This trend towards calcification [into the relatively rigid categorizations of honestiores and humiliores (“respectable” and “humble” people, but in practice, “wealthy” and “commoners”)] had been matched by the loss of Rome’s (admittedly opportunistic and unevenly applied) religious tolerance. This is often attributed to Christianity itself, but is perhaps better understood in light of the increasing demands of emperors during and after the Crisis of the Third Century to insist on unity through uniformity. The first empire-wide systemic persecution of Christians, the Decian Persecution (250 AD) was exactly this – an effort to have all Romans everywhere sacrifice for the safety of the emperor as an act of unity to strengthen his reign which rather backfired because it seems not to have occurred to Decius that Christians (of whom, by 250, there were many) would be unable to participate. Diocletian likewise launched the Great Persecution in 303 as part of a program to stress unity in worship and try to bind the fractured Roman Empire together, particularly by emphasizing the cults of Jupiter and Hercules. From that perspective, Christians were a threat to the enforced, homogeneous unity Diocletian wanted to foster and thus had to be brought back or removed, though of course in the event Christianity’s roots were by 303 far too deep for it to be uprooted.
That is part of the context where we should understand Constantine (r. 306-337). Constantine is famous for declaring the toleration of Christianity in the empire and being the first emperor to convert to Christianity (only on on his death-bed). What is less well known is that, having selected Christianity as his favored religion, Constantine – seeking unity again – promptly set out to unify his new favored religion, by force if necessary. A schism had arose as a consequence of Diocletian’s persecution and – now that Christianity was in the good graces of the emperor – both sides sought Constantine’s aid in suppressing the other in what became known as the Donatism controversy, as the side which was eventually branded heretical supported a Christian bishop named Donatus. Constantine, after failing to get the two groups to agree settled on persecuting one of them (the Donatists) out of existence (which didn’t work either).
It is in that context that later Christian emperors’ efforts to unify the empire behind Christianity (leading to the Edict of Thessalonica in 380) ought to be understood – as the culmination of, by that point, more than a century of on-again, off-again efforts by emperors to try to strengthen the empire by enforcing religious unity. By the end of the fourth century, the Christian empire was persecuting pagans and Jews, not even a full century after it had been persecuting Christians.
These efforts to violently enforce unity through homogeneity had the exact opposite effect. Efforts to persecute Arian Christians (who rejected the Nicene Creed) created further divisions in the empire; they also made it even more difficult to incorporate the newly arriving Germanic peoples, who had mostly converted to the “wrong” (Arian) Christianity. Meanwhile, in the fifth century, the church in the East splintered further, leading to the “Nestorian” (the term is contested) churches of Syria and the Coptic Church in Egypt on the “outs” with the official (Eastern) Roman Church and thus also facing persecution after the Council of Ephesus in 431. The resentment created by the policy of persecution in the East seems to have played a fairly significant role in limiting the amount of local popular resistance faced by the Muslim armies of the Rashidun Caliphate during the conquests of Syria, the Levant and Egypt in the 630s, since in many cases Christian communities viewed as “heretical” by Constantinople could actually expect potentially better treatment under Muslim rule. Needless to say, this both made the Muslim conquests of those regions easier but also go some distance to explaining why Roman/Byzantine reconquest was such a non-starter. Efforts to enforce unity in the empire had, perhaps paradoxically, made it more fragile rather than more resilient.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
February 4, 2026
QotD: The impact of quasi-official monotheism on the Roman Empire
February 1, 2026
The Agora of Athens | A Historical Tour
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 3 Oct 2025The Agora was the political and economic heart of ancient Athens. This tour explores its long history and evocative ruins.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:47 Bouleuterion
1:44 Tholos
2:22 Monument of the Eponymous Heroes
2:56 Temple of Hephaestus
5:28 The Hellenistic Agora
6:16 Stoa of Attalos
6:57 Augustus and the Agora
8:06 Odeon of Agrippa
9:26 Herulian Wall
10:56 Overview
QotD: Don’t bother accusing progressives of hypocrisy … that’s a “category error”
Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.
DonatistsDemocrats are the real racists, amirite? In Clown World, hypocrisy is a category error:
Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform. In moral psychology, it is the failure to follow one’s own expressed moral rules and principles. According to British political philosopher David Runciman, “Other kinds of hypocritical deception include claims to knowledge that one lacks, claims to a consistency that one cannot sustain, claims to a loyalty that one does not possess, claims to an identity that one does not hold”. American political journalist Michael Gerson says that political hypocrisy is “the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit”.
The underlying assumption here is that there exists a standard outside of oneself. What SJW believes that? If you want a learned citation for it, get our main man Marcus Aurelius back up in here: Of each particular thing ask, what is it in itself? What is its nature?1
SJWs are nihilists. Hypocrisy requires an external standard, and they don’t have one. All they have is their self — which they hate, and long to extinguish, along with everything else that reminds them of their hated, hateful self. Their every thought, word, and deed aims only at that — extinction — whether they recognize it or not.
In practice, then, SJW “hypocrisy” is a tool, a tactic — a really valuable one. They want to kick down some pillar of ambient civilization. And they’ve got all the time in the world to do it, because while they’re just getting on with it, their putative “opponents” are shrieking about hypocrisy! Often with some blather about “Chesterton’s Fence” or similar for good measure.
That’s Donatism, PoMo version. “If you’re going to tear down the fence, first you must explain how it got there, and what it was supposed to do, and then what you’ll be replacing it with.” No. Category error. They don’t care. They have never cared. The fence isn’t the point. Neither is the fence’s replacement, or whatever might be behind the fence, or anything else. They’ve never given any of that a second’s thought, because destruction is the point.
It’s the only point. Always. They have no other.
Thus we must reject Donatism. It doesn’t matter how flawed your “priest” is. The work is bigger than the man. The work transcends the man.
Severian, “The Way, Chapter 2: Guidance”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-01.
- A PoMo in joke. That’s not Aurelius, it’s Hannibal Lecter. But it’s an accurate paraphrase of Aurelius. Can you believe there was once a time when a bestselling thriller could make an allusion to Marcus Aurelius a small but important plot point? That time was 1988, for the record.
January 30, 2026
QotD: Slavery in the Islamic world
The widespread neglect of the history of slavery in North Africa and the Middle East, which Captives and Companions seeks to redress, partly reflects a culture of American exceptionalism; slavery in other parts of the Americas (it was abolished in Brazil only in 1888) also receives little attention.
Partly, too, it reflects a tradition of denial in the Islamic world itself. Marozzi recalls a professor at Bilkent University in Turkey admonishing a younger historian not to dig too deep: “Our ancestors treated their slaves very well; don’t waste your time”.
In the West, meanwhile, Islamic slavery is an unfashionable — and often suspect — subject: one is reminded of West Germany in the 1980s, when any overemphasis on Soviet crimes against humanity could appear as an attempt to whitewash or relativise the Holocaust. Marozzi is careful not to dwell too much on comparisons between Islamic and Atlantic slavery, except as regards the scholarly attention which they have received. Still, many readers will pick up his book hungry for such comparisons. So here they are.
In both Islamic and Atlantic slavery there was a marked racial — anti-black — component. Slavery was sustained by similar religious and philosophical justifications: the biblical “curse of Ham”, for example, and the idea that geography and climate made sub-Saharan Africans naturally suited for servitude. “Chattel slavery”, Marozzi emphasises, existed in the Islamic world too. Both involved horrific violence and displacement. Both were complex and sophisticated enterprises, often with serious money at stake.
People have always been hesitant to draw any comparisons between Islamic and Atlantic slavery, albeit often for entirely opposite reasons to historians today. Whereas the Jewish-American writer Mordecai Manuel Noah was a vocal supporter of the enslavement of Africans in America, he was also bitterly opposed to the enslavement of Americans in North Africa — and therefore a strong supporter of America’s involvement in the Barbary wars.
Gladstone, meanwhile, thought that Turks killing and enslaving Europeans was far worse than “negro slavery”, which had at least involved “a race of higher capacities ruling over a race of lower capacities”. However dubious his family connections, Gladstone was born after Britain had abolished the slave trade.
The lack of attention given to Islamic slavery is all the more dismaying when one considers just how much longer it survived.
Most of slavery’s 20th century holdouts were in the Islamic world. Iran abolished slavery in 1928; Yemen and Saudi Arabia in 1962; Turkey — which we like to consider more “Western” than the others — in 1964. Mauritania half-heartedly abolished slavery in 1981. Slavery was still a feature of elite life in Zanzibar as late as 1970. When 64-year-old President Karume took an underage Asian concubine, he justified it by declaring that “in colonial times the Arabs took African concubines … now the shoe is on the other foot”.
The Royal Harem in Morocco, meanwhile, was only dissolved on the death of Hassan II in 1999. In the Islamic world, human beings were bought and sold, and forced to do demeaning and painstaking labour, within living memory; some people languish there still.
The key difference between Atlantic and Islamic slavery concerned status. Slaves in the Islamic world could rise to high places: 35 of the 37 Abbasid caliphs were born to enslaved concubine mothers; the slave eunuch Abu al Misk Kafur was regent over Egypt from 946 to 968. Slave dynasties, most notably the Mamluks, were amongst the most powerful in the Islamic world.
The polyglot governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, when he inveighed against “slavery in the Mohamedan states”, had no choice but to acknowledge that a slave in the East could attain the “highest social elevation” — a far cry from the black slaves of the West Indies. Some slaves, too, were amongst the worthies of Islam, such as the first Muslim martyr, Sumayya bint Khabat.
Slavery occupied a complex place in Islamic law. The Quran, on the one hand, permits men to have sex with female slaves. But on the other, the emancipation of slaves is smiled upon as one of the noblest things a Muslim can do. The Abyssinian slave Bilal ibn Rabah was freed by Abu Bakr and became the first caller to prayer; another freed slave, Zayd ibn Haritha, was briefly the Prophet’s adopted son.
The Quran also expressly forbids Muslims from enslaving fellow Muslims. Nonetheless, as Marozzi shows, this prohibition has not always been strictly observed. The Mahdi (of General Gordon fame) claimed to represent pure, Islamic orthodoxy, but he had no qualms about enslaving Muslim Turks.
Likewise, it mattered little that the Prophet Muhammad had explicitly forbidden castration of male slaves. For over a millennium his tomb in Medina was guarded by a corps of eunuchs. This, too, was an institution which survived into living memory: in 2022 a Saudi newspaper reported that there remained one living eunuch guardian.
Samuel Rubinstein, “The dirty secret of the Muslim world”, The Critic, 2025-10-17.
January 19, 2026
British Islamists scare Islamic governments more than the British government
In Spiked, Rakib Ehsan discusses the recent efforts by the governments of some Gulf states to limit potential radicalization of their own people by reducing support for students attending British universities:
Flag of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
In yet another blow to Britain’s reputation on the global stage, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has curbed state funding for its citizens seeking to enrol at UK universities, over concerns they will be radicalised by Islamists.
As reported in the Telegraph last week, the Gulf state has taken this drastic step because of the influence in the UK of the Muslim Brotherhood – a transnational Sunni Islamist organisation, which is a designated terror group in the UAE. It is also banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The UAE has long offered Emirati students generous grants – including rent and living allowances – for studying “priority” subjects at British universities. These scholarships have now ended because, according to a source quoted in the Telegraph, “the UAE doesn’t want its kids to be radicalised on campus”.
This is not the first time that the UK has been embarrassed for being a soft touch on Islamism by a Muslim country. In January last year, the UAE placed eight UK-based organisations on its local terror list on the grounds of their alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Most of these entities, which range from property firms to video-production outlets, are registered in London. Then, in April, the head of the Muslim World League, Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim al-Issa, warned that the UK should treat poor integration as a national-security issue. He said that young British Muslims had grown disillusioned because of conflicts in the Middle East, advising the UK that “a political situation outside should not interfere with integration inside”.
The UAE’s latest decision should hardly come as a surprise. Indeed, for some time, British universities have embraced the very extremism that Muslim-majority countries have long sought to root out.
January 11, 2026
Iran in the news
There’s a major upheaval going on in Iran, but the western media seem to be incapable of covering it with any depth — or in far too many cases, at all — even though it’s exactly the sort of thing they used to be very interested in. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tahmineh Dehbozorgi provides useful context:
The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world.
Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life — speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival — under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime.
Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it.
Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people”, Arabs, or “the Middle East”, as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine.
This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs”, “all Arabs are Muslim”, and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers”. Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture — Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable — are erased.
By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them — or ignores them entirely.
There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media is economic issues.
As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises.
Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They have been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically.
This is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, non-conformity becomes existentially dangerous. That lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language.
Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape.
That is what terrifies Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored.
So the silence continues.
On Substack Notes, Fergus Mason shares what might be the most iconic photo of the young year:
Update, 12 January: 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.
January 1, 2026
The consuls and the start of a Roman year
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 1 Jan 2025For New Year’s day, we look at how the year started for the Romans, when from 153 BC onwards, the new consuls assumed office. There were rituals, sacrifices and ceremony, and then the start of the political year.
To round off, some thoughts on what is planned for the year to come on this channel.
Oh yes, and for chickens read geese!
December 30, 2025
QotD: Modern weddings
Chris Taylor, “Long Day’s Journey into Matrimony”, Taylor & Company, 2005-09-01.
December 24, 2025
The Pagan Roots of Christmas
History With Hilbert
Published 23 Dec 2017It’s Christmastime everyone, as you can tell from the name, it has a lot to do with Christ and Christianity, after all, Jesus was born on the 25th of December, right? Well, not quite. Most of what we do at Christmas time has little or nothing to do with Christianity and is rather rooted in the ancient pagan pasts of both Europe and other places. In this video I’m going to explore the aspects of Christmas that come form the traditions and beliefs of the Northern Europe Germanic or Nordic Pagans as this is what I know the most about and what interests me the most. This isn’t to say there are more explanations for where certain traditions come from or that there were other groups who contributed aspects of our modern Christmas celebrations. Things like Carol Singing, Christmas Trees, Christmas Lights, Yule Logs, Christmas Dinner, Santa Claus, the Elves, New Year’s Resolutions and Kissing under the Mistletoe can all be traced back to the pagan times of our forefathers and to various characters of Norse Myth and Legend like Odin, Freyja, Baldr and Thor.
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December 19, 2025
The strange rebirth of English patriotism
In The Conservative Woman, Niall McCrae discusses what he calls “a new crusade” as the downtrodden English rediscover — or in many cases, discover for the first time — patriotic feelings for their nation, and earn the scorn and contempt of the ruling class and their media fart-catchers:
“Union Jacks and crosses of St George” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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A wave of patriotism swept across England last summer. Flags were tied to lampposts up and down the country, but while these displays had wide public support, the intelligentsia were troubled, particularly as the colours were often flown in areas of cultural diversity or on roads passing hotels accommodating illegal immigrants. This suggested provocation, rather than the use of national flags to celebrate sporting success.
Politicians and Guardian commentators were careful not to appear too negative, but they emphasised unity and inclusion over nationalistic fervour. The Union Jack was preferable to the St George’s Cross, because they associated the latter more with the far right (this is not accurate, as groups such as the National Front and BNP rallied under the Union Jack).
The Union Jack (properly termed “flag” as a jack is hoisted at sea), comprises the crosses of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick. It is perhaps the most impressive flag in the world, a classic design of great cultural impact. How globalists, the EU and Islamists would like to banish it!
The “Unite the Kingdom” march led by Tommy Robinson in September, which brought a million people to the streets of London, was a marvellous spectacle of patriotism. For the counter-Jihad movement, conflict in the Middle East is regarded as an existential struggle against militant Islam. Israeli flags are often waved towards pro-Palestine marchers, and the London rally gave several Zionists a platform at Whitehall. However, the vast majority of marchers were there for one country only – their own. This was truly a British event, with a roughly equal mix of Union and St George flags, alongside some Welsh dragons and Scottish saltires, and Irish tricolours too.
Significantly, there was another symbol prominently at the London march: the Christian cross. A poignant moment was at the ramparts of Westminster Bridge, where a fearless young man mounted the head of the stone lion and from that precarious pedestal raised in one hand the flag of St George, and in the other a wooden cross. (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOpagGvkQk9/)
I first observed the resurgence of Christian faith at the huge protests against the Covid-19 regime. Several marchers bore crosses, or placards asserting the power of God over earthly evil. The Book of Revelation was quoted, and when the “vaccine” was launched it was cast as the “Mark of the Beast”.
Socially unacceptable they may have been, but now St George and Christian crosses are regularly appearing together in gatherings for patriotic or traditional causes. In his book Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags (2017), Tim Marshall observed that “with the rise of Islam in Europe, these symbols are likely to be increasingly used by the far right to try to define the continent as what they think it is, and in opposition to what they think it is not”. You can’t get a book released by a mainstream publisher without expressing such approved outlook, but Marshall is making the mistake of blaming patriots for the devaluing of their national flag; it is surely the subversive ideology of the progressive left that has taught generations that national pride is regressive and bigoted. Meanwhile “woke” warriors are not shy of waving the Pride rainbow, transgender stripes and the flag of Palestine. And the likes of Hope Not Hate had no complaint about huge fascist-style marches awash in the blue and yellow stars of the EU.
Brendan O’Neill on the Islamophobia racket
In the National Post, Brendan O’Neill criticizes Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in particular, but he’s just the most recent exemplar of western politicians trying to blame society in general and “right wing extremists” in particular for the terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists:
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke a total of 5,022 words in the day after the slaughter of Jews at Bondi Beach. And not one of those words was “Islam”. Or “Muslim”. Or even “Islamic extremism”.
He did talk about the “far right” though. Twice. We need to tackle “the rise of right-wing extremist groups”, he said.
What an odd thing to focus on the day after a father-and-son Islamofascist outfit had mown down 15 innocents, all while proudly displaying the black flag of ISIS.
To fret about the far right hours after suspected Islamic militants had carried out the worst slaughter of Jews in Australian history is cognitive dissonance of epic proportions.
It would be like turning up to the bloody aftermath of a KKK massacre and flat-out refusing to say the words “Klansmen”, “racist” or “white supremacist”. Well, we wouldn’t want to offend the pointed-hood community.
Some Australians were dumbfounded by the PM’s bullish refusal to name the ideology that fuelled this act of antisemitic savagery.
After all, at the time he was holding forth on the various threats to the Aussie way of life, officialdom had found the killers’ ISIS flag and other paraphernalia suggesting they had taken the knee to the death cult of radical Islam.
“What happened at Bondi was an act of radical Islamic terrorism”, thundered Sean Bell of the populist party One Nation. If the PM “cannot be honest” about the “radical Islamic ideology”, he said, “then he has no place leading the country”.
It’s hard to disagree. The first duty of a leader following the barbarous slaying of citizens is to tell the truth. If Albanese can’t even bring himself to mouth the words “Islamic extremism”, how’s he going to fight it?
The PM’s yellow-bellied dodging of the i-word was shocking but not surprising. Other Western leaders have behaved similarly in the wake of Islamist outrages. They have furiously thumbed their thesauruses for spins on the word “extremist” — fanatic, militant, evil — all so that they can avoid committing that most gauche faux pas in polite society: talking about the problems in Islam.
This is the dire handiwork of the Islamophobia industry. For years now, Islam has been ruthlessly ringfenced from free, frank discussion.
Mock Muhammad and you’ll be damned as “phobic”. Crack a joke about the Koran and you can expect a mob of fundamentalists at your front door. Say Islam has an extremism problem and the self-elected guardians of correct-think will drag you off for re-education.
We’ve witnessed the rehabilitation of medieval strictures against “blasphemy”. The end result is that even as women and children writhe in agony from the wounds inflicted on them by Islamist militants, still our leaders won’t say that i-word. It clogs in their throats. They dread cancellation more than they cherish truth.
[…]
After every attack, the same platitudes are trotted out. “Nothing to do with Islam”. “Islam is a religion of peace”. We’re gagged from naming the threat we face, from correctly identifying the men who are killing our fellow citizens.
Believe them when they show you what they are, Oz edition:
In The Line, Ariella Kimmel thinks there are signs that at least some political figures are getting the right lessons out of the events of the last few years:
In the wake of the terrorist attack in Bondi Beach, it seems as if leaders are finally starting to realize the risk of allowing antisemitic extremism to run unchecked for years.
Calgary’s new mayor offered a powerful example of what this means in practice.
At Calgary City Hall’s Chanukah celebration, Mayor Jeromy Farkas delivered remarks that stood out not only for their eloquence, but for their accountability. He spoke plainly about antisemitism and acknowledged the very real fear that Jewish communities are living with. Most importantly, he made clear that civic leadership means showing up publicly, consistently, and without excuses.
In a room of just over a thousand, he declared “let me be absolutely crystal clear. There is no place for antisemitism in Calgary. Not on our streets, not in our schools or campuses, not at protests, not online, not hidden behind slogans, not excused as politics, because Jewish lives are not expendable. Jewish safety is not expendable.”
That moment was especially symbolic given Calgary’s recent past. Two years ago, then-Mayor Jyoti Gondek refused to attend a Chanukah event amid pressure and controversy. Farkas’ presence this week marked a break from that pattern. It signalled that someone, finally, was willing to take responsibility.
That is what leadership looks like.
The Bondi Beach attack should force a reckoning in Canada. If we want to avoid becoming the next headline, this country must do more than mourn; we must decide, clearly and concretely, that extremism has consequences and that antisemitism will not be indulged.
In Canada, politicians were quick to offer condolences. Statements flowed with the standard lines – “my thoughts are with the community”, “our government condemns all forms of hate”, “no one should be targeted for practicing their religion”. The words are familiar, and quite frankly hollow, because for the past two years, many of the same leaders issuing their thoughts and prayers have either ignored, excused, or actively engaged with movements that normalize hostility toward Jews.
Since October 7, Jewish Canadians have watched as public spaces became hostile territory. Synagogues require police protection, while Jewish schools are shot at and community centres are defaced. Rallies openly glorify terrorist groups, call for the destruction of Israel, and chant slogans that any reasonable person understands as genocidal, such as calls to “globalize the intifada”, “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free”, “there is only one solution, intifada revolution”, and “resistance is justified”.
What makes the current moment particularly dangerous is the gap between rhetoric and reality among leaders. Politicians speak of fighting hate while refusing to enforce existing laws against intimidation, mischief, and hate-motivated harassment. They speak of unity while legitimizing groups and movements that openly reject the safety of Jewish communities, even giving funding through government programs meant to combat antisemitism, to organizations that perpetrate it. They issue statements condemning violence abroad while tolerating the ideological conditions that make violence inevitable at home.
December 9, 2025
The “Great Feminization” of western culture
In the National Post, Barbara Kay outlines the way society has been trending further away from traditional values and more and more toward the values of “empathy, safety, and cohesion” which have been predominantly feminine values in contrast to more male-oriented values of “rationality, risk, and competition”:
In September, public intellectual Helen Andrews caused a stir when she delivered a provocative 17-minute speech, titled “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture”, to the National Conservatism Conference, later published as an article for Compact, titled “The Great Feminization“.
Andrews summarized feminization as the prioritizing of feminine over masculine interests, but additionally prioritizing “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”. All these traits combine, she believes, in institutions where females are numerically dominant, to define “wokeness” and “cancel culture”.
Andrews points to Bari Weiss’ 2020 resignation letter from the New York Times where Weiss was labeled and ostracized for her social ties and cut off by perceived friends. In 2018, the newsroom there had tipped to a female majority which Andrews argues changed the work environment’s dynamics to one where cohesion is preferred, and covert undermining would replace open debate in favour of emotional harmony.
And I would argue that the more feminized society’s institutions become, the more readily extreme, empathic attitudes replace rational decision-making at policy-making levels, and the more society loses confidence in its ability to thrive.
Ironically, instead of directing empathy towards our own citizens, feminization also tends to direct empathy internationally. That is exactly what is happening at our national level, when our government earmarks funds for programs such as “Gender-Just, Low-Carbon, Rice Value Chains in Vietnam”.
This is also happening at a micro-level to the Jewish community in North America. Our spiritual leadership in non-orthodox synagogues is growing increasingly female, and, by no coincidence, is wokeness spreading, and, by no further coincidence, so is alignment with radical anti-Zionism.
[…]
Claims that Israel was guilty of genocide and apartheid, the authors write, were a constant feature of their education. Most shockingly, they write — and this at a rabbinical training institution headed by a female rabbi — that “the sexual violence Israelis experienced (on October 7) was never mentioned, even during Women’s History Month”.
What about the Christian clergy? A 2024 report on female Christian clergy found that in a 2018 sample, about 14 per cent of U.S. churches were headed by a senior female clergyperson. So, churches are not yet in danger of feminization. Good luck to them.
If there is a solution to the feminization-linked problem of anti-Zionism in the non-Orthodox rabbinate, I don’t know what it is. I only know this trend cannot end well for our community. What is essential in Jews’ spiritual homes now, more than ever in our history, is that they be spaces where “ahavat Yisrael” — love of Israel — is the prevailing norm. If we are not for ourselves, who will be?
On a more individual level, the Great Feminization has worked not to make women equal, but to increase their existing privileges and to demonize men who even notice the inequality now runs directly opposite to the narrative:
Image from Steve’s Substack
Over thirty years ago, I knew a woman who felt ecstatic joy taunting men with her nudity. She loved to flash her breasts at truckers on the highway. Thrilled at the thought that she left them frustrated, she would boast about her sexual power.
This is clear, unequivocal abuse. Imagine her taunting a village of starving Africans with BBQ’d steak. She then flees to her 5-star hotel, laughing and bragging that she had left them hungry and frustrated. This is how the West raises women. Self-obsessed, over-entitled and insufferable (insert obligatory, “not-all-women” clause here – yawn).
Feminists have gotten more sophisticated with their abuse since then. We now have transgressions that include absurd accusations like prolonged looking, mansplaining and manspreading. TikTokers go to the gym essentially nude in order to video and humiliate men who happen to notice.
We had the, “Yes means Yes” campaign that insists a man should repeatedly pester his partner with endless questions for permission during every intimate encounter. Never mind that a normal woman is likely to leave the bed after a few of these interruptions, rightly despising the insecure man who obeys that tripe. Anywhere outside of a deep feminist indoctrination camp, a woman will wonder whether your mother dropped you on your head as a child. I’ll bet that not even the most committed believer follows their own advice. This is not good communication — it denies healthy context, body language and facial expression.
And there’s nothing romantic about it; it is designed for feminist power. There is no number of reassurances that could possibly satisfy. The emphasis upon a non-stop verbal Q&A is courtroom strategy. And that’s the point: eliminate the human context, and set a trap for the man. “Did he ask permission to engage in number 17 of the 32 listed steps before sex? No, your honor, that’s where the sexual assault happened.”
Human intimacy is negotiated using mostly unspoken signals, and everybody likes it that way. Obviously there’s a need for clear communication, especially in a new relationship. I only need to include this disclaimer because the world is filled with pedantic manhating feminists eager to accuse me of denying women’s humanity. Grow up, child. Healthy women have absolutely no problem setting their own limits during intimacy. I’ve never met one who didn’t.
We cover for even the worst of women’s transgressions. When a woman murders her child, we call it infanticide and blame postpartum depression. When she murders her husband we call it battered wife syndrome, which is the title of a book by Canadian feminist law professor, Elizabeth Sheehy. Feminist lawyers even argue to eliminate female incarceration and close all women’s prisons, and for decriminalization of husband murder. This nonsense from the feminist cult for women with daddy issues protects mentally ill women who need psychological help, and/or belong in prison.
Every woman has a plethora of options, and near-infinite sympathy and support, in Western culture. Maybe that’s the problem: we don’t hold women responsible for their own behavior. Many women have not been socialized into adulthood.
At risk of making this a TLDR post, here’s Mark Steyn on the cultural side of our ever-more-feminized culture:
Welcome to another in our ongoing series of As I Said Twenty Sod-Bollocking Years Ago. Women have inherited the thrones of great powers — Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Victoria — and presided over massed ranks of courtiers drawn from the “pale, male and stale” (thank you, David Cameron). But America and its client states are the first in history in which every significant venue aside from ladies’ sport is now dominated by women. The west is closer than any society should be to the end of men — which is a big source of the terrible confusion in our schools that has led children to offer themselves up for bodily mutilation and irreversible infertility. Helen Andrews’ much noted “viral” essay on the phenomenon informs us inter alia that by 2024 American law schools were fifty-six per cent female and that sixty-three per cent of judges appointed by Joe Biden’s autopen are likewise on the distaff side. Elsewhere, fifty-five per cent of New York Times reporters are women (up from ten per cent half-a-century ago) and 57.3 per cent of US undergraduates are what we would once have called “coeds”.
At the same time, the principal source of immigration to the west is from a patriarchal culture even more severe (if you can believe it) than 1950s sitcom dads. If you live in London, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Dearborn, do you see more body-bagged crones on the streets than you did a generation back? Are you figuring on seeing more still in another twenty years? Or are you betting that the tide will have receded?
It is at the intersection of these two not entirely compatible trendlines — a feminised society with a patriarchal immigration policy — where lies the future (such as it is) of the western world. With that in mind, the annual commemoration of the 1989 Montreal massacre each December 6th has a symbolism that extends far beyond my own deranged dominion. Not just because it was an early example of the state hijacking the actual news to impose a narrative more helpful to its own needs. In the dismantling of manhood and manliness, no lie is too outrageous. As I wrote in The National Post of Canada on December 12th 2002 – twenty-three years ago:
For women’s groups, the Montreal Massacre is an atrocity that taints all men, and for which all men must acknowledge their guilt. Marc Lépine symbolizes the murderous misogyny that lurks within us all.
M Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, whose brutalized spouse told the court at their divorce hearing that her husband “had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men”. At eighteen, young Gamil took his mother’s maiden name. The Gazette in Montreal mentioned this in its immediate reports of the massacre. The name “Gamil Gharbi” has not sullied its pages in the thirteen years since.
The Gazette notwithstanding, that might open up many avenues of journalistic investigation, don’t you think? The potential implications of Canadian immigration policy. The misogyny in particular of Islam, and its compatibility with developed societies. But instead everyone who mattered in the Dominion’s elite decided it was all the fault of Canadian manhood in general — of Gordy and Derek’s, or Émile and Pierre’s, culture of toxic masculinity. That narrative has held for two generations. The only even slight modification has been from a sliver of academics who posit Gamil Gharbi as “the first incel“. I’m not sure “incels” — young men who are “involuntarily celibate” — existed as a mass phenomenon back in 1989: they are a consequence of the societal feminisation Ms Andrews writes about. The “incel” segment was by far the most interesting part of the Tucker/Fuentes convo, and the least remarked upon, but the notion that they’re itching to kill women bolsters the original 1989 framing, so the media are minded to entertain it.
Yet we all know, surely, that the young ladies in that Montreal classroom would have benefited from a little bit of available “masculinity” that day. Alas, the men to hand were in a certain sense far more profoundly disarmed than the wildest dreams of “gun control” advocates. From my book After America:
To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal’s École Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lépine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.
Which is the more disturbing glimpse of Canadian manhood? The guy who shoots the women? Or his fellow men who abandon them to be shot? For me, the latter has always been the darkest element of the story. From my column in Maclean’s, January 9th 2006:
Every December 6th, our own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the Montreal massacre — the fourteen women murdered by Marc Lépine, born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you wouldn’t know that from the press coverage. Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obediently did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
So the annual denunciation of manhood in general is the precise inversion of the reality of the event. That was unusual in 1989, but has become routine since: the UK Government’s “Prevent” programme, set up in the wake of the July 7th Tube bombings to “prevent” further “Islamist” attacks, now focuses its energies on the threat from a “far right” boorish enough to insist on noticing all these Islamic provocations; January 6th is an insurrection for which trespassing gran’mas have to be hunted down and banged up in solitary, but Thoroughly Modern Milley telling the ChiComs he’ll ignore his commander-in-chief or James Comey taking to Twitter to urge his chums to “eighty-six” the President is true patriotism of the highest order; in German cities saving democracy is so critical that it is necessary to ban the leading political party.
So the inversion of reality is pretty much standard operating procedure these days. There is, however, a sense in which that terrible one-off atrocity from the late Eighties has become a portent of tomorrow — of a western world thoroughly unmanned. Your average feminist lobby group doesn’t see it that way, naturally. “The feminism I think of is the one that embodies inclusivity, multiculturalism and the ability to change the world through the humanity that women do bring,” says Stephanie Davis, executive director of Atlanta’s Women’s Foundation. “If there were women in power in representative numbers — fifty-two per cent — I think that the World Trade Center would still be standing.”
December 6, 2025
QotD: King Henry wants a divorce
In 1532, then, Parliament presented the King with the Supplication Against the Ordinaries. “Ordinaries” means “members of a religious order” — basically, the Supplication is everyone’s beefs with the Church. You can read the list at the Wiki link, but they all boil down to this: The Church was effectively a state-within-the-State, operating a different system of law, taxation, etc. And that’s what praemunire means, too — “a 14th-century law that prohibited the assertion or maintenance of papal jurisdiction, or any other foreign jurisdiction or claim of supremacy in England, against the supremacy of the monarch”. By accusing Wolsey of it, Henry VIII was saying that he, Wolsey, was ultimately working for the Church, not the King … which is kinda what you’d expect from a Cardinal, no?
That’s the problem.
Long story short, by 1532 the state-within-the-State that was the Church was blocking the upward mobility of new men like Thomas Cromwell.1 There was an entire secular education system; it was cranking out talented, ambitious men; in short, there was an “overproduction of elites”, since there were limited spaces in the nobility and the Church and they were all already occupied by either bluebloods, or guys like Wolsey who had jumped on the gravy train much earlier.
But this was an artificial bottleneck. The Tudor state had plenty of room to expand; they needed far more educated bureaucrats than the old system was capable of supplying. The old system needed to go, on order to make room for the new, and in many ways that’s what the Reformation was: A brushfire, clearing off the deadwood. A political and administrative brushfire, disguised as a theological dispute. It’s no accident that the most Reformed polities — late Tudor England, the Netherlands, the Schmalkaldic League — were the most politically and economically efficient ones, too.
And by Reforming the Church, the brushfire could extend to the rest of the depraved, decadent, moribund, fake-and-gay culture. The Renaissance is obsessive about the old, but it is, obviously, something very very new. People raised in the Late Medieval world were emotionally incapable of a total break with the past — I don’t think any culture really is, but a culture as hidebound as the Middle Ages certainly isn’t. But so long as they could find some warrant for change in the Classical past (and being the inventive types they were, they’d always find such a warrant), they could purge the culture, root and branch, in the guise of “returning ad fontes“.
Severian, “Reformation II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-08.
- This is where the analogy breaks down, because Late Medieval men were not Postmodern men — Cromwell was actually loyal to Wolsey almost to his, Cromwell’s, literal death. Men had honor back then. It also speaks to the kind of man Wolsey must’ve been, to have inspired the loyalty of a guy like Cromwell despite it all. Cromwell was a ruthless motherfucker, even by Tudor England’s Olympic-class standards; he’d stab his own mother if he found it politically necessary; but he still stayed loyal to his man even when it looked like that would cost him his life.
December 5, 2025
Censorship and “cancel culture” are symptoms of a cultural sickness
A guest post at Woke Watch Canada by C.C. Harvey lays out the evidence that our culture — and most of the western world — is struggling with a spiritual sickness and that arbitrary cancellations and formal censorship of dissenting views are symptoms of that ailment:
When a society begins to suppress intellectual and spiritual searching and dreaming — by punishing speech, regulating thought, discouraging questions, denying the existence of spiritual reality — it is not only a political decline, but a sign of deep unwellness.
Where populations lose respect for liberty of conscience, inquiry, and discourse, society becomes nasty and brutish. Truth-seeking, spiritual health, and peace are inexorably linked. Across formerly open, stable, safe western societies, censorship and repression have been rising as safety, cohesion, and quality of civic life decline.
We must resist cancel culture and speech codes for the following reasons:
- Suppressing Truth-Seeking Violates a Fundamental Human Impulse
Across religious and knowledge traditions, truth-seeking is expressed as a moral duty. When authorities obstruct honest questioning, they interfere with something built into the human spirit.
- Fear Becomes the Organizing Principle
Where dissent is forbidden, fear takes the place of reason. Fear diminishes moral clarity, discourages integrity, and pushes people toward silence rather than responsibility. A fearful society cannot become a virtuous society.
- Conscience Is Treated as a Threat Instead of a Gift
In every major tradition — religious or philosophical — conscience is seen as a source of moral insight. When institutions punish people for following their conscience, they reveal a belief that the individual soul has no intrinsic worth, only value as a compliant unit.
- Dialogue Is Replaced With Dogma
Healthy societies debate, persuade, and refine ideas through open conversation. Unhealthy ones replace discussion with mandatory narratives and speech codes. Leaders who fear questions fear the truth those questions might uncover. Dogma can be secular or religious. It is ideologically rigid, generally not truth-seeking.
- Collective Identity Replaces Individual Worth
Authoritarian systems elevate the group above the person: the party, the ideology, the movement, the “community”. When people are valued only as members of a group rather than as individuals, conscience becomes irrelevant and conformity becomes the main civic expectation. This is materialism, and denial of spiritual reality.
- Repentance and Correction Become Impossible
A culture that silences criticism cannot correct its own errors. Without the freedom to point out problems, there can be no course correction, no growth, and no accountability. Mistakes multiply because they are protected by enforced silence.
- The Vulnerable Are Punished First
Censorship and ideological enforcement nearly always fall hardest on those with the least power — dissidents, researchers, students, teachers, and ordinary citizens. When moral pressure is used to intimidate rather than uplift, society reveals a deeply inverted understanding of justice.
- Curiosity and Creativity Decline
When questions become dangerous, people stop asking. When our human body, spirit, and intellect work in tandem without fear, we are capable of incredible scientific, artistic, and intellectual discovery and achievement. A society that punishes inquiry slowly starves itself of spirit in the form of innovation and insight.
- Tribal Narratives Replace Shared Reality
When open debate disappears, competing ideological factions manufacture their own “truths”. Without a shared standard for evidence or meaning, society fragments into groups that can no longer communicate across boundaries. This is a recipe for distrust, polarization, and alienation … in dogmatically religious societies: a recipe for holy war and violent oppression.
- A Culture That Punishes Dissent Is Living by Avoidance, Not Truth
Suppressing dissent is always a sign that an ideology cannot withstand scrutiny. Societies that silence critics pretend confidence but are insecure. The greater the fear of open conversation, diverse thought, and public debate, the greater the underlying instability and spiritual decay.
- Each Soul’s Journey Is Sacred — And Faith Must Be Chosen, Not Forced
Across traditions, genuine belief is understood as something voluntary:
- Love and faith cannot be coerced.
- Insight cannot be mandated.
- Moral understanding cannot be imposed through fear.
A society that tries to control belief tries to destroy the inner space where thought, reflection, and integrity develop. Coerced belief is not belief; it is compliance. An individual’s free relationship with God is sacred. No human rightfully owns another’s body, mind, or soul.
Update, 7 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.
November 30, 2025
Canada’s growing Islamist problem
At Juno News, Joe Adam George points to the problems Britain is having with their well-established Muslim extremists and says Canada has exactly the same issues here:
When 35-year-old Jihad al-Shamie terrorized a Manchester synagogue last month on Yom Kippur pledging allegiance to ISIS, few were shocked by what investigators later uncovered. He attended a Salafi-inspired mosque where extremist rhetoric was routine. His father had praised Hamas’s October 7 attackers as “Allah’s men on earth”. Years of indoctrination taught him that violence was virtue, resistance was glory, and terror was faith.
What unfolded in Manchester is a warning to Canada, where similar currents of Islamist radicalism have been manifestly gathering strength. Across Canadian cities, extremist narratives are taking root among young people through community networks, activist circles, and online echo chambers.
A prominent Shia mosque in Windsor, Ontario, recently held a memorial service for slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah — for the second year running — where youths eulogised the notorious terrorist as a “hero” and “martyr”. The Toronto Metropolitan University’s arts faculty funded a research paper which argues that Canada’s designation of Islamist groups as terrorist organizations is deeply flawed because of “systemic Islamophobia” and racism. Such episodes do not merely glorify violence; they sanctify terrorism and rebrand militancy as a necessity.
Earlier this year, Canada’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, warned it was “increasingly concerned” about the threat of ISIS-inspired attacks. That concern is well-founded. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported a staggering 488 per cent rise in terrorism-related charges between April 2023 and March 2024, much of it driven by ISIS-motivated youth radicalisation. In the same period, antisemitic incidents surged by more than 670 per cent. An ISIS-inspired teenager was arrested in Montreal in August for terrorism offences. These are not isolated events but symptoms of a cultural shift — where extremism masquerades as activism and hate is sold as justice.
Since the breakout of the Israel-Hamas war, unrestrained radicalisation has seeped into mosques, schools, charities, and universities — often protected by Canada’s own liberal frameworks. Islamist networks have mastered the art of exploiting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to propagate radical ideologies while deflecting scrutiny. Wrapped in the language of “human rights” and “anti-racism”, they advance intolerance behind a façade of moral virtue.
As former FBI agent and counter-terrorism expert Lara Burns noted, it’s a tactic that echoes the Muslim Brotherhood’s “sabotage strategy” in North America — infiltrating institutions to steer public debate and soften attitudes toward Islamist causes.
Campaigns to institutionalize so-called “anti-Palestinian racism” (APR) is turning Canada’s classrooms and government offices into laboratories for grievance politics. Marketed as anti-discrimination, APR in reality brands any criticism of Palestinian militancy as racism, giving extremists a moral shield and silencing dissent. Even Canada’s Islamophobia czar, Amira Elghawaby, has been accused of abusing her taxpayer-funded post to conjure up Islamophobia and APR where none existed. During a visit to London in June, she reportedly met officials shaping the UK’s own Islamophobia legislation — a troubling sign of cross-pollination between partisan ideologues.
