Quotulatiousness

April 15, 2026

Do “combat-trained Islamists in Britain … now outnumber the British Army”?

Filed under: Britain, Government, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, Julian Mann asks Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch if Britain’s immigration policies have imported enough “combat-trained Islamist” to outnumber the ever-decreasing number of soldiers in the British army:

You won’t find anyone less military-minded than me but Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s speech to the London Defence Conference last week prompted me to put these questions to her on X:

“How many combat-trained Islamists do you estimate there to be in Britain? Would they now outnumber the British Army and, if so, by how many?”

I very much doubt that I will get an answer. She is a busy woman and she might be reluctant to comment for fear of being drawn into an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory. She should note that the question is about Islamists, not about integrated and peaceable British Muslims.

It was this part of her speech, highlighted by historian Niall Ferguson on X, that provoked the questions:

    General Sir Richard Barrons, co-author of the Government’s Strategic Defence Review, stripped away the pretence when he said: “Today’s army, frankly, could do one very small thing. It could seize a small market town on a good day”.

Ms Badenoch also said: “Between 1989 and 2022, defence spending fell in every year. One of the authors of the Strategic Defence Review has since said: ‘The UK is trapped in a conspiracy of stupidity because politicians won’t make the case for cutting spending to fund defence’. And he’s not the only one who thinks that. In Washington, US administrations have felt for years that, while America subsidised the defence of Europe, we built welfare systems instead. On this point, they are right. Before the Second World War, one in every £7 the British government spent went on health and welfare. By last year, it had soared to one in every £3. We have grown fat on welfare, prioritising benefits over bullets.”

According to the House of Lords Library: “As at 1 April 2025, there were 181,890 people in the UK armed forces, a 1 per cent decrease compared with the previous year. This total includes:

  • all full-time service personnel (known as the UK regular forces) and Gurkhas, who comprise 77.7 per cent of the total number of personnel
  • volunteer reserves (17.5 per cent of the total personnel)
  • other personnel, including the serving regular reserve, sponsored reserve and military provost guard service (4.8 per cent of the total personnel)

“The total size of the full-time UK armed forces, comprising the UK regular forces, Gurkhas and full-time reserve service, was around 147,000. Of these, 82,000 were Army personnel, 33,000 were members of the Royal Navy or Royal Marines, and 32,000 belonged to the Royal Air Force.”

So if there were 100,000 combat-trained Islamists in Britain, they would outnumber the British Army by about 20,000. I realise that there are various levels of combat training. It is possible that British Army personnel are better trained than any Islamist forces they might face on British soil. But would they be better motivated, given the way they are being treated by the Government? Why has the Government apparently failed to reckon with the appalling impact on morale and recruitment from the lawfare it is allowing against special forces and Northern Ireland veterans?

Update, 16 April: 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.

MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is “a case study in progressive linguistic self-sabotage”

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay highlights how NDP politician Leah Gazan’s freshly coined replacement for our already over-long initialism for other-than-cis-gendered individuals has been a boon to online commentators and comedians across the internet:

While the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was announced in 2015, its final report wasn’t published until mid-2019. The three-and-a-half year period in between overlapped with Justin Trudeau’s manic campaign to replace the idea of biological “women” in public discourse with faddish gender-inclusive terms that describe female-identified men. The initialism he eventually came up with is “2SLGBTQI+” (whose “2S” component signifies a special — albeit ill-defined — “two-spirited” LGBT category that Indigenous people can opt into).

And so, channelling the state-of-the-art in Canadian gender jargon, the Inquiry’s commissioners duly expanded references to Indigenous “women” by addition of the words “… and 2SLGBTQQIA people” — i.e. Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual.

The term “2SLGBTQQIA” appears in the final report 1,197 times. Agglomerating that with the original “MMIWG” mandate yields “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA”.

Detail from page 229 of The Final Report Of The National Inquiry Into Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women And Girls.

If this unbreakable wi-fi code sounds familiar, it’s because a Canadian MP named Leah Gazan just became an international laughingstock for using it at a televised 8 April news conference. (Indeed, she lengthened it even further by adding a plus sign to the end — suggesting that yet more letters, numbers, and/or symbols are on their way.) This unintentional comedy routine was made all the more meme-worthy by the casual, deadpan, en passant way the sixteen-character term rolled off Gazan’s tongue, as if it were a set of ASCII characters that ordinary Canadians ran together all the time in normal day-to-day discussions.

As some Canadians (including me) tried to explain on social media, “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” is not a commonly used term outside of activist circles. I also let people know that Gazan is not a Canadian government representative (as was being claimed), but rather a member of a small and increasingly radicalised hard-left federal party known as the New Democrats.

But by then, no one was in the mood for such nuances. Elon Musk‘s three-word tweet on the subject — “Canada is cooked” — has, as of this writing, garnered more than half a million likes and 77 million views. Thanks to Gazan, millions of people around the world now believe that ordinary Canadians talk in this ridiculous fashion. We don’t.

Gazan told CBC News that the whole episode only goes to show that “bigots are offended by my positions around equality”. A more useful lesson she might take away from this experience is that the use of cultish ideological jargon can turn discussion of even the most serious issue into a farce. This is especially true when terms such as “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” (or “menstruators”, or “uterus-havers”, or “people with a vagina”) are used to soothe the sensitivities of men who demand the right to be called women.

April 14, 2026

Britain’s Green Party stakes out bold new immigration policies

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

With the ongoing shake-up in British politics — long-established “mainstream” parties losing support across the board — once-fringe parties are becoming electorally viable at least in the short term. On Substack Notes, Donna-Louise Flowers talks about the Green Party’s amazingly generous plans for immigrants to Britain should they be elected:

Someone on X just called me a scaremonger. 🙄

For quoting the Green Party’s own published immigration policy.

I’m a former Detective Constable. Serious sexual violence. CSE. I didn’t scaremonger for a living.

So let me be VERY clear about what the Green Party are actually proposing. In their own words. From their own published, member-voted policy document.

Every illegal arrival gets an automatic visa. No questions. No country of origin checks. Free legal advice to regularise their status. No penalty for being here unlawfully.

Guaranteed accommodation. Families get a house or flat with exclusive use. Free Universal Basic Income. No work required. Full NHS access from the moment they arrive — and their policy explicitly states these rights remain even if their asylum case is rejected.

And then — and I need you to read this carefully — they want to give every visa resident the right to vote in all elections and referendums.

All of this while our welfare bill has just exceeded our income tax revenue for the first time in British history.

All of this while we have a shortage of 6.5 million homes.

All of this while foreign nationals account for up to a quarter of all rape convictions in England and Wales. Up to 34% of sexual assault on a female convictions. Ministry of Justice data. Freedom of Information. Not opinion.

Not scaremongering.

Facts.

I’ve written a full thread on X breaking down every single point with sources. Link below.

Read it. Share it. Because this is what 18% of the country is apparently voting for.

x.com/nolongerthefuzz/s…

April 13, 2026

Trump is behind the falling population of LA County!

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

Chris Bray walks us through the tortured logic that leads the venerable Los Angeles Times to attribute the demographic slide evident in Los Angeles County to the Bad Orange Man:

Los Angeles County is bleeding people, sliding into population decline faster than anywhere else in the country. But don’t worry, the local newspaper is on the case!

Screenshot

After a careful examination of the matter, the Los Angeles Times is able to assign blame to — wait for it! — a certain VERY BAD ORANGE MAN.

    While conservative critics of L.A. have rushed to frame the population loss as a “mass exodus” of people fleeing rampant crime, high taxes and inadequate services, the reality is more complex.

    Los Angeles is by far the nation’s largest county, with 9.7 million people — nearly double the next largest, Cook County, Ill. In that sense, it’s not surprising that it saw a severe drop in population after the Trump administration rolled out a flurry of executive orders and new legislation aimed at restricting immigration. L.A. County is a historic hub for immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and a place where 1 in 3 residents is an immigrant.

If you read the story, you’ll see the name Trump several times, like a coven chanting the name of an enemy around the caldron. But definitely for sure don’t listen to those bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories about “high taxes and inadequate services”, noooooooo, that’s a huge lie, trust the wisdom of the local newspaper.

After a large and historic neighborhood ceased to exist because of a wildfire that rekindled after the Los Angeles Fire Department didn’t fully extinguish an earlier fire in dense, dry hillside brush, CNN produced a long story on the disaster of the city’s firefighter staffing. Small sample, describing a memorandum from then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley: “In the memo, which the city has since removed from its website, Crowley wrote that the city’s population had grown from about 2.5 million in 1960 to nearly 4 million in 2020. Yet the city has fewer fire stations today than it did back then, even as firefighters respond to a call volume that has quadrupled.”

A little less than a year and a half after that fire, the Los Angeles Police Department looks like this:

The last time a mean old white male Republican was the mayor, which is very bad and hateful, the city built up the police department, with a goal of having 10,000 officers. They actually hit that number in 2013, during the opening moments of the reign of Mayor Yogapants, then began shrinking soon after. Now we have very wise and progressive leaders, so the city is good.

[…]

So taxes are soaring, fire and police staffing are down, fat dumb communists want to crush basic city services a lot more to free up plenty of social justice cash, and some MEAN RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY THEORISTS bizarrely claim that people are leaving Los Angeles because they pay high taxes for increasingly poor services. My goodness, these people will just believe anything! OBVIOUSLY WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING IS THAT DONALD TRUMP IS VERY BAD, the professional journalists explained.

April 12, 2026

QotD: “Disinformation”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Neil Stone @DrNeilStone
    X is coordinated disinformation packaged as Free Speech

The concept of disinformation is inherently authoritarian. It presumes some faultless source from which truth flows, such that all speech can be judged by its alignment with this source.

Yes, sometimes certain issues are fairly clear-cut and people are just lying, but more often people fundamentally disagree about both facts and methods. They disagree about who is trustworthy and what institutions and processes are most likely to produce truth.

I, as a private citizen, might call some claim a lie or some person a liar. That’s discourse. I hope to persuade others that I am correct. But to institutionalize disinformation is necessarily to institutionalize a priest caste of truth determiners. This is antithetical to the scientific method and the process of knowledge production in general.

Truth-seeking must start from a place of humility: we are not sure of our claims or our methods. We are doing our imperfect best. We demonstrate the value of our ideas via evidence, argument, and the practical utility they provide. Not by censoring competing ideas.

It is ludicrous to assume that modern academic or journalistic institutions are bias-free oracles, yet this is the basis of the “disinformation” concept.

Hunter Ash, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-27.

April 11, 2026

The Liberal Party is about pure politics, not principle

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

In some ways, you have to admire the Liberal Party of Canada — often described as Canada’s “Natural Governing Party” — for their long-term success at staying in power. They do this because, unlike the Conservatives or the NDP, their raison d’être is gaining and holding power. No Liberal holds firm values in any other area and therefore can switch sides on a given topic at a moment’s notice. As long as believing A keeps them in power, they’ll believe wholeheartedly in A, but if believing B becomes more important, like a shoal of fish, they’ll instantly switch to believing in B. It’s an amazing phenomenon. In the Toronto Sun, Jamil Jivani (my local MP) documents this Liberal talent:

April 10, 2026

Trump’s intemperate, irresponsible, unhinged rants … worked?

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For all that Trump’s habitual form of social media post seem to frequently dance on the edge of incoherence — if not insanity — his track record is far better than his critics give him credit for. I thought his most recent blustering threats against the Iranian leadership would be counter-productive, but something approximating a ceasefire began just before his deadline. As Brendan O’Neill put it, this gives Iranian civilization a bit of a reprieve, but what about the West?

Imagine calling for the destruction of a civilisation. Imagine dreaming about violently scrubbing an ancient nation from the face of the Earth. Imagine flirting with the idea of obliterating a land with thousands of years of rich history. I am referring, of course, to the activist class and its annihilationist hatred for the Jewish State. For nearly three years, these people have beat the streets and swarmed the digital networks to agitate for the erasure of Israel, all the way “from the river to the sea“. President Trump’s juvenile bluster on Iran has nothing on their existential loathing for the Jewish homeland.

The frenzy of the past 48 hours, following Trump’s potty-mouthed and threatening social-media posts about Iran, has felt unhinged. The nukes are coming, influencers wailed. Trump must be “removed as president” in order to “prevent a catastrophe that our species will never recover from”, said the Guardian‘s Owen Jones. Within hours of this giddy apocalypticism, this huddled descent of the chattering classes into the pit of End Times prophesying, Trump had done what many of us expected he would: struck a kind of deal. The great detonation was not of a nuclear bomb but of the common sense of the cultural establishment. That’s the only thing that got vaporised yesterday.

Then there was the sheer cant. It was Trump’s ominous yelp that “A whole civilisation will die tonight” that got leftists and liberals frothing. It’s genocidal lunacy, they said. Let’s leave to one side that the target of his digital ire appeared to be the Islamic Republic, not Persia. “Forty-seven years of extortion, corruption and death will finally end”, he said. The more striking thing is the industrial-level gall of a cultural elite that is devoted to the dismantling of Israel, puffing itself up in fury over Trump’s hyperbole on Iran.

I agree that “A whole civilisation will die tonight” is a chilling thing to say. That’s why I’m so horrified by the frenzied anti-Zionism of our times. Our intellectual classes furiously deny Israel’s “right to exist”. Our activist classes openly call for Israel’s excision from the family of nations, by intifada (violence) if necessary. Our celebrity classes cheer the armies of anti-Semites (Hamas, Hezbollah) that were founded with the express intention of vaporising the Jewish nation. One minute the keffiyeh set is accusing the likes of Pete Hegseth of being in the grip of an anti-Iranian “bloodthirst”, the next it’s chanting for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers.

Future historians will marvel at the brass neck of an influencer class that took 24 hours off from calling for the destruction of Israel to bash Trump for posting about the destruction of Iran. I raise this not to be facetious but to draw attention to the moral disarray here on the home front that has been so spectacularly exposed by events in Iran. For it is undeniable now – we are surrounded by people who salivate over the violent disappearance of Israel but who fret over the withering of the Islamic Republic. They have taken sides – the side of the barbarous regime that dreams of “Death to America” over the side of the democratic state rebuilt by Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust. I’m delighted the Persian civilisation is safe – now what about the West’s?

“MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+”

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

Another Canadian interest group decided that their already oversized abbreviation needed to be super-sized. Jonathan Kay provides some useful context for those not familiar with Canadian domestic politics:

Canadian here, with four (count em) points of clarification on the “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” thing, which has now escaped its absurdist Canadian genderwang containment chamber, and gone viral internationally:

1) the speaker here is @LeahGazan, a fringe minor-party politician. She’s not in the government. She regularly calls for dumb things, such as criminalizing anyone who dares talk candidly about the 2021-era unmarked-graves social panic. CBC types treat her as a serious person because she’s indigenous and because she always talks in the tear-drenched idiom of white-settler colonial evilness. But she’s not.

2) MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is a mashup of two acronyms (each unique to Canada). Her decision to run them together is hilarious, which is why this has gone viral, but it’s not a common practice, even in rarefied leftist circles.

3) MMIWG refers to “Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls”. The problem of violence against indigenous women is a real and tragic issue. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago, a bunch of activists produced a ridiculous report on the subject that called it a “continuing” (!!!) “genocide”, and demanded that we all call it that. The whole movement collapsed when it was pointed out that something like 80% of the indigenous women who are killed are killed by indigenous men, which is very much off-message from the whole white colonial G-word thing. But the acronym still gets name-dropped when people are indicting Canada for all its infinitely genocidey genociding of everybody

4) “2SLGBTQetcetc…” Americans always ask me what “2S” stands for. It stands for “2 spirited,” a term that white academics popularized 50 years ago to give expression to their mystical reveries about sacred indigenous elf-people living in some precolonial eden-like genderwang Nirvana where everyone has three penises and five vaginas. No one is allowed to ask what the term even means, but our government made it official policy to use ridiculous words like this under Trudeau, so we’re stuck with it. Basically, if you’re an indigenous guy who likes to wear eyeliner, or an indigenous woman with blue hair and sensible shoes, you call yourself “2 spirited” on your govt grant applications. No one is even allowed to ask whether it’s a gender identity or a sexual orientation. It apparently exists in some exalted state that defies this kind of rigid colonial typology, or something like that.

Back in 2022, I read a whole report about how to teach two spirited concepts to Canadian students, and it turned out that even the authors of the report admitted they had no idea what the term meant. I wrote about it for @Quillette: https://quillette.com/blog/2022/10/0

April 9, 2026

The NFL’s “Rooney Rule”

Filed under: Business, Football, Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As the NFL in its modern incarnation exists as an exception to the normal rules governing corporate structure under US law, you can readily imagine that the NFL’s legal teams are extremely sensitive to the changing winds at the federal level. At a time that the federal government was emphasizing providing employment equity, the NFL scrambled to implement a hiring solution that gave black coaches a better chance of being hired for head coaching opportunities. The winds have shifted recently and the NFL risks being caught on the wrong side of evolving legal decision-making:

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles said he “absolutely” believed that he was sometimes brought in by NFL teams just to check the “Rooney Rule” box.

The Rooney Rule is an NFL policy instituted more than two decades ago that requires teams to interview — though not to hire — at least one minority candidate when hiring new coaches.

The rule was designed to increase the number of minority head coaches in the NFL, a goal it has failed to achieve. For years, it has been a source of moral controversy, but new developments suggest it may now be a legal issue for the league.

Last week, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) sent a letter to the NFL calling the Rooney Rule “blatant race discrimination“, adding that hiring decisions should be based solely on merit.

Though the NFL says it believes its policy “is consistent with the law” and promotes fairness, others have indicated the Rooney Rule may be on the chopping block, given recent legal challenges to other forms of racial preferences.

“There’s no question that the environment has changed in recent years“, said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the son of Dan Rooney, for whom the rule is named. “We do have an obligation to make sure that our policies comply with the laws, whatever the law is, and whatever the changes in law might be.”

Art Rooney didn’t specify the laws the NFL may not be in compliance with, but he might have been referring to last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services. In that decision, the court unanimously ruled that separate standards for minority and majority plaintiffs seeking redress for racial discrimination were illegal.

The ruling undercut the ability of organizations to use race or sex in hiring decisions — even for ostensibly benign or diversity-promoting purposes — because majority-group plaintiffs are now allowed to sue under the same legal standard as minority groups.

As I wrote at the time, the Ames decision was likely to be a wrecking ball to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which employers had used for years to discriminate against majority ethnic groups (and non-focus minorities, such as Asians), in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Carney gets another MP to defect, drawing ever closer to a Parliamentary majority

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

I’m not a Parliamentary history buff, but it strikes me that the number of Canadian Members of Parliament switching parties (always in the direction of the government) over the last year must be close to its historical high-water mark. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed yet another “Conservative” MP to the Liberal caucus in Ottawa:

Call me a cynic if you like, but something is fishy about Carney’s talent for drawing turncoats over to his side. It would not surprise me to find that many more MPs have been offered all sorts of incentives to discover that they were really Liberals all along. Once upon a time I’d have been unbothered by this, but I’m coming to believe that an MP elected under a party banner may choose to leave that party but if they switch to a different party (that also ran a candidate in that MP’s riding), a byelection should be called. If the voters in North Bumbleford-Moosehip-Bongwater are happy with the MP’s decision, they’ll re-elect him/her/them. If not, well, shoulda thought longer before turning traitor.

Along with many others on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, J.J. McCullough clearly feels the same way: “This floor crossing BS is out of control. If MPs in this country can just change parties whenever they want, then voters truly have no control over who becomes prime minister and runs our government. The whole Canadian system is based on the premise that parties MATTER.”

At least one opposition MP did go public about Liberal approaches to switch sides — it’s my belief that he’s one of perhaps dozens:

Ian Runkle (“Runkle of the Bailey”) responds to a typical middle-of-the-Canadian-road take by Spencer Fernando:

L. Wayne Mathison is viscerally against such backroom shenanigans when it comes to Parliament:

I am disgusted, and I am not going to dress it up with polite Ottawa language.

Marilyn Gladu crossed from the Conservatives to Mark Carney’s Liberals on April 8, 2026, saying constituents want “serious leadership” and “a real plan to build a stronger and more independent Canadian economy”. Her move gives the Liberals 171 seats, one short of the 172 needed for a majority.

That is exactly why people do not buy the noble script.

This is how Ottawa usually works. The speech is about conscience.

The reality is about power.

Suddenly the language gets soft, patriotic, and lofty right when the political math gets useful. We are asked to believe an MP was hit by a lightning bolt of principle at the exact moment her switch strengthens the governing party and brings it within one seat of majority control. Convenient does not begin to cover it.

Gladu says this is about leadership and collaboration. Fine. Then let voters decide whether they agree. That is the part these people always skip. They act as if a personal change of heart magically rewrites the contract with the public. It does not. People did not vote only for Marilyn Gladu the individual. They voted for a Conservative MP, a Conservative platform, and a Conservative opposition role. Crossing the floor without first seeking a new mandate may be legal, but it feels like a bait-and-switch because that is exactly what it is.

And spare me the line about “doing the best thing” for the riding. Every floor crosser says some version of that. It is the oldest detergent in the political cupboard. It is meant to wash ambition into service. What it really signals is this: I think my judgment now matters more than the basis on which you elected me.

That is where the anger comes from.

Voters are already drowning in managed language, staged sincerity, and plastic promises. Trust in politics is weak because people keep seeing the same pattern. Politicians campaign one way, govern another, then call the switch “leadership”. They wrap self-interest in national purpose and hope the flag covers the fingerprints.

What makes this worse is the timing. Carney publicly welcomed Gladu into Liberal caucus the same day, and the result is not symbolic. It materially strengthens the government’s position in the House. This is not some minor personal journey. It changes parliamentary leverage. It changes committee numbers, confidence calculations, and the balance of power.

So yes, I’m pissed.

I am pissed because voters are treated like props in a story written after the fact. I am pissed because party labels suddenly matter a great deal during elections and apparently not at all when power is on offer. I am pissed because people who were sent to oppose Liberal policy can simply walk across the aisle and help entrench it, then expect applause for being “constructive.”

And there is another detail that makes this smell even worse. Local reporting says that in January, Gladu had advocated for byelections when MPs switch parties. If that report is accurate, then this is not just opportunism. It is opportunism with a side order of hypocrisy.

That is the real issue here. Not whether floor crossing is technically allowed. Not whether Ottawa insiders can invent a respectable sentence for it. The real issue is whether voters still mean anything once the election is over.

My view is simple. If you want to switch parties, resign and run again. Go back to the people. Make your case honestly. Ask for a fresh mandate under the new banner. Anything less might be lawful, but it is not clean. It tells voters their consent is temporary, conditional, and easily bypassed once the machinery of power starts humming.

That is why this disgusts me.

Because democracy is not only about counting seats. It is about keeping faith with the people who gave you one.

“Trump … scared us into doing the right thing”

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

Canada got into the incredibly bad habit of freeloading on national defence under Pierre Trudeau, and from 1968 onward, we’ve been leaning ever more heavily on US military power to fill in the gaps we’ve chosen not to invest in ourselves. At the same time, we’ve almost dislocated our arm in patting ourselves on the back for our “soft power” on the international diplomatic scene. The Americans, for reasons known only to themselves, rarely pushed back or called us out for our perpetual slacking … until Donald Trump came along. Now, as Matt Gurney regretfully points out, Trump seems to be the only accountability mechanism on the Canadian government:

Coming soon to a Jewish daycare centre near you, sadly.
Image from The Line

Every well-functioning society needs effective accountability mechanisms. It needs something that can reliably deter bad guys from doing bad things, or at least catch them and stop them when they try. Hell, it also needs some sort of immune system that simply prevents the good ones from getting flaky and lazy, and to prune out the soft corruption that can easily settle in in comfortable and generally affluent societies.

“Accountability mechanism” is a broad term, but it has to be. It can be many things. It can be as basic as a strict moral or religious code, enforced by a priestly caste or even simple scolds. Or, ahem, a thriving press, with reporters and columnists poring over all the information they can find for examples of bad things that need fixing and then making a lot of noise about them. In democracies, effective opposition parties are a key part of this; so are government accountability officers, like auditors and ombudsmen. In a pinch, even just a healthy sense of personal honour and shame can work.

In a perfect world, you’ll have many or all of these, and they’ll be mutually reinforcing. Does Canada have any? Or, as I’m increasingly worried, have we basically outsourced this key democratic function entirely to the United States, and specifically, Donald Trump?

This bleak thought occurred to me after I watched, with equal parts horror and relief, a recent video put out by the Toronto Police Service. You can see it for yourself here, but, in short, it’s a promotional video for the new public order mission that is putting heavily armed and armoured officers onto the streets of Toronto to secure sites at risk of attack. The video has an intensely martial vibe; the deployment looks much more like a military operation than a police patrol. Though the video doesn’t say so directly, the intended purpose is clearly stopping the sustained attacks we’ve seen on Jewish religious, commercial and cultural sites in Toronto since Oct. 7, 2023.

[…]

There was also border security and fentanyl. I’m fully aware that the White House exaggerated both issues so they could use them against us. But I’m equally aware that Canada tends to ignore issues even slightly related to national security. A few tweets from Trump changed that. Some of our initial responses, like a czar and a pair of leased Blackhawks, were symbolic, clearly intended for Trump’s consumption. But Mark Carney has continued to ramp up our border security, and make a point of saying so. Again, we did this to avoid Trump’s wrath.

The biggest example, though, is clearly defence spending and rearming the Canadian military. Canada had long pledged to hit the NATO target, but never did; indeed, the former PM reportedly told our allies he had no plans to even try, as it wasn’t a domestic priority. But then Trump comes along and scares the crap out of us and, voilà, we’re hitting the target. Some of that is creative accounting, but not all of it.

Again, Trump did this. He scared us into doing the right thing.

April 8, 2026

“Queering the Past”

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

It sometimes seems as though modern historians are spending all their time postulating that pretty much every prominent figure in western history was gay or lesbian or trans*. The latest attempt to present someone from British history as being trans is Queen Elizabeth I (admittedly in a drama rather than a documentary):

The “Darnley Portrait” of Elizabeth I of England (circa 1575).
National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

Appropriately, it was April Fool’s Day when I read that Queen Elizabeth I is to be portrayed as a cross-dressing man in a forthcoming television show. But we live in times when the more silly and outlandish a rumoured cultural or political plan, the more likely it is to be true. Majesty – an oddly “heritage” title for a project that clearly considers itself “transgressive” – is set to film this summer, and is seeking “trans actresses” (what we used to call cross-dressers, before they got really cross) to play the monarch.

The Sun, which first reported it, seemed drearily inclined to go along with the usual sexist claims of the trans lobby. “She is known for having traits associated with a male monarch”, it mouthed in a mealy manner in an article last week. What would those be – not getting her tits out for, if not the cameras, then the portrait painters of the era? “Some have speculated she had male pseudo-hermaphroditism, known as testicular feminisation”, the Sun continued, also noting that “others are obsessed with the Bisley Boy myth”. Yes, “obsessed” isn’t too extreme a word here – I often hear people at bus stops discussing the Bisley Boy myth. This is the claim that Princess Elizabeth died in her youth and was replaced by a local boy with red hair. It was popularised by Bram Stoker in his 1910 book, Famous Imposters – because Bram “Dracula” Stoker never made up far-fetched stories based extremely loosely on real people, did he?

The Sun quoted a “TV insider” who insists: “Most historians dismiss the claims as misogyny motivated by the idea no woman could be as strong or capable without actually being a man. But it’s a theory which captures the imagination and appears to answer a lot of other questions around the unique queen.”

What would these questions be? That Elizabeth never married and had no children? Must be a bloke, then – what real woman would forego such unqualified pleasures? It’s a sign that trans thought is so woefully conventional, so gender straitjacketed, that it just doesn’t seem able to grasp, in this case, why a woman would refuse to hand over her hard-won power to a man by marrying a stranger who didn’t even speak her language. Or that she said on the eve of the Spanish Armada invasion: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”? It’s called wordplay, I believe, and was extremely common until people with Tin Ear Syndrome – a disease affecting the “trans community” and their inordinate number of “allies” – became so prevalent among those in the arts and media.

This, of course, is our old mate “Queering the Past” (or “lying” as those not educated beyond all common sense and honesty know it) beloved of universities, museums and other beclowned institutions. There have been some truly rib-tickling examples of it, such as the claim that “trans Vikings” existed, which sounds like a Monty Python sketch; sometimes the whole circus gets too much even for the most proudly gay public figure. In 2023, the museum dedicated to conserving the Mary Rose hosted a blog, promising to understand the collection of everyday objects found on the 16th-century ship “through a queer lens”. This prompted the great Philip Hensher to post on X: “I am as keen as anyone on gay sex, but I have to say to these curators – you’re fucking mental”.

April 7, 2026

Alberta is the only province moving in the right direction

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Martyupnorth responds to Tristin Hopper’s post about Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, which he published a year ago:

Here is a one-line summary of each of Tristin’s 8 points:

Housing crisis: Canada pioneered turning entire cities into over-leveraged real estate bubbles, driving home ownership out of reach for ordinary people because prices detached from wages.

Crime and justice: Soft-on-crime policies, catch-and-release bail, and activist courts created a revolving door for repeat offenders, leaving our streets unsafe.

Harm reduction & drugs: “Safe supply” and decriminalization experiments escalated addiction and public drug use, worsening overdoses, tent cities, and societal harm instead of reducing it.

Euthanasia (MAiD): Canada rapidly expanded medical assistance in dying into one of the world’s most aggressive programs, with soaring death numbers and cases pushing it as a tratement for poverty and disability.

Healthcare system: Despite high spending, Canada’s “free” system ranks near the bottom in performance among developed nations, with deadly wait times and dysfunction.

Transgender policies: Canada went further than most countries with permissive rules on youth transitions, pronouns, biological males in female spaces, and related ideology in schools and institutions.

Identity politics and “anti-racism”: Canada outdid even the U.S. in embracing divisive oppressed frameworks, including declaring itself guilty of an ongoing “genocide” against Indigenous people with little accountability.

Censorship and speech laws: Expansive hate speech rules, online content takedowns, and bills like the Online Harms Act pushed Canada toward Orwellian restrictions, chilling expression and drawing international warnings.

Canada took progressive ideas further and faster than peers, almost always with cascading negative consequences, turning a once-stable nation into a totally dysfunctional one.

He’s right in saying that Danielle Smith is the only one finally acknowledging that things aren’t working, and is trying to reverse some of these pad idea.

It’s still not enough to save Alberta, we need to divorce ourselves from the rest of Canada and their bad ideas.

“The Eight Hundred Years of Oppression”

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

On Substack, Upper Canadian Cavalier examines “The Irish Question”:

Every confidence scheme requires three things. A mark who is sympathetic. A grievance real enough to be credible. And an operator whose entire livelihood depends on ensuring the grievance is never actually resolved. Resolution ends the game. The operator does not want justice. He wants the next fundraising dinner.

Irish nationalism, in its mature institutional form, is one of the longest-running confidence schemes in the history of democratic politics. This is not to say the underlying grievances were invented. English rule in Ireland produced genuine catastrophes, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not read much history. The point is not that the wounds were fake. The point is that a very specific class of people discovered, sometime in the nineteenth century, that a bleeding wound is worth considerably more than a healed one, and they have been salting it professionally ever since.

The operators of this scheme are not a conspiracy in any tidy sense. They do not meet in a room. They are, rather, an ecosystem: the Sinn Féin political class, the Irish-American fundraising establishment, the Gaelic cultural bureaucracy with its language boards and arts councils and grant committees, and undergirding all of it for most of its history, the Catholic Church, which managed the remarkable trick of positioning itself as the spiritual soul of Irish resistance while simultaneously running the country’s schools, hospitals, orphanages, and laundries with the administrative efficiency of a medium-sized colonial power. They share no common mailing list. They share something considerably more durable: a common interest in a people who define themselves entirely by what was done to them, because such a people will always need someone to explain what it means.

That someone, naturally, has a salary. Sometimes several.

Part One: The Invoice That Never Clears

The foundational text of Irish identity is not a poem or a legal document or a philosophical treatise. It is an invoice. The Eight Hundred Years of Oppression, presented at every available occasion, never stamped paid, accruing interest at a rate that defies actuarial calculation. It is invoked at pub tables and university seminars and Boston fundraisers and Sinn Féin press conferences with the solemn regularity of a liturgical response, which is appropriate, since it has become one.

Eight hundred years. Let us sit with that number for a moment, because it deserves scrutiny rather than reverence.

The Poles were partitioned entirely out of existence for a hundred and twenty-three years, absorbed simultaneously by three empires, had their language banned, their nobility liquidated, their clergy persecuted, and their country removed from the map of Europe with a finality that the Irish situation never approached. They rebuilt it. They were then invaded again from both sides at once within living memory, occupied by The Nazis and Soviets losing somewhere between five and six million citizens in six years. They do not, as a general rule, organize their entire national identity around the experience. They built things instead.

The Armenians experienced something so total it required the coinage of an entirely new word to describe it. The Acadians were physically deported. The Welsh had their language suppressed for centuries by a state apparatus that regarded Welsh-speaking children as candidates for corrective intervention, which is considerably more systematic than anything the Penal Laws produced. The Greeks spent nearly four centuries under actual Ottoman administration, not the notional suzerainty that characterized much of the Anglo-Irish relationship, and emerged and got on with being Greeks.

None of them made Eight Hundred Years into a brand.

What distinguishes the Irish accounting of oppression is not the severity of the oppression, which was real but not historically singular, but the extraordinary care with which it has been packaged, maintained, and exported. The Famine, which ended in the 1850s, is still discussed in certain Irish-American circles as a recent bereavement requiring ongoing condolences and, more usefully, ongoing donations. The emotional statute of limitations has never been permitted to run. Each generation receives the invoice freshly printed, as though the debt were personally owed to them and personally owed by someone who can still be made to feel bad about it.

NATO’s sudden-onset existential crisis

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Konrad explains that the sudden crisis facing the European NATO allies has been building un-noticed for decades:

NATO is in far bigger danger than anyone realizes. And the reason has nothing to do with defense budgets.

The real danger is psychological. It’s cultural.

Europeans didn’t just free-ride on American security for 80 years. They built an entire identity around the idea that they evolved past the Americans protecting them.

That identity is now the single biggest obstacle to Western survival. And the darkest irony is: we helped build it. After World War II, Europe wasn’t just economically shattered. Its culture was in ruins. The cities, the universities, the concert halls, the museums. Rubble.

The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economy. But culture wasn’t a priority. Not at first. Then the Iron Curtain dropped. And suddenly culture became a weapon.

American diplomats, academics, artists & scholars flooded Western Europe. We funded their universities. Supported their orchestras. Rebuilt their museums. Promoted their intellectual life.
Not because European culture needed saving for its own sake.

Because Eastern Europeans were struggling for Maslow’s mist basic needs.

We needed the view from the other side of that Wall to be intoxicating.

So America built Western Europe into a showcase of self-actualization. Art. Philosophy. Cafe culture. Long vacations. Universities where people studied literature instead of surviving. We were manufacturing jealousy.

And it worked. The Wall came down.

But here’s what no one accounted for.

When you give a society self-actualization on someone else’s tab long enough, they forget it was a gift. They start believing it was organically theirs.

And when they look at the country that funded it all, a country busy building aircraft carriers and semiconductor fabs and shale fields instead of reaching the Maslow’s pinnacle.

An overweight American in a ball cap who can’t tell Monet from Pissarro. Who eats fast food. Who drives a truck. Who builds strip malls instead of piazzas.

And to a culture trained in aesthetics but stripped of strategic awareness, that American looks uncivilized.

So the arrogance takes root. And once a culture decides another is beneath them, they stop listening.

Americans say wars are sometimes necessary: crude.

Oil is the backbone of prosperity: unsophisticated.

Kids build companies in garages that reshape the planet: crass.

Wall Street finances the global economy: vulgar.

Europe has no world-class technology sector. No military capable of strong defense. No energy independence. No AI capacity.

What Europe has is culture. The culture we paid for at the expense of us reaching Maslow’s pinnacle.

For decades that was fine. We funded the museums, protected the sea lanes, and tolerated the sneering because the arrangement worked.

Then Europeans stopped keeping the contempt private. They started saying it to our faces. In their media. In their parliaments. At every international forum. “Americans are stupid. Americans are violent. Americans are a threat to democracy.”

We could have moved the Louvre to NY. We could have built a Venice here. We could have stolen your best artists, designers, philosophers and more … like your conquering armies did for centuries.

Instead we funded them. And all we asked for in return was to let us visit.

You don’t have the military to defend your borders. You don’t have the technology to compete. You don’t have the energy to heat your homes without begging dictators.

What you have is an 80-year superiority complex FUNDED BY AMERICANS, protected by American soldiers, and built on the false belief that self-actualization is civilization.

It isn’t. Civilization is the ability to sustain itself. By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all. It’s a dependency with better wine.

That’s not a threat. It’s a weather report.

Build a Navy. Or don’t. But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us”

Our “crudeness” our “stunted liberal education” our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.

From the comments on that post:

Larry Correia chimes in:

Update, 8 April: 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.

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