common vision of Canada. The left often looks much the same everywhere. Certainly, its values, methods and codes of communication are identical across the Western world.
In Canada, Liberals will not hesitate to weaponise the state to ensure their values endure. The alignment between Liberals in Quebec and English Canada has been critical to their electoral success.
Conversely, the right are more locally rooted and provincial, and are therefore less inclined to share a broad common vision with their compatriots across the country. This poses a challenge to both the coherence of Canadian conservatism and its electoral arithmetic.
Conservatism in Quebec is not libertarian, and here we envisage using the state to advance nationalist and conservative ends. What we conserve in Quebec is not what our friends in Western Canada or Ontario seek to conserve.
Arrayed against our alliance of local political traditions are the Liberals, who share and promote a single, pan-Canadian narrative. The inability of the right to offer a catch-all vision capable of rallying the anti-Liberal vote partially explains the electoral success of the Liberal Party over the past few decades.
Structurally, the 1982 rupture over the imposition of the Charter has made this phenomenon almost permanent, despite the efforts of prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper to rally coalitions against the Liberals. Neither was able to prevent the Charter from entrenching itself as Canada’s new national narrative, despite the explicit opposition of Francophones, one of the country’s founding peoples.
If there is a fault, it does not lie solely with the pan-Canadian conservative movement, but also with Quebec’s bleus, who failed to invest in the Conservative Party of Canada, the only political party capable of rivalling the Liberals. As a result, the Quebec vote is split between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, whose voters are much less left-wing than the party’s current leadership. In the 2025 federal election, the combined Conservative and Bloc vote in Quebec actually exceeded the Liberal vote.
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July 28, 2026
The establishment pretends not to understand why AfD is still on the rise
Normally, I get my updates on German politics from eugyppius’ Substack, but this article is from the New English Review with Bruce Bawer reporting:
… even as the problematic aspects of Islam become increasingly manifest, mainstream politicians and journalists in Germany feign puzzlement over the growing popularity of AfD, which ever since its founding in 2013 has been characterized by the German establishment as heralding a Nazi renaissance. How, the German elites pretend to wonder, can so many voters transfer their loyalty from seasoned, sensible, upright political leaders to ragtag radicals who bring to mind Munich putsches and Nuremberg rallies? How on earth can they have become so misguided? Such is the coy approach of Jochen-Martin Gutsch in a recent article for Der Spiegel, in which he takes a spin around the former East Germany in purported search for an explanation as to why the “far-right” AfD has won majority backing in that part of the Bundesrepublik.
Gutsch’s first move is to act astonished at the fact that an AfD gathering in Salzwedel, Saxony-Anhalt, drew ordinary-looking families, plus “[a] surprising number of young people in their twenties, smartly dressed in blazers”. What, no Hitler Youth uniforms? Gutsch’s line is that he’s just plain perplexed by the numbers: “in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is currently polling at more than 40 percent. In the ARD Deutschlandtrend poll, the AfD is in first place; it’s even the most popular party, nationwide.” But it’s one thing to read the numbers, another thing to see all these – gasp! – ordinary-looking people flocking to show their support. This is what really blows Gutsch’s mind, or so we are meant to believe: the “normalization” of AfD, the party’s growing “acceptance”, its rapid “transformation into a mainstream party in the east”, all of which was, in Salzwedel, brought to vivid, terrible life before his eyes.
Ten years ago, Gutsch recalls, AfD received 20 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, and he, for one, was sure that it had peaked. He’s from eastern Germany himself, and he thought he knew his neighbors. He was wrong, and now, he claims, he’s alarmed – unlike his “friends and colleagues sitting in Hamburg, Cologne, or Munich, who give a friendly, bored look when I talk about the AfD. For them it’s still far away. Somewhere ‘over there’, whereas for me it’s a reality I can’t escape.” Therefore, he tells us, it’s important for him to make unravel the mystery of the AfD‘s remarkable rise in the polls.
Of course, the reason for the rise of AfD is obvious to anyone who’s been following developments in Western Europe for the last quarter-century or so. More and more voters have been demanding that immigration, especially from Muslim countries, be drastically curbed, if not altogether ended, and that the unassimilated masses who’ve already relocated to Western Europe from the Muslim world – only to swell the welfare rolls and the crime statistics – be sent back to where they came from. We’re told that the Berlin Pride killer, Abdul Ballout, belongs to “Islamist circles” in Germany. Why, ask AfD voters quite reasonably, should there be “Islamist circles” in Germany?
Yet Gutsch is, or pretends to be, blind to such concerns. His initial hypothesis, as he heads into the east, is supposedly that AfD is gaining popularity there because of economic hardship. But no, when he drives through Brandenburg now, he encounters prosperity. The city of Großräschen, once the Ruhr of East Germany, became a “ghost town” after 1990; now it’s thriving again, with the unemployment rate a mere seven percent, the old lignite mine converted into a lake with “a lovely beach” lined by “white houses” with “luxury SUVs parked out front”. Why, then, asks Gutsch, are the residents of these stately homes casting their ballots for AfD?
A veteran local politician tells Gutsch that he travels often to Bochum, in western Germany, which, compared to Großräschen, is an economic basket case. And yet the residents of Bochum are “more easygoing” than those in Großräschen. They possess a “fundamental optimism”. They “trust” and “respect” their political leaders. “What beautiful words”, Gutsch comments. He’s not being ironic. To be sure, he understands why eastern Germans aren’t brimming over with love for their leaders, whether in Berlin or Brussels. Many of them are old enough to remember 1990, when the once-mighty East German state “crumbled … before their very eyes.” One might add that before 1990, that same state was the very picture of totalitarian tyranny, as chillingly depicted in the film The Lives of Others. And before that – well, you know. Then there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to insufficiently vetted Muslim immigrants, who proceeded to cause mayhem in both east and west.
But why, then, do so many western Germans still “trust” and “respect” their leaders? It seems baffling. Yet to listen to Gutsch, loyalty to the political establishment remains the way to go – the only intelligent, mature, and reasonable option. When he talks with an AfD politician, Karsten Hilse, to get the latter’s perspective on things, he’s lost at sea. In Hilse’s opinion, mainstream German politicians are too obsessed with “tolerance”; they have at least a degree of hostility toward Germany; and they accept without question the preposterous ideologies of gender and climate-change.
Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation defined
Gawain Towler kindly provides a précis of a behind-the-paywall essay discussing misinformation, disinformation and the less-well-known malinformation, as governments on both sides of the Atlantic rush to codify new laws to further restrict the freedom of speech of their citizenry:
The essay examines “malinformation”, a term coined in 2017 and now embedded in official doctrine on both sides of the Atlantic, and I argue that it exists for one purpose, to give the state a category under which accurate speech can be treated as a harm. I start by Channelling Ambrose Beirce’s Devil’s Dictionary, with a dictionary entry defining the word as information whose defect is that it is true. Thereafter I proceed to trace its origins, its spread through British and American officialdom, its intellectual kinship with behavioural government, and its practical operation, before closing with a demand for its formal abolition.
First the taxonomy itself. The doctrine of “information disorder” rests on a triad. Misinformation is false and innocent, disinformation false and deliberate. Both turn on falsity. The third category does not. CISA, the American cybersecurity agency, defines malinformation as based on fact but used out of context to mislead or harm, and the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory council calls it the intentional spreading of genuine information with intent to cause harm. The offence, the essay observes, is not lying but telling the truth on purpose. The term’s coiners, Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle, applied it narrowly to revenge pornography, miscaptioned photographs and weaponised leaks, and the essay concedes these are real phenomena. But the concept escaped its paddock. Within four years it had migrated from a Council of Europe research paper to the letterhead of a federal agency and thence into British government training materials.
The British chapter centres on RESIST 2, the Cabinet Office counter-disinformation toolkit issued to government communicators in 2021. The toolkit reproduces the triad, admits the categories are hard to distinguish in practice, and resolves the difficulty by instructing officials to stop asking whether material is true and to focus instead on the harm it can do.
The essay treats those five words as the whole doctrine laid bare, truth demoted from test to complication. From the Cabinet Office the word trickled downward, into Local Government Association guidance, a Stockport Council webpage, even a Met Office blog. The essay notes a telling exception. Ofcom and the Electoral Commission, bodies with statutory exposure and lawyers, avoid the word entirely. Its distribution across the state maps the distribution of accountability. Where courts can reach, the concept hides.
The American experiment, the essay argues, ran to destruction. CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation team spent the early 2020s flagging content to platforms, much of it neither foreign nor false, drawing a House Judiciary Committee report accusing it of collusion and camouflage. When Missouri and Louisiana sued, the case reached the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri, where the government prevailed not on the merits but on standing. The essay relishes the irony of a Justice Department litigating for its own right to withhold context. Britain played a damper version. After Big Brother Watch revealed that the Counter Disinformation Unit had monitored lawful speech by journalists and parliamentarians, the government refused substantive disclosure and renamed the unit National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), in the tradition of Windscale becoming Sellafield.
The essay then traces the doctrine’s parentage to the habit of mind exemplified by the Nudge Unit. RESIST had different midwives, but both traditions live in the Cabinet Office and both treat the citizen as an object of professional influence. They embraced during Covid, when SPI-B recommended raising the perceived level of personal threat through hard-hitting emotional messaging while the information machinery flagged sceptical commentary, some of it correct. Fear turned up on one wing, information turned down on the other.
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July 26, 2026
The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
Handre discusses the book George Soros wrote (or had written) after he gained a huge sum of money by speculating against the Bank of England in the 1990s:
George Soros made a billion dollars betting against the Bank of England in September 1992, and then he wrote a book explaining that markets are fundamentally irrational. Notice the tension there.
The Alchemy of Finance, published in 1987, gives you Soros’s theory of reflexivity. The idea runs like this: participants in a market do not observe prices from the outside. They shape the reality they are trying to measure. Their biased expectations feed into prices, prices feed back into expectations, and the whole thing spirals away from any “equilibrium”. Soros presents this as a devastating blow to the neoclassical economists who model markets as tidy machines grinding toward a single clearing price.
He is right, but misses one fundamental point. The equilibrium fetish deserves a beating. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek spent decades explaining that the market is a process, not a photograph, and that no equation captures the discovery going on inside it. Prices carry dispersed knowledge. Entrepreneurs guess, act, and get corrected by profit and loss. Soros rediscovered a slice of this in his trading room, and called it “alchemy”.
But, Soros treats his “far from equilibrium” boom-bust sequences as proof that free markets are inherently unstable and require an adult (usually a central bank, sometimes Soros himself) to supervise them. He points at the credit bubbles of the 1980s and sees capitalism failing. He never asks who prints the credit.
The Federal Reserve does. Cheap money floods in, entrepreneurs misread the artificially low interest rates as real savings, and they pile into projects that cannot pay off. That is the boom. The bust arrives when reality collects its debt. Soros describes the symptom with real skill and misses the pathogen entirely.
So the man who broke sterling by exploiting a currency that politicians pegged at a lie somehow concludes that governments need more discretion, not less. The 1992 pound was a government price-fix collapsing, exactly as Mises predicted such fixes always do.
The reflexivity part is spot on, but send the bill for the bubbles to the people with the printing press.
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QotD: Progressives know they’re on the “right side of history”
You want to know why the Left is so awful? They have no sense of history. Total ignorance would be sufficient, but the Left, as always, really goes the extra mile (so long as “going the extra mile” entails “patting yourself on the back”) — they think they have an exquisite knowledge of history. This is partly a holdover from Karl Marx, who thought his sub-Hegelian junk philosophy was not just a science, but THE Science — The Science of History. More than that, they’re certain that History is moral, that it has “sides”, and they’re on The Right Side of History.
Whatever happens, then, happens either exactly as they foretold — even if they never bothered to actually prophesy, or to even think about it at all until just this second — or is a temporary victory by the forces of evil, a temporarily successful holding action against the inevitable Triumph of Progress.
It’s a fascinating chicken-and-egg conundrum: Did the Left take to Marxism because they’re so invincibly self-righteous, or does their sanctimoniousness come from their dedication to Marxism? It doesn’t really matter, because the practical effect is the same either way: Their consciences are completely short-circuited. They can do the most awful stuff with a smile on their faces, because “awful” is relative, comrade – as you’d know if you had the proper proletarian consciousness; if you understood things from History’s perspective, as they do.
Severian, “Escriva Ch.8: Examination of Conscience”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-26.
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July 25, 2026
Modern careers – the permanent protest class
Although L. Wayne Mathison mentions this as a Canadian phenomenon, I believe it’s endemic to the Anglosphere and probably all of the former “first world” democracies:
“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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After watching this, my takeaway is simple: Canada has developed a small, permanent protest class that moves from cause to cause, looking for confrontation, attention and social-media status.
These people are not trying to persuade anyone. They want to control the space, silence opponents and punish anyone who records what they are doing. The cause changes. The tactics do not.
There are extremists on both sides, but the organized activist left has become especially comfortable deciding who is allowed to speak, report or even stand in a public place. Too often, well-funded NGOs and unions provide the money, organization, legitimacy and political cover that keep this protest machine running.
Politicians, journalists and institutions then excuse the behaviour because they sympathize with the slogan on the sign.
A democracy cannot survive on selective free speech. Protest is a right. Intimidation, harassment and mob rule are not.
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July 24, 2026
To Zohran Mamdani, “working class” means earning less than a million a year
Rob Henderson coined the fantastically useful phrase “luxury beliefs”, and regularly points out examples of people expressing beliefs that allow them to virtue signal at little or no cost, yet if the ideas were implemented would harm those not as privileged as the speaker:
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, 10 February 2024.
Photo by Kara McCurdy via Wikimedia Commons.
In a recent New York Times interview, Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s socialist mayor, struggled to define “working class”.
At one point he was asked point-blank, “How do you define the working class?”
Mamdani replied, “I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class”.
After some pushback from the interviewer, Mamdani said he would draw the line at “about a million dollars a year”. I have no idea how he can say that without any embarrassment, but that’s why he’s a politician and I’m not. Say what you will about him, but the man knows his base. These are the people who claim to be the champions of women yet — and please forgive what has now become a hackneyed line — can’t define what a woman is, and they claim to be the champions of the working class, yet can’t define what the working class is. Or they redefine both terms to be so expansive that they could potentially encompass just about everyone.
This is where the luxury belief class has steered us.
Anyone who isn’t a millionaire gets to be working class now. It sounds absurd but that’s where we’re at now. Remember during the primaries in 2015, Bernie Sanders said that “the millionaires and the billionaires” need to pay their fair share? At some point over the past decade, he dropped “millionaires” because he became one. Now you see the millionaires condemning only the billionaires. Mark my words, at some point in the not-too-distant future, you will see the billionaires disparaging the trillionaires. Maybe inflation will hasten that phenomenon.
Anyway, in that Mamdani interview, the focus on defining class by money is revealing.
People often conflate social class with economic class. This allows us to talk about the former while pretending we are talking about the latter.
It is easier to discuss income than educational pedigree, accent, hairstyle, clothing, taste, or zip code.
But education usually signals social class more clearly than income does.
Research has found that parental educational attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. This is because, compared with parental income, parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle, tastes, and opinions. If your parents went to college but you didn’t, you’re still middle-class or higher. Not working class.
Education shapes habits, networks, and outlook long after the degree is earned. Higher education bestows cultural capital: patterns of speech, tastes, opinions, and expectations about life. Income may rise and fall over a lifetime. The worldview formed in selective institutions usually endures. By that standard, college graduates, regardless of earnings, are not working class.
Education also shapes political views more strongly than income does.
In 2021, Ezra Klein pointed out that “We tend to think of class as driven by income” but that “A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineer’s at Google, while an adjunct professor’s will look more like an apprentice plumber’s. But in terms of class experience — who they know, what they believe, where they’ve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest — the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.”
Plainly, a PhD who takes a job driving a taxi will tend to vote like other PhDs, not like other taxi drivers, especially if he or she also has a parent with a college degree.
It was so much easier to recognize the British classes, at least back in the 1960s that is:
John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbet as the avatars of the British upper, middle, and lower classes
Original version from The Frost Report, 7 April 1966.
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July 23, 2026
DSA: Trump doesn’t respect political norms. Also DSA: Let’s abolish the current system
On Substack, Chris Bray attempts to establish what the nascent Democratic Socialists of America actually stand for — and what they stand against:
Democrats are racing left, sprinting faster and faster toward abject authoritarian idiocy. Democratic socialists are defeating old Democrats in Congress and governing our big cities to death, and the DSA now offers an explicitly post-capitalist future in which everything is “free”, the one thing that resources can’t actually ever be:
You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.
You get as much food, energy, and everything else as you feel that you need, and labor is no longer imposed on anyone. Should work well.
Meanwhile, after years of dire warnings that Evil Trump doesn’t respect our Constitution, here’s an actual headline today from one of the mindless institutions of the Democratic Party’s narrative-making apparatus:
They also propose the replacement of the Supreme Court, the restructuring of the presidency, and the elimination of the Electoral College, but other than that they’re really mad that Trump doesn’t respect our political norms. Trump is very bad, because he’s tearing down our political system, and also we demand the destruction of our political system.
Why are they moving left, moving left, and then moving left some more? Why doesn’t anything ever hold them in check?
Because there’s no anchor on the right to hold the left anywhere near the center. There’s no force in American politics pulling consistently and effectively in the other direction. They’re unopposed and unanchored, so nothing holds them. Mixing metaphors, it’s like gravity ceased to exist, so the moon is floating away. Political centering is the product of a contest. Bad ideas are punished and rejected through debate. And we increasingly don’t have that. Here’s a Republican congressman bragging about getting his measure passed to make home repairs a federally funded giveaway:
Democrats think the federal government should just give you whatever you need as a government handout, while Republicans think the federal government should, how can I put this, just give you whatever you need as a government handout. Your bathroom faucet broke? Don’t worry, that’s a federal program.
Meanwhile, while Democrats demand the abolition of the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and private property, prominent Republicans are theatrically angry at … Donald Trump.
The danger of election fraud isn’t cheating – it’s citizens believing their votes no longer count
Following up on his post about the need to audit elections, Larry Correia explains why election fraud is an existential threat to the very concept of democratic government:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 
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The thousands of comments on my voter fraud post remind me of one very important thing.
The issue isn’t about Trump. It is about the perception of the citizens. But they need to make it about Trump.
It is difficult to dismiss the valid concerns of millions of nervous or angry citizens. It is easy to dismiss one guy as a sore loser and make the whole thing about his ego. Hence any discussion of this topic inevitably devolves into them fixating on Trump and the details surrounding one election and one moment in time, and ignoring everything else in the universe, up to and including fundamental human nature (as in some people cheat).
Voter fraud existed long before Trump was born and will exist long after he dies. The fixation on Trump is merely a smokescreen to obfuscate the issue. He was just louder about it than most politicians who traditionally just sulk off rather than rock the boat.
Everybody made their mind up about that election six years ago. It was a big muddled mess. And no matter what happens now around other elections, they’re gonna try and shift the discussion back to that. They’d rather relitigate 2020 and have those same tired arguments over and over again than focus on the threats today, and those which are looming in the future.
And yes, they really don’t want you to talk about the future. It can only be 2020, forever and ever. Amen. Even though technology is evolving rapidly, we have hostile foreign actors who we know for absolute certain have their intelligence services meddle in other nations’ elections, and this is a cheap and easy ploy … nope. Thinking about the future is bad. Why do you hate those millions of elderly disabled women of color who can’t get IDs?
Don’t let them gas light you that you’re crazy for being suspicious of your fellow man. It is perfectly sane, rational, and logical to suspect that fraudulent behavior is occurring when suspicious things happen and the same parties always seem to benefit.
It becomes even more prudent to be suspicious when instead of tightening the process to make fraud more difficult, they loosen the process to make fraud easier. That sends the opposite message.
There is nothing wrong with you. You look out there and see a world of unaccountable mail in ballots, drop boxes, organized ballot harvesting, bribing homeless schizophrenics to vote, weird questionable crap, and blue cities who take longer to count their results than a 3rd world nation. It would be insane to NOT be suspicious.
And then rather than placate the reasonable people who are worried about this loosening of the controls, they attack everyone who raises concerns as a racist, sexist, conspiracy theorist, dismiss them as insane or stupid, and then turn the subject back to talking about Trump’s personality.
The biggest danger about election fraud isn’t just someone cheating their way to victory. It’s a critical mass of citizens losing faith in their institutions and believing that their votes no longer count, and that being dangerous to the survival of the country. When people truly believe that the fix is in, and their votes don’t matter, bad things tend to occur. That’s what I want to avoid.
It would be logical and reasonable to do everything possible to assure the people that their system is secure, but instead they get berated, gas lit, and told they’re insane. Don’t believe your own eyes. Asking for ID is racist. Taking weeks to count votes is perfectly good and normal. Having late ballots continue to appear is wonderful, and questioning this is makes you a bad person. How dare you wonder if ineligible non-citizens are voting? Sure, we’ve got people registering their pets to vote just to prove a point, and humans lie and cheat in every other endeavor on Earth, but they’d never cheat in an election. How dare you?
And so forth.
Now watch. If this post goes viral like the last one the process will repeat, and the NPC/bot army will do exactly what I described trying to browbeat and shame everyone into compliance. I’m safe to say that here because almost none of them actually even read the posts they’re responding to.
July 22, 2026
Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” at the national level
In The Critic, Shimeon Lee looks at Andy Burnham’s time as Mayor of Greater Manchester and what his record there says about how he will try to run Britain from No. 10:
Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official MP portrait, July 2026.
© House of Commons via Wikimedia Commons.
Andy Burnham is now Prime Minister, and the country soon to discover what “Manchesterism” means when applied to the British state. Burnham’s nine years as mayor, alongside his earlier national record, offer a clear guide to the instincts he is likely to bring to No.10: a willingness to raise taxes, expand the state and prioritise policies that sound good but ultimately deliver poor value for money.
It is revealing that after being elected mayor in 2017, one of Burnham’s first acts was to impose a new charge on households in Greater Manchester. The new mayoral precept was initially set at £8 for the average band D property, funding the mayoral operation, including Burnham’s £110,000 salary. As so often happens with new charges, it did not remain modest for long. The charge more than doubled the following year, rising again in 2020-21, 2022-23, 2025-26 and 2026-27. By the time Burnham resigned to contest the Makerfield by-election, it had risen to £61.75, nearly eight times the original amount in less than a decade.
As residents paid more, the mayor built an increasingly elaborate network of advisers, commissioners and panels funded by taxpayers. These included a young person’s advisor paid £500 per day, a transport commissioner and an active travel commissioner each paid £650 per day, and an LGBTQ+ advisor paid £177 per day. He also established seven equality panels facilitated by “culturally appropriate organisations” which cost £392,435 a year. Taxpayers can only speculate how much larger that ecosystem could become when he takes control of Whitehall.
The mayoral precept was not the only tax rise implemented by Burnham. As mayor, he raised every tax under his control. The band D police precept rose from £162.30 when he entered office to £285.30 by the time he left, a 76 per cent increase. At the same time, the fire precept increased from £59.95 to £92.20, a 54 per cent increase. Both increases substantially outstripped cumulative inflation of 37.5 per cent during that period.
Even that understates his tax-raising ambition, as it only includes the charges he managed to implement. In 2019, Burnham proposed a clean air zone for Greater Manchester which would impose a daily charge on commercial vehicles that did not comply with environmental standards: £7.50 per day for taxis, £10 per day on vans and £60 per day on buses, coaches and heavy goods vehicles. These would have added thousands of pounds a year to local businesses’ costs.
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Sensible climate spending
On his Substack, John Robson suggests some spending on environmental issues where we actually can make positive changes as opposed to the spending on climate change which is mostly wasted:
As noted in our latest Green Money Machine, there’s no question that humanity faces real environmental problems and that some worthwhile organizations and people are trying to do something about them. It’s an important reason why we oppose, and even resent, the way the overwhelming focus on “climate change” drains off so much effort, time, and even money. So let us tell you about some actual environmental issues that have caught our attention lately. For instance “the Mediterranean Sea’s critically endangered population of great white sharks”. Of course we also recognize that some ecologists may be taking a worldly, not to say cynical, approach and leveraging concern about climate to raise money for other actually more useful activities. But in the long run cunning isn’t a good plan any more than obtuseness is.
When it comes to great white sharks it is also of course easy to imagine that anyone planning to swim in the Mediterranean might regard their scarcity as a plus. But the fact that such a comment would be controversial today reminds us of just how far the environmental movement has come since the 1960s, and frequently in good ways.
Indeed, being historically minded, we even recall a jibe by the New York Times after US president Franklin Roosevelt’s crushing 1936 reelection victory (he won every state but Maine and Vermont) that “If he were to say a kind word for the man-eating shark, people would look thoughtful and say perhaps there are two sides to the question”. But just in case you were frightened by Jaws in your youth, we could also mention (also from National Geographic) efforts to save the Mekong River’s “megafish”, a catfish bigger than a person that … no, wait. Poor choice. Also scary.
Satellite photo of the Great Salt Lake from August 2018 after years of drought, reaching near-record lows. The difference in colors between the northern and southern portions of the lake is the result of the Lucin Cutoff, a railroad causeway. The image was acquired by the MSI sensor on the Sentinel-2B satellite (Resolution: 20m, RGB Composites: True color, Band 4-3-2).
Wikimedia CommonsOK then. How about the shrinking Great Salt Lake? Because according to National Geographic (yes again they do serve a useful purpose when not banging on about climate):
Since 1850, the lake has lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area, and as more people move to the region, the water that typically feeds the lake is increasingly being diverted for agricultural, municipal, and industrial needs. What’s more, over the past few decades, a series of challenges – including climate change and the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years – has impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia.
Aaaargh. Banging on about climate. It’s a hard habit to break. And a bad one to keep, because it’s ridiculous to describe the loss of water going back to 1850, attribute it to human folly diverting the flow, and throw in the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years (which necessarily means there was a horrific one 1,200 years ago which can’t have been our fault) and then toss in “climate change” which again is a description of alterations in weather not a causal force, and then speak of all these things having “impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia”.
Bosh. In the first place, they cannot possibly know what cyclical climate conditions were like thousands and thousands of years ago. Nor what kind of pattern of megadroughts occurring millennia apart is natural, especially since interglacials don’t last that many millennia. Second, it isn’t possible that diverting water to agriculture, or swimming pools, has disrupted climate cycles. It just isn’t. Critical thought seems to be among the first and worst victims of “climate change”. The mind virus not the weather thing.
Especially as we regard it as intensely desirable that our fellow human fools stop draining the lake. Really. Take some of the tens of billions governments squander on trying to fix the weather, which honestly has always been bad, frequently dreadful, and put it to sensible uses.
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July 21, 2026
Exit Starmer, enter Burnham
Britain swapped out Prime Ministers on Monday, pushing Sir Keir Starmer out to the curb and installing former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham in Number 10 Downing Street. In The Critic, Robert Hutton reports on the day’s events:
Then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visiting Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School in Manchester on 13 April 2026 with Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.
As Keir Starmer walked out of Number 10 for the last time, he was greeted by a huge cheering crowd. Wow, this guy is popular! He should consider running for office. “My work is done”, he told us, offering possibly the most misguided example of marking your own homework since George W Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” six weeks after invading Iraq. Although we shouldn’t be harsh: Liz Truss listed leading the nation in mourning the late Queen as her big achievement in office.
Starmer’s, as he pointed out yet again, was winning the election. The list of things done since then was slightly more vague. But again, Boris Johnson’s departing speech claimed credit for a high-speed train line to Manchester and a number of hospitals that still do not, as such, exist. At least Starmer could truthfully say that he was leaving “with a smile”. Was he also, as he claimed, going “with good grace”? Well, unlike Johnson, he managed to get through the speech without attacking the people who forced him out.
It wasn’t entirely cheery. His wife Victoria was wearing black, and Rachel Reeves was crying, once again. The departing prime minister warned us not to succumb to division and to “unite different people under our common flag”. Although he completely failed to help that happen while he was in office, and showed little interest in trying.
With that, he was off to Buckingham Palace, where the band was playing a medley of Bon Jovi songs. Shot through the heart, and only himself to blame, he gave Labour a bad name.
But if Starmer was going out in a blaze of inglory, the rest of us were only halfway there. While the King conducted his exit interview in the Palace’s Chinese Dining Room (imagine having a different space to eat every takeaway) we had to hold on, ready or not, through the hour in which we were without a prime minister and living, as it were, on a prayer.
Andy Burnham had put on a suit for the day, a concession to the soft southern ways of the monarch. We half-expected him to leap out of the car in Downing Street and rip off the whole ensemble, Full Monty-style, to reveal black jeans and a T-shirt underneath. Perhaps he felt that would be taking his personal branding too far.
A fresh crowd of Labour types had gathered, looking more convincingly happy than the ones who had stood behind the last guy. They included the incoming prime minister’s mum, and the youngest person present: Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram’s 10-week-old grandson, currently scheduled to become the King’s 49th prime minister, in about 2038.
Not everyone is as excited as Burnham’s Labour Party supporters:
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill bids an unfond farewell to Two-Tier Keir:
Sir Keir Starmer: the PM who did nothing about the sense of doom pervading Britain, but he did ban “doomscrolling“. The man who did zilch to mend our fraying social fabric, but he did stop kids from perusing its consequences on TikTok. The man who failed – catastrophically – to alleviate that bleak feeling many of us have that Britain is broken, but he did cover the next generation’s eyes to just how broken we are.
Starmer should be remembered for his social-media ban for under-16s, that mad, illiberal law, due to come into force in spring next year, that promises to liberate youth from the angst-inducing “doomscrolling” inflicted on them by Big Tech’s wily algorithms. Not because it’s a “landmark” policy, as he claims. And not because it will be effective – kids will find a workaround. No, it’s because leaving intact the social conditions of doom while tweaking the machine so that fewer people can ‘scroll’ those conditions is Starmerism summed up: a regime of hollow theatricality, devoted more to managing the optics of crisis than mustering up the competence to avert it.
Starmer is a man without a legacy. He promised competence over charisma and delivered neither. His was a phantom premiership: government without governing. You could ask a hundred Brits to name a policy he enacted and I reckon five, at best, could do so. Even his vanishingly small number of apologists usually only squawk about what he didn’t do. He didn’t drag us into the Iran-US War. He didn’t follow through on his promise to cut the winter-fuel allowance for pensioners. He didn’t murder anyone. A man so staggeringly insubstantial that even his fans prefer his inertia to his initiative.
For me, the terrifying nothingness of Starmerism is best summed up in the fact that he recently said his “proudest achievement” was scrapping the two-child benefit cap, the Tory-introduced measure that meant families could only claim additional welfare payments for their first two kids. But Starmer opposed cutting that cap. For ages. In fact, in July 2024, he withdrew the whip from seven Labour MPs who voted to scrap it. It was only under pressure from his parliamentary colleagues that he relented. What can you even say about a man whose “proudest achievement” is a course of action foisted on him by others? That’s Sir Keir: the political weathervane who mistook a gust of wind for his own internal moral compass.
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Business idea – socialist-themed holiday camp
This idea is a banger, but it won’t attract the audience who really could benefit from the experience: the camp experience is what they want you to have, not for themselves.
New startup idea: a socialist-themed holiday camp where affluent Westerners pay premium prices to experience the system they keep voting for.
Picture it. You arrive at Camp VS (Virtue Signal) and hand over your passport (you won’t need it, exit visas take eleven years to process). Staff assign you to a concrete panel block, 320 square feet, shared with two other families you’ve never met. The heating works from 6 to 8 a.m. The elevator works never. Authentic Khrushchyovka construction, guaranteed.
Your daily itinerary: Wake at 5 a.m. Stand in the bread line until noon in minus 15 Celsius. The bread runs out at 11:40, but the queuing builds character, and character is the only thing not in shortage. Afternoon activities include a second line for toilet paper (there is no toilet paper) and a mandatory lecture on how the shortages prove capitalism sabotaged the harvest.
For guests seeking the deluxe package, we offer the Gulag Experience: rock-busting in a quarry under armed supervision, with optional whipping for anyone who fulfills less than 110 percent of quota. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote 1,800 pages about this amenity. Rave reviews, in a sense.
Every fourth guest works as an informant. You won’t know which one. Complaining about the food earns you a midnight interview with camp security, and the food gives you plenty to complain about: it’s cabbage. All of it. Abolish market prices and you abolish economic calculation, so nobody can know what to produce, in what quantity, or for whom. The planners guess. The planners guess cabbage.
Checkout is where the theme really lands. You can’t. The wall around the camp faces inward, and East Germany shot 140 people at theirs between 1961 and 1989 to keep paying customers from leaving the workers’ paradise.
The irony here is that this business would only survive under capitalism, because it needs voluntary customers, market prices, and profit signals to exist at all. Run it as an actual socialist enterprise and within a year the camp has no bread, no rocks, and no guests. Just like the original.
July 20, 2026
Carneynomics in action
Even though the relic media are all singing from the government’s hymn book — because they might lose their generous subsidies if they don’t — a few dispiriting details about the real state of Canada’s economy still slip through:
This is the Carney economy in one picture.
He sold himself as the adult in the room. The banker. The international dealmaker. The man who could handle Trump and restore confidence.
Instead, Canadian manufacturers are preparing their exit.
According to the KPMG survey, 42% of manufacturers have already moved some production to the United States or are considering doing so. Another 36% are cutting investment, 12% have paused spending and 9% have cancelled projects altogether.
Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Investment is drying up. Factories are moving south.
Businesses respond to incentives, costs and uncertainty. They do not remain in Canada because Mark Carney gives polished speeches about nation-building. They go where taxes, energy prices, regulation, labour costs and access to markets make production worthwhile.
Carney promised competence. What Canadians are getting is stalled trade talks, falling investment, disappearing jobs and another Liberal government that seems incapable of understanding how private-sector wealth is actually created.
A great many Canadians now see Carney as an incompetent ideologue in a good suit, surrounded by the same Liberal machine that helped create this mess.
And what consequences does he face?
Very few.
Carney is rich. His family is secure. His pension, investments and connections are intact. He will never worry about a mortgage payment, a grocery bill, a lost factory job or whether his children can afford a home.
The people who pay for his failures are workers, families, small-business owners and young Canadians whose futures are being shipped across the border.
That is the ugliest part of modern government. The people making the decisions are often insulated from the consequences. They can damage an economy, lose jobs, drive away investment and still retire wealthy, respected and welcomed back into corporate boardrooms.
A résumé is not an economic policy. A banker’s vocabulary cannot hide factories closing and investment leaving.
Canada is not being built. It is being hollowed out, while the people responsible remain comfortable.
This is why I thought the announcement on Friday that a Republican senator is calling for Carney’s assets in the US to be seized and to refuse him a visa … it’s beyond weird that a Canadian Prime Minister would have over 90% of his personal assets invested in the United States rather than in Canada. This gives Trump another handle on Carney, if he chooses to use it.
On her Substack, Melanie in Saskatchewan envisions how this may play out:
AI image from Melanie in Saskatchewan
So let me make a prediction: Any day now, your government will solemnly discover the importance of proper forest management.
There could be a task force, or a federal strategy, a minister standing solemnly in front of some trees. Perhaps an announcement that Ottawa has been “working around the clock” on a comprehensive plan that, by a miraculous coincidence, became urgent only after the American president threatened tariffs and a U.S. senator started talking about sanctions.
Should that happen, Canadians will be entitled to ask a very simple question: What finally changed Ottawa’s mind?
Was it concern for Canadians living through evacuations, destroyed communities and weeks of choking smoke? Was it the economic damage caused by recurring fire seasons? Was it pleas from provinces, northern communities and forestry workers for better prevention, mitigation and emergency capacity?
Or did the urgency arrive only when Washington threatened to slap another charge on Canadian exports and Senators possibly sanctioning Canadian officials like yourself? You personally have A LOT at stake if you are sanctioned since the majority of your wealth investment portfolio is in America.
The timing on this matters a great deal. It matters whenever a government suddenly treats a long-standing domestic problem like a national emergency only after somebody powerful outside the country attaches a financial consequence to it.
Trump has accused Canada of “wilful negligence” in maintaining its forests and says he intends to ask you what Canada plans to do. Your emergency management minister responded that governments have invested billions in fire prevention and forest sustainability since 2020. That defence deserves to be examined very closely and very carefully, because Canadians can reasonably ask what those billions purchased, where they went and why so many communities remain frighteningly vulnerable. To say it plainly … Canadians simply do not see any value for the dollars spent.
You announced spending of $317 million to lease 10 water bombers and heavy helicopters for rapid deployment to provinces because the wait time for them to be built is too long. So, here’s a fun little arithmetic exercise for Ottawa: water bombers are built right here in Canada — jobs, sovereignty, the whole patriotic package you’ve been selling — yet the federal shopping list remains stubbornly empty.
With $317 million, you could buy three heavy scoopers and have pocket change left for spotter planes or a helicopter, or — and this is where it gets embarrassing — you could roll out 45 to 55 single-engine Fire Boss aircraft, scattering an actual national fleet across every province that needs one. But apparently the government prefers its firefighting budgets theoretical. It is here that I will remind you, Fort Mac, Jasper and Lytton should have already provoked this response to act years ago.
The United States is hardly in a position to lecture anyone without hypocrisy. It is enduring its own brutal wildfire season, and fires do not stop at customs booths to declare their country of origin. Climate, drought, lightning, forestry practices and emergency capacity all play a role. There is plenty of responsibility, contradiction and political theatre to go around here. America has somehow managed to turn airborne smoke into an international trade dispute, because apparently even oxygen now requires a customs declaration. But that doesn’t absolve Ottawa. Again … Fort Mac. Jasper. Lytton. The warnings were already there. The time to act was then, but Ottawa chose navel gazing instead. In my books, that means today’s consequences lie with the governing Liberals.
