World War Two
Published 25 Jun 2026Magda Goebbels was one of the most infamous women in Hitler’s inner circle. Known as the wife of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and often treated as an unofficial “First Lady” of the Third Reich, she helped project an image of family, elegance, and loyalty while standing beside one of history’s most murderous regimes. But her story ends in one of the darkest acts of the Second World War.
As Berlin collapsed in 1945, Magda Goebbels took her six children into Hitler’s Führerbunker. Offered chances to escape, she refused. One day after Hitler’s suicide, she helped murder her own children with cyanide, claiming that a world without National Socialism was not worth living in.
In this episode of our new format, Baddies and Battleaxes, Anna Deinhard returns to tell the story of Magda Goebbels: socialite, Nazi fanatic, mother, accomplice, and child murderer. Her life reveals how women in the Third Reich were not always passive bystanders. Some, like Magda, actively embraced Nazi ideology, helped legitimize the regime, and chose loyalty to Hitler over humanity itself.
This is the story of the Nazi “First Lady” who followed fascism all the way into the bunker.
Who should Anna cover next in Baddies and Battleaxes? Tell us which heroines and villainesses of WW2 you want to see in a future episode.
June 26, 2026
Magda Goebbels: The Nazi Mother Who Murdered Her Children
Sparta vs Athens 2(c): Spartan Childhood – The Agōgē, Infant Inspection, and State Brutality
seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
This segment goes straight to the ancient evidence. Using Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus (with the passages shown on-screen), I explain how Sparta understood itself: infant inspection and exposure, the collective upbringing of boys in the agōgē, deliberate hunger and deprivation, enforced endurance, and the suppression of private loyalties in favour of loyalty to the state.
This is not presented as scandal. Plutarch often writes admiringly, which is precisely why the text is so revealing. The system is coherent. It is also terrifying. Sparta did not merely train soldiers. It manufactured them, beginning at birth.
June 23, 2026
Modern children as human hothouse plants, needing constant care and protection
At Becoming Noble, Johann Kurtz discusses how parents today treat their children in ways they largely never experienced, failing to provide them with enough freedom to allow them to develop personal autonomy as most western children have done for generations:
Giving children the freedom they need to develop agency is now a luxury good. The number of neighborhoods in which it is normal for children to leave the house and roam all day has collapsed. This collapse has come for a variety of reasons relating to security, trust, law, norms, and infrastructure.
Allowing children the privilege of freedom depends on conditions that most families no longer have access to: safe streets — yes — but also neighbors who are known and trusted, and a settled local agreement about what children are and what they are for. These conditions have not vanished, but they have concentrated, and are now a guarded secret, found only in private, privileged, and intentional communities.
This is a curious inversion of an older pattern. For most of history the peasant’s son had the run of the village while the noble’s son was kept under tutors. Now it is the wealthy child who is sent out to enjoy the freedom and adventure of camps and screenless schools, while working and underclass children are kept indoors and screened up.
Photo from Becoming Noble
It is worth being clear about the factors which underlie this transition. Otherwise, parents seeking the nostalgic “free roaming” experience are directed to explanations which are emphasized because they are unproblematic and suggest that a broad solution is available if we just move policy in a sensible direction. This includes discussions of “walkable development” and a rejection of “helicopter parenting”.
This polite framing avoids the reality that the prudent decisions available to parents are mostly made for them by the place they can afford to live, the people they live among, and how radical they are willing to be.
Children develop “agency” — the self-belief that they can independently and effectively manipulate and shape the world in creative ways — through constant experimentation and positive reinforcement.
The “independent” aspect of this formula involves developing internal psychological permission to break from prosaic norms and routines. Developing this is helped by play outside the control of authorities and interacting with the real world in settings unmediated by parents.
The closed systems that now fill children’s hours provide some feeling of agency (open world games, sprawling social media platforms, private chat rooms) without its substance. A child scrolling or playing through the programmatic logic of games is making choices, but they are only the choices that limited systems can accommodate.
Closed-system childhoods teach that there are inviolable hidden structures underneath reality and that the smoothest and most rewarding experiences are to be found when you conform with them. Experiences from boxes teach you to think within boxes. And the vice available online can be as controlling as any parent.
A few years ago, I linked to an article that graphically illustrated how the generations of an English family near Sheffield had experienced continuously diminished “range” for the children to explore:
Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.
June 18, 2026
The Rape Gang Inquiry Report
At The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian expresses his disgust and contempt at the British government which has categorically failed to protect a quarter of a million girls and young women from sexual predators imported by that government, which then actively covered up the crimes. It’s impossible to put into words just how cowardly every politician, every police officer, and every “social worker” has been for decades in allowing these crimes to flourish:
Click the image to open the report PDF
I was not expecting to learn that the grooming gangs have been operating since 1955. Seventy-one years. At least two generations of British children have been savagely sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism, willingly helped and encouraged by not only the State, but by our “Journalistic Betters”.
I was not expecting to learn that the victims number a quarter of a million. At minimum.
The least job of a society — the very minimal function expected — is the protection of the innocent and the defence of those who cannot protect themselves.
The Government of Great Britain — from the least to the highest — not only failed in this most minor of duties, but actively aided and abetted the destruction of the innocent and the depredation of the defenceless — with the enthusiastic assistance of “professional” “journalists”.
Seventy-one (71) years. Two-hundred and fifty-thousand (250,000) children raped. Trafficked. Tortured.
I don’t ever bloody well want to hear any English person tell me I don’t need guns again. “The police will protect you” you say, with that supercilious smirk. Read that report again — especially the part about the police failing to protect children, CHILDREN for God’s sake — and then get sodding bent.
I am furious. I don’t want apologies — I want officers executed. I want politicians hung in the public square, their possessions seized. I want journalistic edifices chained shut and set on fire.
I want the bloodshed and retribution visited upon those responsible, those who enabled, and those who willingly ignored to be of a level that will snarl softly to British people for ages to come:
“Do. Not. Fail. Again.”
Bastards.
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, X Freeze summarizes some of the findings from the report:
Perpetrators:
~87% of convicted group-based CSE offenders had Muslim names. Estimates put the real figure at ~95% Muslim. Networks were almost entirely Muslim men — overwhelmingly Pakistani. Massively disproportionate to population share.Enabled by honour-shame clan culture and Islamic doctrines that treat non-Muslim girls as available property: Muslim superiority over kuffar, al-walā‘ wa-l-barā‘ enmity to non-Muslims, no fixed age of consent, and rules allowing sexual use of captives.
How the grooming worked:
Girls as young as 11 were befriended by young Muslim men who treated them like adults, supplied alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. They were collected in taxis from school gates, care homes and streets, taken to houses, flats, restaurants and hotels, then raped repeatedly by groups of men, passed between perpetrators, tortured, filmed, and told they were “white trash” or “kuffar” who deserved punishment. Many became pregnant while still children. Some were trafficked to the Middle East for Islamic marriage.
failure & cover-up
Every pillar of the state failed catastrophically for decades:
- Police ignored reports, criminalised victims instead of perpetrators, destroyed evidence and bailed known rapists.
- Social services placed children in trafficking hubs inside children’s homes, closed cases despite clear signs, and retaliated against whistleblowers.
- NHS recorded genital injuries, multiple STIs in children as young as 13, and rape pregnancies — then discharged victims back to their abusers.
- Schools saw older men collecting girls at the gates and heard disclosures, yet often excluded the victims rather than protecting them.
- Politicians (especially Labour-controlled councils and the party nationally) denied knowledge, blocked or watered down inquiries, suppressed ethnicity data, and prioritised electoral support from Muslim voting blocs and “community cohesion” over child protection. Fear of being called “racist” paralysed action. Sadiq Khan repeatedly insisted there were no grooming gangs in London, despite the Metropolitan Police holding reports of girls being raped by groups of men in hotels and other locations across the capital.
On her Substack, Celina identifies the specific state failures that perpetuated what started as isolated, local crimes:
The central thesis of the Rape Gang Inquiry Report is unequivocal: the estimated 250,000 victims were the victims of a deliberate collapse of the British state’s safeguarding architecture. Across every crucial sector, the state chose institutional convenience over the lives of children.
The Police: Criminalisation and Complicity
The Inquiry documents how officers frequently arrived hours late to missing persons reports, actively discouraged parents from filing complaints, and routinely closed cases without conducting basic forensic or digital examinations.
The most pervasive failure was the ideological decision to view the victims as willing participants in their own destruction. Children like Chloe, found highly intoxicated in the cars of adult men, were labelled “prostitutes” making “lifestyle choices”. By framing the organised rape of children as consensual sex work, the police absolved themselves of the legal requirement to launch resource-heavy investigations into organised crime syndicates.
When victims or their families did provide actionable evidence, it was routinely mishandled, ignored, or actively destroyed. Ross, the father of a survivor named Phoebe, testified that vital digital evidence handed over to the police was inexplicably deleted from the device while in police custody. When Grace’s abusers repeatedly breached their bail conditions and stalked her family, the police took no action, rendering protective non-molestation orders entirely meaningless.
The bureaucratic responses were often farcical. In some instances, the only formal action taken by police was issuing “harbouring notices” to the men, pieces of paper warning them not to associate with the child. When the men inevitably ignored these notices, no further enforcement followed. Furthermore, the Inquiry uncovered a deeply entrenched “two-tier” policing system. While forces surrendered to the fear of disorder from certain communities, they aggressively targeted the victims and their families. Chloe was arrested in her pyjamas after her mother called the police for help, kept in a cell until 2:00 AM, and released onto the streets without transportation, leading directly to her being picked up by a gang member and trafficked nationwide.
Most disturbingly, the report highlights allegations of direct police complicity, referencing whistleblower accounts of “cop nights” where officers were allegedly active participants in the trafficking and abuse of girls using police vehicles. The revelation that an abuser could be legally accepted as an “appropriate adult” for Michelle during police questioning underscores a force either dangerously incompetent or wilfully blind to the dynamics of coercive control.
Social Services: Abandonment and Retaliation
If the police failed to enforce the law, social services failed to enforce basic humanity. Across multiple districts, social care systems identified the precise markers of severe exploitation, truancy, self-harm, sudden wealth, STIs, missing episodes and consistently chose to look away.
The Inquiry demonstrates that social workers frequently undermined protective parents, isolating children from their families and placing them in residential care homes and semi-independent units that functioned as drive-through delivery systems for the gangs. Children were centralised, making them easier targets.
Jane, a victim placed in semi-independent living at 16, was trafficked directly from her state-provided accommodation. When she disclosed the abuse and the exchange of money to the staff, she was told it did not constitute trafficking because she was over 16. The staff then blackmailed her, threatening to blame her for the exploitation if she complained further. Following a psychiatric hospitalisation, Jane discovered that all statutory care records from her placement had been mysteriously “lost or destroyed,” legally obstructing any path to future accountability.
When internal whistleblowers attempted to expose the ongoing grooming, trafficking, and financial abuse of children in these units, they were met with severe retaliation. An unnamed social worker who acted as an Interim Co-Manager testified that after raising concerns about untreated exploitation risks and unlawful housing practices, she faced sudden suspensions, the removal of payments, fabricated allegations, and career-ending professional isolation orchestrated by senior leadership to protect the council’s reputation. Social services actively punished those who tried to protect children.
Schools:
Teachers and school administrators observed older men waiting at the school gates to collect young girls in taxis. They noted sudden drops in attendance, drastic changes in behaviour, and physical exhaustion.
Instead of recognising these as textbook indicators of exploitation, schools responded with punitive measures that pushed the children further to the margins. When Chloe’s trauma manifested as truancy, the school repeatedly placed her in isolation, compounding her emotional distress and alienation. When Jen was bullied to the point of wetting herself because a teacher refused her access to the toilet, the school ignored her subsequent self-harm and suicidal ideation, failing to initiate any safeguarding response.
In the most tragic instances, schools actively protected the abusers to avoid scandal. When Rachel’s autistic daughter disclosed that she had been orally raped by a peer, the school failed to effectively safeguard her, allowing the alleged perpetrator to remain on the premises. She was subjected to relentless physical and online bullying by students linked to the abuser, which was filmed and shared online. The intimidation escalated until the twelve-year-old took a fatal overdose of colchicine, stating she “just wanted everything to stop”.
Rupert Lowe explains his next steps after the publication of the inquiry report:
June 11, 2026
Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act
As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:
The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.
Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.
I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.
The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly
The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.
[…]
The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s
The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]
The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition
The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]
The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties
The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.
June 10, 2026
To protect under-16s from harmful content, everyone will now need to show their ID online
Australia’s attempt to ban under-16s from accessing social media and other online sites blew up rather quickly. Britain and Canada, seeing what happened down under, chorused “Hold our beers!“:
“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The government is expected to table the Digital Safety Act on Wednesday with reports that it will include a ban on social media for those under 16, framed as a “temporary” measure that platforms can exit once a new digital regulator certifies their safety standards. I have been writing about these issues, from the original Online Harms Act to mandated age verification and website blocking and now the kids’ ban, for several years. This FAQ gathers the analysis in one place, with links throughout to the longer pieces for anyone who wants to go deeper. The key takeaway is that a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements. The policy fails to address the underlying concerns with social media and the prospect of a “temporary” ban makes little sense since the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are permanent.
What is the government reportedly about to introduce?
According to the Globe and Mail, the forthcoming bill would bar anyone under 16 from social media. The government will indicate that this is a temporary safeguard with an opt-back-in once a regulator certifies safety standards. The government will frame this as “temporary” measure, but I argue that once established, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube given that the policy will require a regulator and proof of age from everyone.
Didn’t this start with Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act? What happened to it?
Bill C-63 was the government’s 2024 online harms bill, and from my first-day take I described it as effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of provisions focused on platforms that featured a duty to act responsibly, more contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act provisions, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission modelled on the CRTC to be funded by the tech companies. My view was that the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions should have been dropped or incorporated into a separate piece of legislation. Bill C-63 itself died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election, but the duty-to-act-responsibly model is likely to survive as part of the forthcoming bill.
Why is a kids’ social media ban bad policy?
I set out at least six reasons in this post on the issue. The most important is the first: the harms people associate with social media, such as algorithmic manipulation, addictive engagement design, weak content moderation, inconsistent enforcement, inadequate transparency, and privacy risks, affect users of every age. Treating them as a children’s problem misidentifies both the source of the harm and the right target of regulation. By focusing legislative attention on who is permitted to use social media rather than on how the platforms operate, an age-based ban lets legislators and the companies off the hook from more effective broad-based regulation. The other reasons identified in the post include the absence of evidence that bans work, the privacy harms they create, and the constitutional rights of the children they claim to protect.
Does the ban actually work?
The evidence to date says no. Australia’s under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, and the eSafety Commissioner’s first compliance report found that roughly 70 per cent of children who had accounts before the ban retained access to at least one platform three months later, with no discernible reduction in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints from under-16 users. Children route around age gates through VPNs, borrowed accounts, and false birthdates, and the most at-risk users are the most likely to circumvent them. Professor Lisa Given laid out much of this on a Law Bytes episode before most of the data was even in. Canadian politicians now citing the Australian approach with approval are pointing to a model whose own regulator’s data suggests has thus far proven ineffective. At a recent Canada 2020 event in Ottawa, Australian professor Amanda Third confirmed that kids are actively circumventing the ban and indicated that parents are concerned that their children are now less safe.
Doesn’t polling show overwhelming public support for a ban?
The headline number is real but misleading. The March 2026 Angus Reid Institute survey found that three-quarters of respondents support a full ban on social media for those under 16, and politicians have cited it repeatedly. But as McGill’s Sara Grimes documented on this Law Bytes podcast episode, the less-quoted numbers in the same survey complicate the picture: 72 per cent said parents, not governments, should be primarily responsible for regulating teens’ social media use, only 32 per cent picked 16 as the right threshold, and the survey did not ask respondents anything about the mechanism any ban would actually require. Simply put, public support for “protect kids from harm” is not the same as public support for “every Canadian must submit ID to a third-party provider in order to use the internet”.
Hasn’t social media been proven harmful to kids?
The data on social media harms to kids is far more mixed than is often portrayed in the media and in Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book that has fuelled much of the legislative panic. Grimes has produced a very accessible explainer on the issue that walks through the science. As she notes in Panic First, Evidence Later, “there is a serious problem. Researchers who have spent their entire careers studying adolescent mental health, children’s digital media, developmental science, and media psychology – the people who actually built the evidence base Haidt draws on – have raised sustained, substantive objections to his core claims.”
Read all of Michael Geist’s FAQ here.
June 5, 2026
The Lord of the Flies was just a novel
We often use The Lord of the Flies as a shorthand way to illustrate the darkness in the hearts of men, and that, absent civilizations, men descend into a hellscape of violence, hatred, and all-against-all destructive competition. Yet the real-life case of a group of boys isolated for an extended time didn’t go at all the way the novel did:
More and more I’m learning that the nihilistic claptrap we were all told was genius was just Leftist demoralization propaganda.
Situations like this have occurred, and the children didn’t turn into little monsters. In fact they survived quite well.
In June 1965, six boys named, aged 13 to 16 “borrowed” a fisherman’s boat hoping to reach Fiji or New Zealand. After a storm damaged the sail and rudder, they drifted for eight days surviving on fish and rainwater collected in coconut shells, before washing up on the rocky uninhabited island of ‘Ata.
Rather than descending into chaos during their months there the boys created a mini society. They planted vegetables, collected and stored rainwater, and maintained a permanent fire. They even built a gymnasium with homemade weights, a badminton court, and chicken pens.
They divided daily chores using rosters, resolved conflicts with time-outs instead of fighting, began and ended each day with songs and prayers. One boy, Gilligan’s Isle style, constructed a guitar from driftwood and coconut shell to boost morale. When one of the children broke his leg falling off a cliff the others set it with sticks and leaves and took over his work. They ate fish, coconuts, eggs, wild taro, bananas, and later chickens they had discovered in an ancient volcanic crater.
They endured this for for fifteen months, and never once turned into murderous thugs. A far cry from what we were told would happen.
It wasn’t just William Golding manufacturing dark stories, of course:
May 26, 2026
“She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism”
Millennial Woes on having sympathy for the Midwit:
In August 2022 I stumbled upon this video of a young female teacher in Utah. She is what we would once have called an SJW. She describes how she has equipped her fourth-grade classroom in a way that she expects will annoy the parents of her (aged 9-10) pupils: all of the materials have been vetted by her to ensure that they include no images whatsoever of White people — “not a single White face there”.
Even though she knows the school is majority White (over 85%), she has designed her classroom, in her own words, “for non-white students”. To be fair, this could be simply because she is bringing materials from her previous school, which was much more diverse. But even then, you would think the sensible thing would be to buy materials more fitting for her new school. She does not.
So the woke attitude goes far beyond merely accommodating non-white people, and beyond even the absurdity of giving them equal prominence in our ancestral society, but actually to giving them precedence over us there.
What I found striking about this video, apart from the mindboggling fact that this is someone presumably vocated to help people yet doing something that will clearly harm her pupils, is how she delights in the fact that what she has done will annoy parents. To be precise, it will annoy parents who, whether conscious of it or not, are “racist”. After all, if they really “don’t see race”, then how can they possibly care about this? Thus, they cannot argue that their kids should see representations of their racial kin without outing themselves as “racist”, which in turn will make them very vulnerable. So this younger teacher feels not just morally sound, but bulletproof against reprisals, and very clever.
There is also a social class element to this. She specifies that these will be “posh White parents”. Despite appearing to be all of 23 and only having taught in very diverse schools, she alludes to experience in dealing with such upper-class White parents before. She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism.
She also clearly assumes that, if any parents do complain, she will be safe. The institution — not just her school but the entire education sector, including all of the academics and every university department that sustains them — will be on her side. If and when the parents complain (having navigated their way through the minefield of realising they are “racist” and painstakingly forming some lame argument to hopefully avoid that accusation) they will find that she is protected not just by her employer but by an entire segment of society. They, the parents, might get some small local newspaper to back them, or more likely to report the story impartially, but in all likelihood they will find themselves shamed by some much bigger newspaper. That is what she was clearly expecting when she made this video.
[…]
What I find troubling about this story is that it illuminates both the viciousness and the vulnerability of the midwit. It wouldn’t be worth fretting over, except that there are many millions of these people about. Every one of them is bright enough to grasp the drivel at teacher training college, but not bright enough to realise that it is drivel. Every one of them is vicious enough to harm children and take pleasure in disturbing the parents and sadistically putting them in an impossible position … but every one of them is literally just doing what they have been told to do, and is spreading the ideas they have been trained to believe are good, healthy, and crucially needed.
Canadian parents are increasingly adopting the “helicopter” or “bulldozer” model
Eva Chipiuk on concerning trends in Canadian parenting styles and the long-term impact on children:
Not many people have really turned their minds to the psychology of Canadians. Most are too busy reacting to the latest outrage, headline, or political controversy.
However, David Redman has cautioned about what he has identified as a trend in Canada: “helicopter” and “bulldozer” parenting, where children are either constantly hovered over or where every obstacle is removed before they ever have to face it themselves.
Over time, that kind of environment can produce people who become uncomfortable with uncertainty, overly dependent on authority, fearful of risk, and hesitant to think independently or challenge difficult ideas. As this article put it:
Children, the authors observed, are now deliberately shielded from any sense of risk or uncertainty. How can anyone — young boys most of all — learn about the world around them when school principals announce at the onset of every snowfall that “all snow must stay on the ground”. The ideal of adventure and resilience has been replaced by a debilitating sense of fragility and risk-avoidance …
Adventure should properly be considered a spirit, not a place. It is driven by a powerful mixture of curiosity, necessity, and an openness to experiencing new things. And it can be found wherever uncertainty reigns. Today, that might entail travelling to strange lands, meeting new people, or even engaging in uncomfortable discussions about whether Alberta should remain part of Canada forever.
Wherever the unknown lies, adventure can be found.
That mindset does not just affect childhood. It shapes entire societies. It affects how citizens respond to disagreement, political debate, uncertainty, criticism, and even new ideas.
Somewhere along the way, many Canadians lost their sense of adventure, resilience, curiosity, and willingness to engage with uncomfortable conversations or difficult questions.
Where did that spirit go? What happened to the mindset that encouraged people to explore, question authority, take risks, debate ideas openly, and build something better even when the outcome was uncertain? Somewhere along the way, discomfort itself seems to have become something to avoid rather than something people grow through.
Because if we stop exploring, questioning, debating, and taking risks, we lose something essential about what it means to live freely and think independently. A society that becomes afraid of uncertainty eventually becomes dependent on being told what is safe, acceptable, and permitted.
If we are going to move forward in any meaningful way, we need to rediscover the spirit of curiosity, resilience, and adventure that pushes people to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and engage with the unknown instead of fearing it.
Perhaps one of the most important conversations we should be having is this: what does it actually mean to be Canadian today?
Because for many, it increasingly feels like the answer is becoming less about courage, resilience, curiosity, and self-determination, and more about compliance, comfort, and avoiding difficult conversations.
May 24, 2026
How to Indoctrinate a Generation – Death of Democracy 16 – Q4 1936
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 23 May 2026How did Nazi Germany seize control of its youth by the end of 1936? In this episode, Spartacus traces the Hitler Youth Law, the Four-Year Plan, Winterhilfswerk, the Anti-Comintern Pact, Goebbels’ attack on criticism, and the tightening exclusion of German Jews.
Berlin, December 31, 1936. The Nazi regime did not need another single dramatic coup. It connected the household, the factory, the school, the street collection, the newspaper, and the foreign threat into one system of mobilization.
This episode covers how the Law on the Hitler Youth declared all German youth organized within the Hitler Youth; how the Four-Year Plan redirected recovery toward rearmament and autarky; how charity became mandated patriotic ritual through Winterhilfswerk; how anti-Bolshevik propaganda linked Spain, Japan, Italy, and Germany; and how Jewish Germans were pushed further into isolation through administrative humiliation and police control.
This is an educational historical documentary condemning Nazism, antisemitism, dictatorship, racial exclusion, and political indoctrination.
May 15, 2026
Sweden – “We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible”
Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of us were enthusiastic about schools adopting digital technology, as it seemed to be the way of the future for kids to be fully immersed in the online world as part of their education. Reality has harshed the mellow for a lot of us misguided techno-fossils, as there seems to be a very strong correlation between childrens’ (computer) screen use and lower educational achievements. Sweden is trying to reverse this pattern:
“student_ipad_school – 038” by flickingerbrad is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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According to primary school teachers, many children shamble through the doors today zombified and crying out for their iPads.
Their parents, lined at the school gates, barely say goodbye, what with the hypnotic drivel spewing from their iPhones.
The kids greet their teachers with the YouTube vernacular: “Hi, guys!” When handed a book, they swipe and tear at the unfamiliar paper. They greet each other with: “Welcome to my channel!”
Finally, when they leave, they don’t say goodbye. They say: “Remember to like and subscribe!”
I’m not taking the piss. A friend of mine, tasked with civilising these screen-addled sprogs, confirms what one reads in the newspapers. These chirpy little addicts ransack classrooms crying out for more iPad with the fanatical calculation of tweaking crackheads.
Wherever you may sit on the political spectrum, I hope you agree that a functioning democracy might one day need citizens who can read and write, and who can concentrate beyond a ten-second video clip.
At least one functioning democracy agrees. Recently, Swedish politicians reversed their digital-first obsession by announcing a return to paper and pen. The sensible Swedes have gone analogue. Why? Literacy rates in the cosy Nordic social democracy have collapsed.
“We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible,” said the Liberal party’s Joar Forsell.
Since 2025, pre-schools are no longer obliged to employ digital ‘tools’ and teachers no longer dole out tablets to kids under two. According to Mr Forsell, reading real books on paper does what schools have for decades avoided: it teaches kids to think. Tablets for toddlers is now från skärm till pärm (from screen to paper.)
High school students now drag their textbooks and notepads to classrooms stripped of screens.
The evidence piles up. Researchers found that hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.
But it’s not just the Swedes.
Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing — at least if learning something is your thing. Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.
How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words — the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little. It’s like paying someone else to have sex for you.
Researchers claim that writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.
When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it, much like ChatGPT doesn’t know that flipping a glass spills water. It merely knows that the words “flip” and “glass of water” are statistically related to the word “spill”.
And yet, British schools continue marching to the drumbeat of post-literate doom.
May 10, 2026
The Ancient Greeks: 01 – What Made Them Special? (b) Slavery, Violence, and the Reality of Greek Life
seangabb
Published 31 Jan 2026This section confronts the social realities of Greek civilisation that are often ignored or idealised.
It examines the position of women, the central role of slavery, ritualised violence against children, infant exposure, and what we would now describe as widespread paedophilia. Drawing on ancient sources such as Plutarch, Demosthenes, and Aristotle, it shows that these practices were not marginal, but embedded in Greek social norms and justified as rational policy.
Victorian and modern idealisations of Greece are critically dismantled in favour of historical evidence.
The aim is not moral condemnation, but historical clarity.
May 8, 2026
National Indigenous History Month in Ontario schools
Igor Stravinsky outlines what Ontario schools will be focusing on this June instead of in addition to the normal provincial school curriculum:
Image from the Senate of Canada via Woke Watch Canada
50+ years ago, public schools in Ontario started the day with Bible readings and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Critical Theory, the philosophical and pedagogical approach in force these days in schools is the new religion. It is based on the (unproven) premise that society is rife with power structures, inequalities, and oppression, and asserts that education is inherently political rather than neutral. “Marginalized” students (non-Whites, especially males, plus Whites who are not heterosexual or able-bodied) are to be “centered”. This supposedly promotes “Social Justice”, which is basically the absurd and asinine idea that every aspect of society should be represented by all conceivable identity groups in proportion to their numbers in the general population. It is equality of outcome, not opportunity.
As Indigenous people rank high on the pyramid of oppression, every day is a day of Indigenous recognition in most public schools in Ontario. Students are asked to stand quietly every morning to hear the Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, which is the same text day after day, just like the Lord’s Prayer used to be. But June is special. It is National Indigenous History Month.
During June, students can expect to get hit with an extra large dose of affirmation of their original social justice sin. If you can’t trace your ancestry back to a person who lived here before first contact between Europeans and Indigenous people, then you are a “settler colonist”. This technically means anyone, but of course the main targets of the social justice warriors are European descended people. Just immigrated from Poland last week? Start groveling. You’re White, and that’s that.
The themes of the month are really the same as the ones presented to students all year, just more intensively: Prior to contact with Europeans, Indigenous people lived in peace and harmony with each other and lived sustainably and in sync with nature. Settler ways are depicted as based on greed and a reckless plundering of the lands, along with utter disregard for the wise ways of living of the Indigenous people, who were to be forcibly assimilated into Western ways.
Of course, students in our schools should be learning about the history of Indigenous people, just as they should be learning about the conditions in which so many Indigenous people struggle and suffer today. But that is not the objective of Indigenous History Month or any of the other long list of Annual Indigenous Days of Significance. This year, National Indigenous Peoples day, June 21st, falls on Fathers Day. Luckily, it is a Sunday, so schools won’t be able to erase that. Social Justice warriors hate Fathers Day even more than Mothers Day. If there is one thing they can’t stand, it’s the nuclear family.
Also this year, the fifth anniversary of the false claim by the Kamloops Indian Band that the remains of 215 murdered residential school children had been confirmed in the apple orchard outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (May 27) will have just passed. Even the band itself now admits, on their website, that all that was discovered was soil “anomalies”. The technician who performed the ground penetrating radar survey told them there were 200 targets of interest and only excavations could confirm burials (she initially identified 215 but reduced that to 200 when she discovered, after the fact, the part of her survey area had already been excavated and no one had found any bodies there). Of course, even if you found burials, you would need forensic work to determine the identity of the bodies and the cause of death. The band has been paid over 12 million dollars to do that work but they haven’t done anything.
April 18, 2026
Australia’s age verification scheme – a great success!
Every time a politician gets up on hind legs to propose yet another brilliant scheme to ensure little Jaden and little Daenerys don’t access adult content on the internet, I remind myself that it’s going to be pitting the tech know-how of people who need help opening child-proof caps against the youngsters they get to open the child-proof caps for them. In other words, it’s not going to work out quite how the politicians expect:
“Kid-notebook-computer-learns-159533” by LuidmilaKot is marked with CC0 1.0 
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Among the great many bogeymen of the current moment is social media, which stands accused of making young people anxious and unhappy. Whatever the merits of those charges — and they’re debatable — politicians have predictably tried to address concerns by applying the blunt instrument of coercive law to kids’ online activities rather than simply let parents help their children make better choices. The experience in Australia now shows the subjects of the law have, once again, proven cleverer than law enforcers.
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“There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban”, reports the U.K.’s Molly Rose Foundation, which supports internet restrictions, of the results of a poll of Australian young people. “Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts.”
The group adds that “70% of children still using restricted sites say that it was ‘easy’ to circumvent the ban. In most cases, social media platforms have failed to detect or seek to remove under 16s accounts.”
Importantly, officials agree that young people subject to the law are actively evading its impact. In a compliance update published last month, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, which enforces the ban, conceded that “a substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts, or pass platforms’ age assurance systems”.
Like the Molly Rose Foundation, Australian regulators note that noncompliance is not just a concern for the small platforms with limited exposure in Australia which were expected to become refuges for Australian teens seeking online connections. They also point to large, established companies including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.
In the majority of cases, according to both reports, young people ignoring the law have not yet been asked to verify their age. But, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, “around a quarter of children still using each restricted platform had been successfully able to get around an age check on a pre-existing account”. Some changed their claimed age, others had older friends and relatives set up accounts for them, and still others gamed technology intended to estimate their age by their appearance.
April 16, 2026
Never say that teachers have no influence
Of course, that influence isn’t always benign:
It’s true, every halfway intelligent right winger I know irl had a massive conflict with at least one elementary teacher over things like: reading ahead, reading too difficult books, not showing enough work, etc etc. it’s the first time we experience the uncaring tyranny of state bureaucracy and it sucks.
