Quotulatiousness

October 9, 2026

Conrad Black on Tucker Carlson

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his (new-ish) Substack, Conrad Black discusses Tucker Carlson’s media career before he unceremoniously left Fox News and what he has been doing since then:

Tucker Carlson talking to Mike Pence, July 2023.

This became a dangerous cycle because the more Tucker forayed into the fringe, the harder he struck a vein of malformed but popular sentiment. Meanwhile, censorship of his relatively tame views only handed him a bigger megaphone and more incentive to go further. His sensible opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters, and his wariness of another quagmire emerging in Ukraine, curdled into progressively more unhinged forms of isolationism. His legitimate concerns about demographic trends and failed immigration policy curdled into belief in a coordinated conspiracy to erase white people from Europe and North America. Reasonable criticism of Israel and the American role in the Middle East curdled into the quasi-antisemitic trope of AIPAC as the hidden hand controlling U.S. foreign policy. His well-earned distrust of government curdled into various conspiracies involving some mix of extra-terrestrials, the CIA, and the Jews.

The pattern has become so predictable that if there was an effort to block him from praising Brussels sprouts as his favourite vegetable, at least three of his next five interview guests would spend two hours apiece insisting the maligned little cabbage is the victim of a coordinated smear campaign bankrolled by Big Salad. The attempted prohibition becomes the proof.

As a free-speech and free-market advocate, I think Tucker is entitled to say what he wants, and I congratulate him on his commercial success, even while finding many of his views idiotic. What troubles me is not so much the outlandish claims, but the skill atrophy — the phenomenon whereby any skill sharpened by adversarial pressure dulls without resistance. In boxing, the term “ring rust” is sometimes used to describe the way a boxer who stops facing strong opponents loses their timing, power, and urgency, until nothing’s left but a shell of their former selves. Looking back over his podcast guest list, with the exception of this Rees-Mogg segment, Ted Cruz last year, and perhaps a handful of others, it has been a long procession of hundreds of people brought on to confirm his own worldview back to him, in their own words. And the ring rust has set in.

I first noticed it at an event in Edmonton in January 2024, where I sat on a panel with Tucker and Jordan Peterson. I found myself in the awkward position of feeling the need to defend then-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in front of a packed arena of anti-Liberal partisans (with whom I would have considered myself somewhat of a kindred spirit). I was booed by parts of the audience for pointing out the fact that while Freeland, whom I know slightly and like personally, was politically hopeless, she was not, as Tucker had claimed, a fascist. The typically leftist habit of reducing every political opponent to a Hitler or Mussolini analog is lazy and obnoxious — not adjectives I would have used to describe the old Tucker. His justification was that he had recently seen a video of reporter David Menzies being detained by the RCMP after a collision with an officer while trying to get his microphone close enough to pick up Freeland’s response (or lack thereof). It was an outrageous overreaction by the officer, but there was no suggestion that Freeland had ordered the arrest. Ironically, Menzies’ question that Freeland was trying to dodge had been about why the Liberal government had gone soft on Iran’s terrorist regime — a question one might well put to Tucker.

The signs of atrophy continued to show up and in ways that, as a former admirer of Tucker’s, became progressively more alarming. At the memorial following the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, Tucker gave an odd speech in which he claimed that the assassination was reminiscent of his “favourite story”, in which Jesus Christ was killed for telling the truth by a group of shadowy figures “in a lamp-lit room” in Jerusalem, “sitting around eating hummus”. When asked about it a few days later, Tucker employed a variation of the Jon Stewart technique of backing away from his own words to avoid serious scrutiny. With his characteristic forced laugh, he denied any implication that he had echoed the nascent conspiracy theory that Israel had murdered Charlie Kirk. His defense: hummus is a traditional Arab (rather than Jewish) food.

The evident decline grew even more pronounced in his May 2026 New York Times sit-down, when Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked why he had suggested that Donald Trump might be the Antichrist. Tucker insisted he had never said that, wasn’t even sure what the Antichrist was and insisted “those words never left my lips” — then, after he was shown a clip from his own show of the words leaving his lips, he apologized that his remarks from the clip implied “a precision I haven’t arrived at”. In other words, the jury is still out about whether Trump is the Antichrist, and he regretted jumping the gun on the verdict.

Which brings us to the latest instalment. After roughly 200 interviews, each amounting to hours-long sessions of Tucker and his guests regurgitating the same pablum into each other’s mouths, the transformation into a shell of his former self appears to be complete. In this conversation, moments after declaring that killing the innocent is “never justified under any circumstances”, he pivoted almost in the same breath into a full-throated defence of Hitler — history’s single greatest killer of innocents. He argued the invasion of Poland was understandable given that 15% of the country had been German before the Treaty of Versailles. While absurd, at least it is consistent with his position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But even if, for argument’s sake, that justified Poland, Hitler didn’t stop there. What justified the invasions of Belgium and France? After all, France was faithfully adhering to the Tuckerite foreign policy of reluctant rearmament, appeasement, and assuming an entirely defensive posture (behind the Maginot Line). Stretching the flimsy logic further one could argue (feebly) that France had it coming too, since 6% of France (Alsace-Lorraine) was also German before Versailles. But there’s still no justification for the invasions of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece, or the Soviet Union — with whom Hitler had a signed non-aggression pact. None of those countries were ever German, let alone Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt.

What’s clear is that Hitler used his early invasions to test whether anyone would stop him — and the feedback he got was a green light for more. History keeps teaching the same lesson: appeasement is just expansionism outsourced to your enemies.

Small wonder Tucker hasn’t learned this lesson from history, given that he called Darryl Cooper — a man with zero historical credentials — “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper spent two hours on Tucker’s show in September 2024, arguing Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the war, and that the deaths of millions in Nazi camps owed more to German logistical incompetence than deliberate extermination.

October 6, 2026

Humour and the British Green Party

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the Daily Sceptic, Steven Tucker discusses the state of comedy in Britain today, in the light of the recent Green Party internal report on what members are supposed to deem funny or not funny. Not joking:

In the very same week these letters were publicised, the UK Green Party did actually launch its own internal in-depth report on what was and was not funny, with party activists receiving training informing them they should maintain detailed records of any jokes fellow members had told to them, “including dates, times [and] locations”, in case anyone later found them to be offensive – particularly if they touched upon sensitive issues like race, religion, sexuality or class. Even if the particular big fat black lesbian affected made a joke about themselves, this was still to be noted down and eliminated, as it nonetheless created “an environment in this space where derogatory jokes are allowed to happen”.

To prevent such jocular genocide occurring again in future, Greens were advised to perform an “audit” of their friendship groups to ensure they were diverse enough so that this simply would not happen: an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman all walk into a pub, and nobody says anything even remotely untoward whatsoever, as diversity is clearly our strength.

Official Green Party advice on what to do if you happen to hear a joke one day. Nowhere does the option “laugh” appear

For a preview of what a future Green-led Ministry of Laughter might one day look like, we should look towards a current controversy involving the quasi-state-run BBC (Bowdlerising British Comedy), which in September decided to mark 20 years since the first broadcast of award-winning sketch-show That Mitchell and Webb Look – by cutting out several sketches, and deeming the show to be “racist”. The now samizdat sketches involved scenarios like English Civil War re-enactors getting bored and deciding to black up and recreate modern-day conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a brownface Amazonian tribe found secretly living behind flower-pots in a garden centre and a woman wearing a burka being an unsuccessful participant in a TV makeover programme.

Even more primly, the BBC also wiped or butchered entire episodes of popular children’s comedy history series Horrible Histories, as they featured jokes about sensitive topics like slavery – despite the fact they pretty obviously were not of a “Let’s bring it back!”-type perspective, but attempting to satirise the practice’s brutality.

One horrified reaction came from Graham Linehan, the cancelled Anglo-Irish comedy writer who today lives in exile in America, as nobody in the UK industry will now touch his work with a bargepole. Not only does it commit the cardinal post-2010s sin of actually being funny, Linehan’s writing is also deemed to be “transphobic”; Channel 4 refuses to re-show an old episode of his sitcom the IT Crowd, as it features a joke about a cross-dresser (see my review of his 2023 autobiography).

Writing in the Telegraph, Linehan observes that most British comedians who get their back-catalogues politically ruined these days, like Mitchell and Webb, either keep silent and go along with it for an easy life, or else actively denounce themselves in classic Soviet show-trial fashion, so as to keep raking in the cash on the panel-show circuit. Because of this cowardice, he says, “somewhere out there, the next generation of comedy writers and performers, the ones who might have pushed the form further, taken bigger risks, made the joke nobody else would touch, will quietly decide it isn’t worth it, and nobody will have to ban anything ever again”. Sounds a bit like how Islam operates in such matters, too …

October 1, 2026

“Motte and bailey” doesn’t work with this argument

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

Yesterday was nominally “Truth and Reconciliation Day” in Canada, but the government and progressive activist groups are actively trying to suppress honest questions about the whole Residential Schools topic and threatening jail time to those who refuse to mouth the slogans:

This is an interesting thread, because he makes the motte and bailey explicit in a way they’re not usually careless enough to do.

No one denies that the residential schools were rough, that the kids who went there were probably kind of sad, and that some of them died, due to contagious disease mostly. That’s all very unfortunate but doesn’t amount to much more than “kids get homesick at boarding school, discipline back then was often severe by modern standards, and medicine was primitive especially in remote areas”. This is the motte and it isn’t all that impactful because none of it is all that different from conditions that white kids lived through at the time, particularly in remote areas.

But it was very specifically the claim of mass graves due to deliberate genocide that supercharged this issue back in 2021, with the implication that the residential schools were actually a cover for a policy of systematic extermination. At least I assume this is the charge, as they keep saying “genocide” and that’s what genocide is commonly understood to mean. This is the bailey.

The problem is that there is no evidence for mass graves. The few times that they’ve been investigated no bodies were found. At the Kamloops site they deliberately refuse to even dig, which strikes people as suspicious. So people ask questions. It’s only natural to want something more concrete than “because I said so” when you’re being accused of genocide.

So they then retreat to the motte of “well things were hard in the schools”, and okay, yes, they were, but that isn’t genocide. But the implication is that anyone asking for evidence in support of the genocide claim – anyone attacking the bailey – is engaging in “denialism” that the schools even existed or that conditions in the schools were often not ideal. Which literally no one does.

This entire debate comes down to one question. Is the Canadian government guilty of a deliberate, systematic policy of genocide? Did it set out to exterminate the First Nations via the mass murder of their children? That’s it, that’s the issue, that’s what we’re fighting about.

And there’s a very high bar of evidence for proving something like that. At a minimum, you need a whole lot of bones.

Got any bones out in that bailey?

Marc Emery argues that the reservation system was a mistake and it has permanently immiserated most First Nations people and enriched a tiny minority who capture most of the benefits for themselves:

We should have abolished reservations and this idea of tribal land. Each native should have been given land that stays in that person’s family in perpetuity, and then we should have been done.

Instead, tribal lands, reservations, the Rez, have been the worst places on Earth to have been a child or female.

Rape, incest, predation, neglect and child abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, abandonment, murder, violent assault, domestic violence; no child or youth was spared being witness to this grim experience in their tribal homes.

Statistics don’t lie. No one hates their women more than native men.

The residential schools were much safer.

That was one of the main reasons for residential schools and the 60’s Scoop, get the children away from the dangerous and predatory reserve life. Many mothers who sent their children to residential schools knew this.

This is the truth that must be reconciled. The Whites have paid their dues in triplicate. No more tribute, no more money, no more land.

The natives have to raise themselves up. Blaming the Whites is over. The children of today should not be tax slaves to a pay tens of billions of dollars in annual tributes to a culture that has been so barbaric to women, children, that had slaves, were in constant warfare before the establishment of Canada, that invented nothing, that received the benefits of every technological advance at no cost to these “indigenous” who gladly — eagerly — abandon their ancient traditions for every benefit of European/Canadian invention and wonder.

September 30, 2026

Undermining any attempt to discover truth and achieve any reconciliation

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

The urge to uncover past wrongs in the Canadian government’s dealings with First Nations groups isn’t a bad thing … but the government’s unwillingness to require factual evidence in support of claims of past wrongs will do exactly the opposite of working toward cultural reconciliation:

Photo from Woke Watch Canada

Why is the federal government trying to prevent Canadians from learning the truth about Indian residential schools?

On 24 September 2026, six days before Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Rebecca Alty issued a statement about so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’.

Alty claims so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ “spreads false information by denying or casting doubt on the history of Residential Schools and the lasting harm they caused”. She offers no examples, which strongly suggests she could not provide examples if pressed to do so. The federal government is thus using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack a straw man of its own creation.

In fact, the federal government has gone far beyond using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack the straw man it calls ‘Residential Schools denialism’. It has even entertained bills which would criminalize it.

    The federal government refuses to release residential school attendance records to the public which would disprove claims of missing children

In addition to using Canadian taxpayer money to attack so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ — a straw man of its own creation — and entertaining bills which would criminalize it, the federal government has actively prevented the truth about Canada’s Indian residential schools from coming out.

For years there have been tales of thousands of missing Indian residential school students. The federal government has allowed these baseless rumours to proliferate, despite the fact that not a single name of a missing Indian residential school student has ever been produced by anyone, including the federal government.

Moreover the federal government has allowed these baseless tales of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate while actively concealing from the Canadian public the attendance records in its possession which disprove them.

An example is the attendance records for the Kamloops Indian Residential School. A close examination of the quarterly returns for the Kamloops Indian Residential School from 1943-1952, which are available online, establishes that every student is accounted for during that decade.

The government also has quarterly returns and other attendance records for the remaining years of the existence of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1952-1977, which it has not released to the public. Their existence is attested to by the federal government itself in the school narrative it prepared for use in the Independent Assessment Process.

Quarterly returns were the basis on which the Department of Indian Affairs calculated the per capita grant which covered the operating costs of the school. School officials ensured they were meticulously accurate in order to obtain as large a grant as possible based on current student enrolment, and the Department of Indian Affairs likewise demanded that they be meticulously accurate to avoid the federal government overpaying the school.

It is thus of the greatest significance that on pp. 7-8 of the attached school narrative, the federal government provides a table of total attendance figures for the years of the Kamloops Indian Residential School’s existence. The figures given by the federal government for the years from 1952-1977 are not estimates. They are very precise numbers — 402, 424, 381, 390, for example — indicating that they are derived from attendance records in the federal government’s possession, and in fact the federal government’s heading on the table reads “most are September figures for each year and based on Quarterly Returns where possible“.

It is thus clear that if released by the federal government, the quarterly returns underlying the figures in this table would establish conclusively that not a single student from the Kamloops Indian Residential School went missing between the years 1952-1977, yet the federal government refuses to release these attendance records so that the Canadian public can learn the truth. Instead, the federal government allows the damaging and completely unfounded myth of thousands of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate, and even to be promulgated beyond Canada’s borders (as, for example, in the recent hearings of the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal).

The federal government needs to release these attendance records, not just for the Kamloops Indian Residential School, but for all Indian residential schools in Canada, so that the Canadian public can learn the truth, i.e., that federal government records establish that not a single student is missing from an Indian residential school.

On X, Mr Bench points out that First Nations’ political representatives see literally no end to the need for reconciliation for generations yet to come:

Will reconciliation ever end?

According to Candice … NO.

Plan for this to continue for generations.

She says some people haven’t even started healing yet.

Her son will need healing.

Her future grandchildren will need healing.

And she admits:

“Don’t know how many generations it’s gonna take for us to heal, and healing is forever.”

So when does reconciliation end?

It doesn’t. So keep the funds flowing

If “healing is forever”, apparently there is no finish line.

L. Wayne Mathison speaks for an increasing number of Canadians here:

I’m sick and tired of being told that people generations from now will still need to “heal” from events they never personally experienced. My ancestors went through terrible things too. History is full of conquest, poverty, discrimination, war and displacement.

Remember the past. Teach it accurately. Deal with specific injustices that still exist. But at some point adults also have to build a life in the present.

I do not believe anyone should inherit permanent victimhood, and I do not believe anyone alive today should inherit permanent guilt.

Reconciliation without measurable goals, accountability or any conceivable end point stops looking like reconciliation to me, period.

Keep this up, and I am totally done with this.

September 22, 2026

The future of online free speech for Canadians

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

The Liberals in Ottawa prefer not to hear uppity citizens yapping about Liberal policies, and having a majority in the House of Commons means that there’s very little chance that they won’t be able to ram through a bill to curtail the ability of Canadians to speak freely online — that’s why I put a “warrant canary” in my daily Substack summary of blog posts. On X, John Carter has some advice that may be helpful to Canadians who don’t agree with the government:

Carney is essentially trying to implement Yookay style online speech controls. With his stolen majority government, there’s no way to stop him, and so no reason to expect that he won’t succeed.

Canadian nationalists therefore need to start being smart. Use coded language. Avoid overt “hate speech”. Don’t advocate violence. Use positive messaging, love of country rather than hatred of other. Make their job as difficult as possible.

This is nothing the right hasn’t seen before. The bad old days of Twitter censorship are not so far behind us. Britain and Europe already have very similar laws. That hasn’t stopped their nationalist communities. Censorship doesn’t change the underlying social conditions. At worst it prevents people from being too direct. Furthermore, by forcing dissidents to be clever, it exerts a selective pressure that raises the intellectual level of dissidents, while making the censors themselves increasingly ridiculous.

Censors themselves are usually very stupid people. Coded language tends to go right over their tiny heads. They don’t handle satire well. It’s also very easy to mock a regime like this by parroting its own vocabulary. Elbows up, everyone. Diversity is our greatest strength.

State capacity is another factor. How many censors do they actually have? How competent are they? (diversity is our greatest strength!) How many people can they actually enforce these laws on? Every time someone gets dragged into court the state is burning a significant quantity of time, energy, and attention. The cost-benefit of tasking bureaucrats, police officers, lawyers, and judges to punish random shitposts is math that doesn’t math very well. The entire strategy relies on making an example of a few to cow the many. If the many aren’t cowed, because for instance despite the censorship they can see with their own eyes what’s actually happening to their country on the street, all censorship does is piss people off and further undermine the legitimacy of a regime that would not be resorting to censorship in the first place if its legitimacy was beyond reproach.

This is bad. I’m not looking forward to it. But panic won’t help. Keep your wits about you, stay calm, be smart.

September 5, 2026

The high-water mark of Cancel Culture

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

This Noahpinion piece is from last year, but I hadn’t seen it before and I think it outlines fairly accurately why “we” allowed Cancel Culture to temporarily take over social media and cause so much personal damage to disfavoured individuals. It gave the mob the power to identify their own Emmanuel Goldsteins and drive them from the public sphere:

The Arrest of Robespierre, The Night of the 9th to 10th Thermidor, Year II, 27th July 1794
Colour engraving by Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert (1765 – ca.1835) via Wikimedia Commons.

I think about this when I think about cancel culture.

Back in 2018, Bari Weiss got dogpiled on Twitter for an anodyne liberal tweet. Weiss congratulated Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu on pulling off a difficult move, quoting a line from the musical Hamilton about immigrants being great:

Weiss was viciously attacked for this tweet by thousands of people who called her racist over the course of several days. Why? Because Mirai Nagasu isn’t actually an immigrant — she was born in the U.S. According to Weiss’ many attackers, Weiss’ statement implied that nonwhite people are perpetual foreigners.

That was, of course, complete hogwash. Nagasu’s parents are immigrants; the use of the term “second-generation immigrants” to describe the children of immigrants is utterly standard terminology in academic sociology. And by quoting a line from Hamilton in praise of a second-generation immigrant athlete competing on behalf of the U.S., Weiss was clearly advocating in favor of (nonwhite) immigration as something that makes America stronger — a very standard liberal viewpoint.

Whether this particular pile-on had long-term negative consequences for Weiss’ life isn’t clear, but she encountered an increasingly hostile climate at the New York Times, the paper where she worked, and eventually was forced to quit. It would have been reasonable for people observing that pile-on — and similar attacks directed at Weiss over the years — to conclude that speaking up is dangerous and that Twitter mobs hold a lot of real power.

The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb — an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago — reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.

Why was cancel culture both so powerful and so popular for those few years? The most obvious reason is that it worked. If you were a progressive in 2018 who really believed that calling a second-generation American an “immigrant” was racist, then you could often effectively strike at that person by raising a hue and cry about them on Twitter. Companies were afraid of boycotts, of course. But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger; corporate managers would often cave out of pure fear of online negativity.

Another reason was that cancel culture was a quick route to online clout. As Eugene Wei wrote in his famous blog post “Status as a Service (StaaS)“, social media offers most people the opportunity to get much more social status than they have any hope of getting in their daily lives, if they happen to get lucky and go viral and become an influencer.

But to get that clout, you have to stand out. Attacking the same old progressive targets — Donald Trump, Republican senators, conservative influencers — is a low-yield activity, because the field is too competitive. Everyone attacks those people. But finding more novel targets for mob attack — like an NYT writer who calls a second-generation American an “immigrant” — can be a high-yield activity. It’s basically outrage entrepreneurship.

Of course, this means that there was an incentive for progressive purity spirals and tent-shrinking. If you’re a progressive looking for new people to denounce, the most tempting targets are probably center-left liberals who have heretofore been safe from cancellation. Hating Donald Trump is old news. But hating Matt Yglesias? That could get you some real attention!

And so the ranks of the online cancel-mobs were probably also swollen by people who participated in the mobs out of fear that if they didn’t, they too would be canceled. This gave rise to a phenomenon I call ponzi screaming — berating the person immediately to your right on the political spectrum, out of fear that if you don’t berate them, people further to your left will berate you. You have people like the progressive online shouter and failed Congressional candidate Will Stancil berating Nate Silver even as he gets frequently dogpiled and berated by leftists.

Between outrage entrepreneurship, purity contests, and ponzi screaming, late-2010s progressive cancel culture started to look like a farcical imitation of the French Terror or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The stakes were obviously much lower — losing your job is a lot less bad than losing your head — but many of the social dynamics and behavior patterns were recognizably similar.

August 24, 2026

“Communism is an ideology designed to liquidate nations”

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

I nearly skipped this post by Celina, as it started off appearing to be pretty much of interest only to Australians, but that was just the opening sections:

The Bolsheviks were the first governing power of the modern era to write the suppression of “national enmity” into a systematic criminal code. The RSFSR Criminal Code of 1922 penalised agitation and propaganda arousing national enmity or dissension, its successor, the 1926 Code, carried the provision forward as Article 59-7, under the chapter dealing with especially dangerous crimes against the order of administration, punishing “propaganda or agitation directed towards arousing national or religious enmity or discord”, with sharply escalated penalties, up to and including death, where the offence occurred in wartime or amid mass disturbances. From the earliest years of the Soviet state, in other words, speech about nationality was not a civil-society problem to be argued out, but a category of state crime sometimes punishable by death.

To understand why, it is necessary to understand something about communism that conservatives and libertarians have largely obscured. If you ask the average conservative what communism is, he will most likely start discussing government ownership, five-year plans, bread queues etc.

Communism, from this point of view, is essentially capitalism with the economic settings reversed. The government “does and owns everything“. This is why so much conservative analysis eventually degenerates into horseshoe theory: fascists liked government intervention and communists liked government intervention, therefore fascism and communism were basically versions of the same thing.

But that completely misses the ideological conflict which defined twentieth-century Europe. Communism was not just some economic theory about who should own what. It was an internationalist theory about who you are.

Communism is an ideology designed to liquidate nations. Literally.

Marxism insisted that the fundamental political division of mankind was class. The worker was not ultimately supposed to understand himself principally as English, German, Italian, French or Russian. He belonged to the proletariat. His historical interests were shared with workers beyond the borders of his own country, while his supposed national solidarity with his own bourgeoisie concealed the class relationship upon which capitalism depended. Hence the language that runs through the entire communist tradition: Workers of the world, unite; The proletariat has no fatherland; No war but class war. You’re not Italian, you’re not German, you’re the proletariat, and all you have to lose is your chains.

The political logic here is blatantly obvious. Nationality competes with class consciousness, patriotism competes with proletarian internationalism. The nation tells a German worker that he shares something profound with another German who happens to own a factory. Marxism tells him that this solidarity is false and his real political brother is the French, Russian or Italian worker standing on the other side of the border.

That is why the nation became one of the great obstacles confronting revolutionary socialism. The theory said workers possessed common international class interests. Yet, history repeatedly demonstrated that workers continued to behave like members of nations.

In 1914, the workers of Europe did not unite against their governments and refuse the coming war. They rallied overwhelmingly to their respective countries. Socialist parties fractured along national lines. Men who Marxists expected to understand themselves as an international proletariat marched into battle as Germans, Frenchmen, Russians, Austrians and Britons. And the same problem returned after the Bolshevik Revolution.

That is why the great twentieth-century conflict between communism and nationalism was not accidental. It was ideological. Communism was internationalist not in the banal sense that communists in different countries cooperated with one another, but in its conception of history itself. The nation was something history would ultimately transcend. Lenin said this openly: socialism aimed not simply to bring nations closer together, but eventually to “merge them“. Elsewhere he described the centralised state as a historical step towards the future “socialist unity of the whole world“.

Stalin, grasping this principle, forged civic nationalism as the indispensable stepping-stone toward that communist universalism. Inside the borders of the revolutionary state the old nationalities were to be liquidated into a single Soviet identity: you are not Ukrainian, you are not Russian, you are not Jewish, you are not Georgian, you are a Soviet patriot, loyal only to the revolution. That state, once purged of national loyalties, would then project its universalist ideology outward, seeking global hegemony by liquidating, in turn, every nation that still dared to resist it.

Update, 25 August: 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.

August 13, 2026

German democracy from the POV of “Our Democracy Enjoyers”

Filed under: Germany, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If you’ve been wondering about the state of democracy in Germany, your first move should be to check the latest update from eugyppius:

“Bundesrat of Germany” by photosteve101 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

In civics class, parties appear as little more than informal election-winning cooperatives. Now and again “the sovereign” – that is to say, “the people” – may grant one or various parties a limited right to govern, but the state is held to be in some sense public property. Politicians and their parties are at best its temporary custodians.1

Our Democracy Enjoyers particularly deplore state systems in which parties have captured the state – a special political form we might call the “party state”. Germany became a party state after 1933, when the NSDAP seized the entire state apparatus and outlawed all competitors. Contemporary states owned and operated by single parties include China, Cuba and North Korea. Our Democracy Enjoyers hate all single-party states because they are not democratic.

Party states need not however be single-party states. While the Socialist Unity Party (SED) effectively owned the DDR, they tolerated an array of subservient bloc parties from the very beginning. None of these parties ever had any chance of governing; they functioned only as extensions or alternative faces of the SED itself. These parties included gutted, early opposition parties like the CDU (Ost) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPD), but also SED concoctions like the Democratic Farmers’ Party (DBD) and the cynically post-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDPD). The SED cultivated these parties both as a democratic figleaf and also to integrate “non-proletarian” (particularly Christian) elements within the communist system. The precedent of the DDR shows that the party state can assume various innovative forms and that multiple parties may be useful for political, propaganda or other purposes.

My thesis of the Federal Republic is that it is also a party state. The only difference between the DDR and the BRD is that, in the BRD, several different parties share ownership of the state among themselves.

The three anecdotes at the head of this piece reveal this party ownership in incidental but telling ways. They show, for example, how a substantial portion of the police consider their oath of office to preclude loyalty to a democratically elected opposition party. Should the voters go rogue and install any such party at the state level, a prominent police union functionary openly hopes for insurrection and federal intervention. Periodically voiced ambitions and campaigns to cleanse the civil service of AfD elements come from a similar place. The ownership parties cannot countenance opposition creep into the bureaucracy, because they correctly regard the bureaucracy as their property.

The hysteria surrounding a thwarted SPD nomination to the Federal Constitutional Court reveals that the parties that own the BRD extend their proprietary interests not only to the executive and legislative branches, but also to the allegedly independent judiciary. The ruling parties have divided the prerogative to nominate judicial candidates informally among themselves. This prerogative is so jealously guarded that a leading Union politician cited a single thwarted SPD nomination to make the case for mass censorship and regulation of “alternative” media.

And while it is a minor incident that hardly matters, the dispute over the Otto-Wels-Saal shows that the proprietary feelings of the state parties extend to physical architecture, even specific rooms and buildings, which the parties of the party state regard not as public property but as their very own chambers – to name, possess and use as they see fit.

While progressive liberal political systems are all oligarchies, and this because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, they are not all party states – far from it. The party state is a clunky and outmoded political system that historically arose out of accident or necessity, generally following a revolution perpetrated by a single party or political movement in a moment of particular ascendance. The Federal Republic was founded as a party state in 1949, mainly to foreclose the possibility that subversive National Socialist or communist elements might return to influence via democratic processes. This is the basic meaning of German “defensive democracy”, which denotes an array of legal or constitutional tools for the parties that own the state to fend off or criminalise competitors.

  1. Now, we know this is mostly nonsense. “The people” are an abstraction and as such they cannot grant anybody anything. All political systems ultimately redound to the control of more or less stable oligarchies. “Democracy” describes little more than a set of procedures via which the these oligarchies (or their representatives) assume power and enact their will.

July 28, 2026

Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation defined

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Gawain Towler kindly provides a précis of a behind-the-paywall essay discussing misinformation, disinformation and the less-well-known malinformation, as governments on both sides of the Atlantic rush to codify new laws to further restrict the freedom of speech of their citizenry:

The essay examines “malinformation”, a term coined in 2017 and now embedded in official doctrine on both sides of the Atlantic, and I argue that it exists for one purpose, to give the state a category under which accurate speech can be treated as a harm. I start by Channelling Ambrose Beirce’s Devil’s Dictionary, with a dictionary entry defining the word as information whose defect is that it is true. Thereafter I proceed to trace its origins, its spread through British and American officialdom, its intellectual kinship with behavioural government, and its practical operation, before closing with a demand for its formal abolition.

First the taxonomy itself. The doctrine of “information disorder” rests on a triad. Misinformation is false and innocent, disinformation false and deliberate. Both turn on falsity. The third category does not. CISA, the American cybersecurity agency, defines malinformation as based on fact but used out of context to mislead or harm, and the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory council calls it the intentional spreading of genuine information with intent to cause harm. The offence, the essay observes, is not lying but telling the truth on purpose. The term’s coiners, Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle, applied it narrowly to revenge pornography, miscaptioned photographs and weaponised leaks, and the essay concedes these are real phenomena. But the concept escaped its paddock. Within four years it had migrated from a Council of Europe research paper to the letterhead of a federal agency and thence into British government training materials.

The British chapter centres on RESIST 2, the Cabinet Office counter-disinformation toolkit issued to government communicators in 2021. The toolkit reproduces the triad, admits the categories are hard to distinguish in practice, and resolves the difficulty by instructing officials to stop asking whether material is true and to focus instead on the harm it can do.

The essay treats those five words as the whole doctrine laid bare, truth demoted from test to complication. From the Cabinet Office the word trickled downward, into Local Government Association guidance, a Stockport Council webpage, even a Met Office blog. The essay notes a telling exception. Ofcom and the Electoral Commission, bodies with statutory exposure and lawyers, avoid the word entirely. Its distribution across the state maps the distribution of accountability. Where courts can reach, the concept hides.

The American experiment, the essay argues, ran to destruction. CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation team spent the early 2020s flagging content to platforms, much of it neither foreign nor false, drawing a House Judiciary Committee report accusing it of collusion and camouflage. When Missouri and Louisiana sued, the case reached the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri, where the government prevailed not on the merits but on standing. The essay relishes the irony of a Justice Department litigating for its own right to withhold context. Britain played a damper version. After Big Brother Watch revealed that the Counter Disinformation Unit had monitored lawful speech by journalists and parliamentarians, the government refused substantive disclosure and renamed the unit National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), in the tradition of Windscale becoming Sellafield.

The essay then traces the doctrine’s parentage to the habit of mind exemplified by the Nudge Unit. RESIST had different midwives, but both traditions live in the Cabinet Office and both treat the citizen as an object of professional influence. They embraced during Covid, when SPI-B recommended raising the perceived level of personal threat through hard-hitting emotional messaging while the information machinery flagged sceptical commentary, some of it correct. Fear turned up on one wing, information turned down on the other.

July 16, 2026

“Banned” book library in a Portuguese bookshop

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

Most people are at least a bit uncomfortable with censorship, at least when the censors get into the swing of things and start banning ordinary books and authors. I had to check Wikipedia to find out who Dua Lipa might be as I hadn’t heard of her before, so the name popping up in headlines about her bold anti-censorship actions didn’t tell me much. I think I’m safe in assuming that Ms. Lipa is fully read-in on all the fashionable concerns of the celebrity set, so it’ll be easy to predict the works her library will feature:

The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of “banned” books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.

For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).

Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. “The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection” would make a funny meme — as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey — but it would likely not be much of a career boost.

And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.

Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc.), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).

Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: “The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices.”

What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.

This is most notable in the “Voice” section, which, we’re told, “amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented”.

Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the woke era of radical Leftism, aggressive conformity and cancel culture.

Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism — a hostile force attacking it from the outside.

And as the “banned” book library is in Portugal, I’m including Larry Correia’s comments on the issue (he still counts as “Portuguese”, right?)

Since I’m still getting barked at by pearl clutching weirdos about my comment yesterday about “banned books” everybody with a functioning brain knows that just because parents don’t want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing liberal authors to stock public school libraries with torture porn, and the book is still legally available literally everywhere else books are sold, means that book is not “banned”.

And most “banned” book displays are just left wing virtue signaling for marketing purposes. Like most liberal causes its a fake ass moralizing narrative disconnected from reality where they get to play the victim and the rest of us are bullies.

Manhattan publishing LOVES when the school board in Somnambulant Iowa says they don’t want to spend their limited budget buying copies of The Illustrated Guide To Fisting for Trans Middle Schoolers, because that’s great marketing and all the blue haired weirdos are now religiously mandated to go buy a copy to stick it to the chuds.

Libs tried their best to get writers like me booted out of everything, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before you see any of us showing up on any of these banned books displays, and we all know it.

Stephen King was lying his ass off about how that particular novella collection was all about “friendship” or WTF ever he claimed. The friendship story has prison rape as a subplot, but the real issue was the story about an escaped Nazi war criminal teaching an American teenager about the joys of rape, torture, and murder.

As you can imagine some parents get hesitant about giving stuff like that to their kids … just like Stephen King himself did when he banned his own school shooting book, Rage. But it was okay when he did it.

If a school board said they didn’t want to buy one of my books because they thought it was too violent for kids, I’d say, okay, cool. Not being a dishonest histrionic dork, I recognize that’s their choice, and not being in that one collection does not in any way make my book “banned”.

The book in question is still available in every store, can be ordered online, and is in most public library systems. No law is broken if you possess it or share it. But to a liberal NOT buying their shit with tax dollars to give to children (even if their parents think it is inappropriate) is the gravest sin imaginable and you are all basically nazis.

Well, except for Graham Platner obviously. Stephen King says he’s alright.

July 11, 2026

British censorship laws do not apply outside the UK’s jurisdiction

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack Notes, Lorenzo Warby links to a fascinating discussion about the ongoing struggle between the UK government’s Ofcom and the US-based 4chan and their legal representatives, saying “The totalitarian wannabes currently running the UK do not apparently grasp that the American Revolution and War of Independence was a thing. Also, being totalitarian wannabes, they have no sense of humour.”

A UK cabinet minister, Rt. Hon. Liz Kendall MP, Secretary of State for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (“DSIT”), discussed the infamous “hamster e-mail” I sent on behalf of my client 4chan to the UK’s Internet censor, on national radio today in the UK. […] My father always told me, when I was growing up, “when a cabinet minister holding the technology policy brief for a G7 Member State is talking about your e-mailed jokes to an audience of millions on national broadcast media, that is the right time to explain the joke, especially if the cabinet minister didn’t get the joke”.

That explanation follows.

The backstory – Hamster #1

The hamster joke has a bit of a history to it. Ofcom, the UK’s Internet censor, first made contact with my American client 4chan in June of 2025 in its attempt to impose British censorship law on that website. I was subsequently retained as defense counsel, pro bono.

Ofcom then “provisionally fined” 4chan on August 16th, 2025 for refusing to obey the UK’s censorship regime. We were invited to make representations to the regulator following that provisional fine decision.

We did two things in response to that. The most newsworthy response was to file a lawsuit against the regulator in the DDC. Before that, however, we explained our position to Ofcom in writing and gave them an opportunity to walk away:

To wit, Ofcom’s fine notices were not properly served and were not enforceable in the United States. Note that we also gave Ofcom fair notice that while this might have been their first attempt to enforce their censorship orders in America, this was not our first rodeo when it came to successfully refusing such orders.

No quantity of officious and haughty foreign demand letters will change our stance. The UK could even pass a bill of attainder – historically Parliament’s most extreme and powerful legislative weapon – against my client, for all I care. My client’s right to operate its service lawfully in the United States is protected by the First Amendment. There is no law Parliament could enact that would change that fact.

I am very familiar with how this movie ends, and it does not end with 4chan paying Ofcom’s fine.

It may end with the UK’s censors getting a blocking order that it serves on its own ISPs; that would be the UK visibly censoring its own people, rather than censoring my client, and doing so ineffectively, at that, as ISP blocks can be circumvented with a VPN. That is a consequence my client is prepared to accept.

England might have the Online Safety Act, but the United States has the U.S. Constitution. These rulesets do not override each other; they are, rather, mutually exclusive. In America’s domain, the Online Safety Act essentially doesn’t exist. It has about as much legal force as a pile of shredded paper one might use to line a hamster’s cage.

Peace was always an option here, but that would have required the UK to abandon the fiction that its rules override the U.S. Constitution on U.S. soil, which we are not prepared to accept.

My clients did not start this fight, but by golly we do intend to finish it.

My client sued Ofcom two weeks later.

There’s much more, so do read the whole thing.

July 10, 2026

EU “Chat Control” passes through parliamentary chicanery

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As mentioned yesterday, the EU introduced “Chat Control” which allows the authorities to examine any and all private communications by EU residents “to protect the children”. As eugyppius reports, it got through and was passed into EU-wide law on Thursday:

If anybody cares, what actually happened is that an extension of the European Union’s mass surveillance regulation known as Chat Control 1.0 failed to make it out of the European Parliament twice in March. Unable to summon a clear parliamentary majority, advocates (mostly in the centre-right European People’s Party [EPP]) turned to the European Council, which adopted the failed Chat Control 1.0 renewal on 2 July. The Council’s position hardens automatically into law unless the European Parliament can summon an absolute majority to stop it. To forestall any such majority from forming, the EPP on Tuesday moved with member state backing for urgent procedure, angling to force their scheme through in the last days before the summer holiday, after many MEP’s had already left. The parliament narrowly approved the urgent procedure, and in consequence there were not enough votes to stop Chat Control 1.0 when it came for a vote today. Hours ago, a majority of 314 MEPs voted to stop Chat Control against the wishes of the Council, while a minority of 276 voted to let it happen. Because 314 is less than the absolute majority of 361, Chat Control 1.0 passed even though most MEPs present didn’t want it to.

It was a sleazy vote, not least because it’s far from clear this procedural manoeuvre was even appropriate in this case. Also, electronic surveillance is bad, but if we are honest with ourselves this battle was already lost.

Chat Control 1.0 was first instated in 2021 as a temporary exemption to the ePrivacy Directive of the EU, allowing messaging services and online platforms to scan chats and other electronic communications for child sexual abuse material. The exemption expired in April, but various platforms have continued their surveillance with no legal basis in the intervening months. Now their formal permission to scan our private communications has been restored and extended through April 2028. We are, in other words, merely returning to the prior regime.

Chat Control 1.0 is a temporary stopgap while the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council try to negotiate their Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, or Chat Control 2.0. As envisioned by the Commission, this permanent law would not merely allow platforms to scan private communications for child sex abuse material, but require them to do so; require additional AI-assisted automated scanning not only for known child pornography but also for such vaguely defined activities as “grooming”; and extend scanning to end-to-end encrypted services like Signal via mandatory monitoring on the client side. This insane proposal has been watered down over the years, in large part because of parliamentary opposition, but it’s coming in some form. We’re getting Chat Control 2.0 before Chat Control 1.0 expires, and Chat Control 2.0 will be at least somewhat worse.

July 9, 2026

They call it “Chat Control”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam talks about what the EU is calling “Chat Control”:

We need to talk about Chat Control, because it’s all happening this week and almost no one understands what it’s about.

In plain terms: the EU wants to authorize the scanning of your private messages. Your WhatsApp conversations, your emails, your DMs. Not those of a suspect. Those of everyone, all the time, by default.

The pretext is airtight, and that’s the trap: “protecting children”. No one can be against that. That’s exactly why it’s the perfect tool. They’ll never get you to swallow mass surveillance in the name of mass surveillance. They’ll get you to swallow it in the name of children, terrorism, disinformation. Always some cause you won’t dare challenge.

Understand the two-step mechanism well.

Today it’s the “soft” version: platforms have the right to scan, on a voluntary basis, unencrypted messages. Harmless on the surface. It’s the foot in the door.

Then comes the real version, the one under negotiation: mandatory scanning, including of your encrypted messages, analyzed directly on your phone before they’re even sent. Over 500 cryptographers have signed a letter saying it’s technically unfeasible without creating security vulnerabilities that any hacker or hostile state could exploit. You’re breaking encryption for everyone, including the criminals you claim to be targeting.

And the worst part isn’t even that.

The real danger isn’t that Brussels technocrats will be watching you tomorrow. They’re probably too spineless for that. The danger is that they’re building the infrastructure. Once scanning everyone’s messages becomes normal, legal, operational — the track is laid. And on that track will roll everything that comes next. The day a crisis brings ruthless people to power, they won’t have to invent anything. The machine will already be there, ready to go.

No surveillance infrastructure has ever stayed limited to its original purpose. None. It’s a law of administrative nature: a tool built for X always ends up serving Y.

What makes this text dangerous isn’t what it does today. It’s what it makes possible forever.

The decisive vote is Thursday. The last lock.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

The good folks at Windscribe weigh in:

The EU is not a democracy.

They’re closer to a guy who keeps pressuring a girl to sleep with him despite her saying no.

5 times now.

But he won’t stop.

We’re at the stage where he’s giving her alcohol and making her drunk so she struggles to say no.

Over the last 3 years, Chat Control and similar scanning measures have been defeated or blocked 5 times.

The citizens of the EU and members of EU Parliament have made it abundantly clear — they don’t want Chat Control.

This latest attempt by the EU is the slimiest one yet. Revive dead legislation that was already defeated, flip the passing criteria so that majority don’t need to SUPPORT it, majority need to DEFEAT it, and as the cherry on top, hold that vote on the very last day before Parliament members go on summer break so that many don’t show up. Oh and if they don’t show up, it counts as a vote to pass Chat Control.

You can dress it up in as many legal technicalities and loopholes as you want, what the EU is doing here is fundamentally undemocratic.

No means no.

And if you ever saw a guy pressuring a girl into sleeping with him with disgusting tactics after she said no THIS many times, you would consider him to be a rapist.

So congrats to the EU on adopting rapist strategies to your governance.

July 6, 2026

Federal ministry outlines their plans to become Orwell’s MiniTrue

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian government of Britain (“Airstrip One”) organized itself into all-powerful ministries whose names were deliberate lies: “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

The Canadian government seems to have mistaken Orwell’s warning as a how-to guide:

This is crazy

Canadian ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

wrote a memo to Minister Joly

outlining a plan to make themselves the literal Ministry of Truth, and then use government lawyers to sue people.

And this is the minister in question:

Not parody: Meet our new Minister of Misinformation.

She will be the in charge of state surveillance & the punishment of speech.

We are becoming the UK:

The government is the accuser.

The government is the judge.

The government is the executor.

The government decides what speech is allowed.

The Liberals purposely redacted what tools they plan to use.

And there will be no threshold for what triggers legal action.

Nor will there be independent oversight of the accuracy of what THEY call misinformation.

They want to use your tax dollars, so they can sue you.

Using government lawyers, for what you post online.

TWO WEEKS AGO CARNEY PASSED BILL C22, GIVING CABINET SECRET ACCESS TO YOUR DATA.

THIS WEEK JOLY TELLS YOU WHAT THEY PLAN TO DO WITH IT.

We were called conspiracy theorists.

Update:

July 1, 2026

Scholarship replaced by elitist gatekeeping and bad faith

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

It is possible — in fact, essential — to discover and disseminate the facts about Indian Residential Schools. Repeating the unproven (and to many, deeply discredited) narrative and denouncing those seeking the facts as “denialists” has nothing to do with scholarship but it’s very much in line with gatekeeping:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

Let’s be honest about what is happening in this video.

This is not academic debate. It is a character attack dressed up as scholarship.

Dr. Travis Hay’s presentation at Mount Royal University, uploaded by Frances Widdowson under the title “Bad Faith: Residential School Denialism and the Academy”, is deeply disappointing. I expected a serious lecture. I expected evidence, argument, and a careful dismantling of claims he believes are wrong.

Instead, what we get is a bad faith lecture.

So yes, Bad Faith is a good title. Just not for the reason Hay thinks.

The real bad faith is pretending to defend scholarship while avoiding the hard work of open debate.

Hay spends much of the lecture drawing a line between “good faith” and “bad faith” criticism. But his standard for good faith appears to be simple: you may disagree only inside the boundaries of the approved framework. You can quibble over details. You can adjust the margins. You can offer polite corrections.

But if you challenge the premise itself, suddenly you are no longer mistaken. You are morally defective. You are a “denialist”, a “grievance merchant”, or some broken person who must be pushed outside respectable academic life.

That is not scholarship. That is gatekeeping.

None of this requires minimizing the real harm done by residential schools. It simply means historical claims should be open to examination. Evidence should be tested. Terms should be defined. Numbers should be scrutinized. Arguments should be answered.

Instead, Hay leans heavily on moral outrage, personal denunciation, and guilt by association. Rather than carefully taking apart Widdowson’s arguments, he drags in old controversies involving other people, uses emotional anecdotes, and builds a mood where the audience is being told what to feel before they are allowed to think.

The most revealing part is the conclusion. Hay says people like Widdowson do not belong in the academy. In other words, the answer to uncomfortable academic work is not better evidence, better reasoning, or open debate. It is expulsion.

That should bother everyone.

A university that cannot tolerate dissent is not protecting knowledge. It is protecting doctrine.

If Widdowson is wrong, prove it. Debate her. Bring the evidence. Take her claims apart in public. That is what serious scholars are supposed to do.

But when the response is censorship, exclusion, and personal insult, it starts to look less like confidence and more like fear.

I came away from viewing this lecture disappointed. Not because Hay disagrees with Widdowson. Disagreement is the whole point of academic life. I was disappointed because the lecture showed so little faith in the public’s ability to hear competing arguments and judge the evidence for themselves.

This lecture does not prove that Widdowson’s arguments are wrong. It proves that parts of the academy no longer know how to handle a serious challenge without reaching for moral panic and professional exile.

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