Quotulatiousness

August 1, 2026

Why UK crime victims’ families always sound so similar talking to the media

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

On Substack Notes, John Carter linked to an article about the British Home Office’s “nudge unit” who, among other things, coax and cajole the families of murder victims to avoid any hint that they blame the perpetrators for the loss of their loved ones:

This is incredible. I always wondered how family liaison officers from RICU or the CRS reliably got the families of victims murdered by political or racial terrorists to provide such anodyne, don’t look back in anger public statements. I figured in most cases it would be concern trolling, with legal threats held in reserve.

This lays the technique bare, using interviews conducted both with victim’s families and former police officers. Liaison officers serve as anesthetic patches that get slapped on the open wounds of the migration war. They apply therapeutic techniques to calm and reassure the families, establishing dependent relationships and using the trust they build to guide them away from saying anything inflammatory when the time comes to speak to the public. If families become noncompliant in this respect, they’re threatened with causing a mistrial should they speak too openly about their feelings.

That isn’t all RICU does, of course. “Communications” includes a huge propaganda arm, which uses every tool at its disposal, including battalions of fake social media profiles. You have to wonder how much of the culture war of the last decade or more was pure hallucination.

The article in question is by David Shipley for the Pimlico Journal:

RICU, the Home Office’s Research Information and Communications Unit, is often the subject of much attention online, particularly around its role in the consistently bland calls for “unity” after horrific acts of violence. Many people online suggest that either the Unit itself, or the “specially trained officers” (Victim Liaison Officers or Family Liaison Officers) must threaten victims and their families to ensure their compliance with approved messaging. This always struck me as unlikely — widespread coercion would surely have leaked by now. There was also good reason to be sceptical of the efficacy of behavioural science applications to government. And yet public statements by those victims and their families are remarkably consistent.

So I was delighted when, a couple of months ago, Pimlico Journal asked me to investigate RICU and victim liaison properly. In order to do so, I studied historic statements, publications and coverage of RICU and spoke with victims’ families, some of whom are named in this piece and former police officers, none of whom are named, with knowledge of the Victim and Family Liaison units. What I discovered is fascinating and far more insidious than the imagined coercion. This article provides an overview of RICU’s history, goals and methodology, followed by details from those interviews. I hope it sheds some light on this murky area of the state’s “communications management”.

RICU was established in 2007 “under the Prevent strand of [the UK government’s] CONTEST strategy” with its stated goal being to “understand and counter terrorist and extremist ideologies to reduce the risk to the UK, its citizens and its interests overseas”. Giving evidence to MPs in 2009, Charles Farr, a former SIS officer, and head of the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism, who set RICU up in 2007, said the unit is “responsible for advising the rest of government [and] officialdom, from a brigade commander in Helmand province through to a chief constable in Yorkshire, about how they wish to characterise the threat we face and describe the response that we are making and, secondly, rather different, they are responsible for challenging the propaganda which comes to us from al-Qaeda and associated groups — generally not from people in this country; usually from the incessant 4,500 websites that are in one way or another associated with radical Islamist terrorist organisations around the world”.

The unit embraced convenient lies from the start. Part of their strategy was to send advice to “local authorities, people working on community cohesion projects, local police, neighbourhood policing teams” and “the Chief Constable” that they should nottalk about Islamic terrorism, not because in certain circumstances that is an inaccurate description but because the language admits of a number of interpretations which are not always helpful to us“.

RICU was also always concerned with the whole of British society — while Farr said the unit decided to “start” with Muslim communities, he told MPs that he did “not want to give the impression that RICU’s sole purpose is to communicate with Muslim communities in this country. It is not.” So by 2009 a unit existed which had “about 35 people” working for it, “and a bit of the private sector in there to advise us on aspects of communications”, which was telling every arm of the state, along with much of civil society, that they should lie about the nature of the threats the country faced, to serve the state’s perceived interests. It was also already building wide and deep relationships within many parts of the state, including policing.

What has it become, in the 17 years since Charles Farr gave his evidence?

In 2011, when the government reviewed Prevent, it found that RICU’s communications sometimes “erred in seeking to make language acceptable to some in Muslim communities, at the expense of candour”. The unit was described as having “a central role in developing counter-ideological or counter-narrative work”, although its track record was described as “mixed”. It was directed to take “more care … to identify credible partners to develop powerful and specific narratives across a range of communications channels, especially on the internet“. Despite these criticisms, the state chose to “retain RICU, largely in its current form”, but with the expectation that it would produce “much sharper and more professional counter-narrative products” — there was also a commitment to “continue to work with social media enterprises” in the battle against “propagandists and radicalisers” including those whose “propaganda work” might be illegal under “race and religious hatred legislation”. The shift is notable — Farr’s commitment that RICU would work across the whole of British society is clearly underway, with Islamic terrorism and radicalisation no longer the main focus.

More recently, RICU has long been the subject of much discussion on social media, and of occasional interest in the mainstream press. It’s often accused of being behind the anodyne calls for unity and calm issued by public bodies, victims and their families after the latest “Yookay” Event in which a migrant has done something appallingly violent. Not unrelatedly, it is generally the right who are more vocal in their criticism of RICU, and it is regularly suggested that they threaten families into sticking to the regime-approved line.

Homelessness isn’t the real problem … it’s feral humans

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

Many well-meaning people see “homeless” individuals on the street and think the problem is that these individuals don’t have homes. An obvious solution occurs: we’ll just give them homes so they won’t need to sleep rough on the streets. What a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?

The real problem isn’t that there aren’t enough homes … some of those “homeless” people on the street actually do have places to sleep but for one reason or another choose not to. The real problem for most of them is that they’ve gone feral:

If you give problems the wrong names, you can’t understand them.

If you can’t understand problems, you can’t fix them.

There are almost no homeless people in America. There are only feral humans.

A homeless person is someone whose distinguishing feature is not having a home. I was homeless once, for a day, when the lease on one apartment expired before the next one was cleaned, repaired, and ready.

I parked a moving van full of my worldly possessions at my university, and slept on a couch in the student commons.

That’s “homeless”.

“Feral” is when a human cannot live within society, or comply with the basic expectations required for membership.

Yes, they do not have homes.

But this is not their distinguishing feature. Because they also don’t have jobs, sanity, sobriety, manners, morals, or hygiene.

Which is why they do not have homes.

If you give them a house, because you think they are “homeless” rather than “feral”, then they will simply repeat, within that structure, the same feral behavior.

And soon that structure will be uninhabitable.

Which, for certain people, is the whole point.

A man whose job is to sell 3d printed houses isn’t trying to fix the feral-human problem. He’s trying to sell 3d printed houses.

And it’s one hell of a lot easier to sell them to bureaucrats who aren’t spending their own personal money.

It doesn’t matter if 3d printed houses suck to live in. It doesn’t matter if the feral humans trash them. Nobody in this equation cares about the feral humans, even the feral humans themselves.

And nobody in this equation cares about the taxpayers. If the feral humans are still feral, then the 3d house grifters can sell more gimmick houses, and the bureaucrats can spend more of someone else’s money.

If a violent political upheaval becomes necessary, this will be very unpleasant for everyone involved, but at least afterwards, we will all be able to use the feral humans, bureaucrats, and grifters to fertilize the garden of new homes.

Which will be made out of bricks.

Update, 2 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 Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 30, 2026

Support for capital punishment is the opposite of a luxury belief

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

As noted in City Journal, support for capital punishment is overwhelmingly high … which is why politicians and wealthy progressives whole-heartedly oppose it. As you probably know, a “luxury belief” is one that is usually held by people who will not be in any way impacted by the downstream effects of that belief. It’s not the wealthy and privileged who suffer when murderers get out of prison, so they are generally all in favour of ever greater leniency in sentencing and easing parole conditions. Poor and middle class people are more likely to suffer when violent criminals return to their communities, which is why they generally want longer incarceration for violent crimes and favour capital punishment for certain abhorrent acts of murder. Charles Fain Lehman has more:

Those findings undermine the narrative, routinely advanced by death-penalty abolitionists, that capital punishment is on the decline because the public has turned against it. In reality, both public opinion and the current composition of the Supreme Court militate in favor of expanding the death penalty’s use — and, specifically, relaxing many of the arbitrary and undemocratic restrictions imposed on it by courts over the past several decades.

Abolitionists have based their case for declining public support on polls such as Gallup’s, which for nearly a century has asked respondents if they are “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder”. The share in favor has indeed dropped steadily since the 1990s, from a 64-point difference between support and opposition to just a 6-point split today.

That question, though, artificially reduces support by asking about all murders. Under current precedent, only certain heinous murders — those in which jury-determined aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors — are eligible for the death penalty. There is likely far more support, for example, for executing Dylann Roof specifically than there is for executing all murderers generally.

The new MI poll illuminates this point. It asks about support for capital punishment under a variety of circumstances. The result is lopsided endorsement in the event of, for example, murder involving “extreme cruelty”, mass murder, or the murder of a child — all supported by 3-to-1 margins. Death for premeditated murder generically has 72 percent support, suggesting that even clarifying intent significantly increases support for capital punishment.

Notably, the poll also finds majority support for executing those who rape a child (71 percent) or an adult (57 percent). Yet neither offense would, absent a concurrent murder, be death-eligible. The Supreme Court ruled that applying the death penalty to non-murdering rapists violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” in 1977’s Coker v. Georgia, a prohibition it extended even to child rapists in a 2008’s Kennedy v. Louisiana. With certain exceptions for crimes against the state, the Kennedy majority asserted, a crime that did not result in the taking of someone’s life was categorically ineligible for the death penalty.

Both decisions were justified by reference to the court’s “evolving standards of decency” test. First introduced in 1958’s Trop v. Dulles, the test has led the court to understand “cruel and unusual punishment” through its interpretation of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”. That lens allowed it to reach the conclusions it did in Coker, Kennedy, and numerous other narrowings of the use of the death penalty. In combination with the aggressiveness and gamesmanship of the capital defense bar — which spends decades filing often-frivolous procedural motions to keep clearly guilty clients alive — the result has been a steady choking off of capital punishment.

Update, 31 July: 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 Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 23, 2026

The danger of election fraud isn’t cheating – it’s citizens believing their votes no longer count

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

Following up on his post about the need to audit elections, Larry Correia explains why election fraud is an existential threat to the very concept of democratic government:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

The thousands of comments on my voter fraud post remind me of one very important thing.

The issue isn’t about Trump. It is about the perception of the citizens. But they need to make it about Trump.

It is difficult to dismiss the valid concerns of millions of nervous or angry citizens. It is easy to dismiss one guy as a sore loser and make the whole thing about his ego. Hence any discussion of this topic inevitably devolves into them fixating on Trump and the details surrounding one election and one moment in time, and ignoring everything else in the universe, up to and including fundamental human nature (as in some people cheat).

Voter fraud existed long before Trump was born and will exist long after he dies. The fixation on Trump is merely a smokescreen to obfuscate the issue. He was just louder about it than most politicians who traditionally just sulk off rather than rock the boat.

Everybody made their mind up about that election six years ago. It was a big muddled mess. And no matter what happens now around other elections, they’re gonna try and shift the discussion back to that. They’d rather relitigate 2020 and have those same tired arguments over and over again than focus on the threats today, and those which are looming in the future.

And yes, they really don’t want you to talk about the future. It can only be 2020, forever and ever. Amen. Even though technology is evolving rapidly, we have hostile foreign actors who we know for absolute certain have their intelligence services meddle in other nations’ elections, and this is a cheap and easy ploy … nope. Thinking about the future is bad. Why do you hate those millions of elderly disabled women of color who can’t get IDs?

Don’t let them gas light you that you’re crazy for being suspicious of your fellow man. It is perfectly sane, rational, and logical to suspect that fraudulent behavior is occurring when suspicious things happen and the same parties always seem to benefit.

It becomes even more prudent to be suspicious when instead of tightening the process to make fraud more difficult, they loosen the process to make fraud easier. That sends the opposite message.

There is nothing wrong with you. You look out there and see a world of unaccountable mail in ballots, drop boxes, organized ballot harvesting, bribing homeless schizophrenics to vote, weird questionable crap, and blue cities who take longer to count their results than a 3rd world nation. It would be insane to NOT be suspicious.

And then rather than placate the reasonable people who are worried about this loosening of the controls, they attack everyone who raises concerns as a racist, sexist, conspiracy theorist, dismiss them as insane or stupid, and then turn the subject back to talking about Trump’s personality.

The biggest danger about election fraud isn’t just someone cheating their way to victory. It’s a critical mass of citizens losing faith in their institutions and believing that their votes no longer count, and that being dangerous to the survival of the country. When people truly believe that the fix is in, and their votes don’t matter, bad things tend to occur. That’s what I want to avoid.

It would be logical and reasonable to do everything possible to assure the people that their system is secure, but instead they get berated, gas lit, and told they’re insane. Don’t believe your own eyes. Asking for ID is racist. Taking weeks to count votes is perfectly good and normal. Having late ballots continue to appear is wonderful, and questioning this is makes you a bad person. How dare you wonder if ineligible non-citizens are voting? Sure, we’ve got people registering their pets to vote just to prove a point, and humans lie and cheat in every other endeavor on Earth, but they’d never cheat in an election. How dare you?

And so forth.

Now watch. If this post goes viral like the last one the process will repeat, and the NPC/bot army will do exactly what I described trying to browbeat and shame everyone into compliance. I’m safe to say that here because almost none of them actually even read the posts they’re responding to.

July 22, 2026

Why progressives are always so eager for more gun control

Filed under: Law, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR discusses a recently posted chart about firearm homicide rates:

I’m not certain this chart is true, but looking at it shook something loose in my head. I think it explains why ordinary liberals are so obsessive about gun control despite the fact that it’s both bad policy and a persistent election-time loser.

This isn’t a trivial question. I understand why Communists are obsessive about gun control; the last thing they want is a population capable of armed resistance to tyranny. What I have never figured out is why Communists have been so successful at selling gun control to their dupes as an urgent moral necessity.

This chart could be exaggerated, but the figures are at least possible. In the United States, murder and other forms of criminal violence are heavily, heavily concentrated among Blacks. Usually with other Blacks as their victims.

And that’s a problem for your typical normie liberal, because not being “racist” against Blacks is the core of their moral and political identity.

What I now understand — forgive me because I probably should have noticed this sooner — is that gun-control advocacy is a sort of reaction formation. When you’re not an evil Communist, it’s something you do frantically to avert your eyes from unbearable reality.

The truth: outside of a relatively small cohort at the right-hand end of the Black IQ distribution, the people liberals want to treat as sacred victims deserving of infinite indulgence are savages that even intelligent Blacks fear and despise.

That’s the message in the left hand column, there.

IQ denialism, blank-slatism, “poverty causes crime” — these are all defensive formations. They cluster with gun-control advocacy as ways of avoiding the horrible, intolerable truth.

Which makes me wonder: what happens when the strain becomes too great and the protective illusion snaps?

July 19, 2026

The importance of auditing

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

I often find people on social media expressing frustration with the voting system in their country, often claiming that all elections are placebos and that the powers-that-be would get rid of them if they actually worked. A strong counter-argument to that line of thought is how hard many on the left fight against any measure that would increase the security of elections, like requiring voter ID or auditing election results:

If it is a voter fraud speech tonight, the dems will of course flail, lie, and deny regardless of what is presented. Because as we all know fraud happens everywhere, all the time, in every other system humans are involved in, but not in voting ever, and HOW DARE YOU?!?

And when some of it does get caught, they cry that it is no big deal, and made no difference.

Every other functioning system on Earth gets audited. But not elections. Nope. Those are sacrosanct and the idea that dishonest humans would cheat at that one thing even though they routinely cheat at everything else is CRAZY.

And I mean real audits, not spot checks or recounts, or any of the other silly little half ass things dumb people think count as a real audit. If we audited publicly traded corporations like we “audit” elections, we’d have ten thousand percent more stock related fraud.

At this point if someone is against voting security or voter ID it’s because they want easier cheating. Period. That’s it. They’ll still lie about it and come up with outlandish bullshit scenarios about disenfranchising some imaginary people, but we all know it is to make cheating easier.

It is so tiresome keeping up these polite fictions with people who you know are lying their asses off.

They lie. We know they lie. They know we know they’re lying. They lie anyway.

July 12, 2026

The CBC is a conscious shaper of the narrative, not a news organization

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

The CBC recently published a highly misleading article based on a recent report on firearm use in intimate partner violence, omitting two key facts and massaging the rest to support their preferred narrative:

Tara Carman [@tarajcarman] is directly responsible for producing this deceptive piece of journalism that deliberately misleads the Canadian public on a critical public safety issue. As the sole author of the article published by CBC, she made the conscious decision to omit the most important data from the Statistics Canada report she herself references, leaving readers with a completely distorted picture of firearm-related intimate partner violence. Specifically, she buried or ignored the fact that, in solved firearm-related intimate partner homicides, only 25% involved an accused person who had a valid firearms licence and was in legal possession of the gun used, while a massive 58% involved individuals who had no valid licence, were not in legal possession, or both. For non-intimate partner cases, the figure for legal possession drops to a pathetic 9%. These numbers come straight from the official report, yet Carman chose not to include them, choosing instead to hype up rising rates, female victims, and lethality while pushing narratives around red flag laws and confiscating guns from legal owners.

This is shitty journalism at its worst because Carman actively shaped the story to imply that legally owned firearms, held by licensed, responsible citizens, are a primary driver of these tragedies, when the data she had access to proves the opposite is true in the majority of solved cases. By leaving out these crucial possession statistics, she misleads the public into believing that broader restrictions on law-abiding gun owners are the solution when, in reality, the problem is overwhelmingly tied to illegal guns, criminals, and repeat offenders who already slip through the system. Her selective framing ignores how small a slice of firearm-related incidents overall intimate partner violence represents and instead amplifies fear to fit a predetermined anti-gun narrative that CBC routinely peddles. Carman has failed in her basic duty as a reporter to present the full truth, choosing omission and emphasis that distort reality and erode public trust. This kind of dishonest reporting from Tara Carman harms informed debate on serious issues and deserves strong public condemnation for prioritizing agenda over accuracy.

Rod Giltaca has more on the omissions of the original CBC story:

IMPORTANT POST🚨

Additional point to the story below: less than 1% of intimate partner violence has a firearm present. It’s been this way for decades. Statcan tracks this.

This is how CBC describes this: “Most intimate partner violence crimes don’t involve firearms”.

“Most”? How about 99% doesn’t?

This is the type of manipulation you can expect from the CBC. It’s unconscionable.

Domestic violence is absolutely unacceptable. We should be looking for the people and situations involved in it and deal with it directly. We should be using the billions the gov’t has wasted on gun bans on services to support women escaping these situations. Stories like this merely serve as an opportunity to vilify people who legally and responsibly own firearms, full stop.

We need to start asking real questions about where these situations occur, who’s involved, and that includes demographic information of every kind; racial, cultural, economic, geographical, real information that demonstrates the will to (actually) solve these problems.

If you want to reduce this type of violence then you have to ask these questions whether they’re uncomfortable or not.

Do you really care, or is this just another opportunity to play politics or virtue signal? Clear thinking people are sick of this.

July 10, 2026

The EU’s stratégie “antiracisme”

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

The media has been pushing the narrative of a huge rising tide of racism and white supremacy, even as those ideas had been steadily losing influence and popularity. European and western governments generally have been doing their part to keep racism alive by importing as many unassimilable young men of military age and setting them loose upon the native population. Something’s got to give:

It has been proven. The narrative of systemic racism and “white supremacy” was completely fabricated by the media and activists since 2010. It’s undeniable.

Ask yourself this: have you ever come across, among your friends, your family, or your colleagues, someone who calls themselves a white supremacist and wants to “restore the purity of the white race”?

No. It doesn’t exist. It might have been a marginal fantasy in the past. Today, it’s a media construct to justify division and ideology.

The post I made that Elon Musk reposted yesterday proves it perfectly.

This European strategy isn’t going to “fight racism”. It’s going to create the perfect breeding ground for grooming gangs to spread everywhere in Europe, including France.

Reminder: in the UK, thousands of underage girls were raped, drugged, and sexually exploited by networks (often Pakistani) in Rotherham, Rochdale, and elsewhere. The cops, social services, and elected officials let the most horrific abuses slide for years … because they were afraid of being labeled racists. They chose to sacrifice young girls rather than “stigmatize” a community.

This is exactly the mechanism that Brussels is now rolling out across the board:

– Denial of anti-white racism
– Definition of “structural racism” without perpetrators or intent (so everyone is suspect by default)
– 3.6 billion euros in public money to anti-racist NGOs
– Training for civil servants to detect “racial bias” everywhere

Result: police officers and agents paralyzed by the fear of being called racists. They’ll hesitate even more to act in certain neighborhoods or against certain groups.

In France, this ideology has already been carried by associations like Touche pas à mon pote and others of the same ilk. Instead of promoting integration and unity, they’ve created division by exploiting minorities for political ends.

Antiracism as it’s practiced today is racism. It divides people by skin color, protects real problems, and criminalizes those who dare to name the facts.

What needs to be done: stop dividing. Stop multiplying associations that exploit minorities to sow discord. Go back to true equality: judge actions, not origins. Protect victims without ideological taboos.

If this strategy passes, we won’t have “small” problems.

We’ll have grooming gangs on steroids across all of Europe.

That’s the price of this madness.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

July 9, 2026

Here’s why “free range children” went away

As a child in England and then in Canada, I had a pretty wide range for unsupervised activities and I generally took advantage of that. On foot or riding my bicycle, it was completely normal for me to be several miles from home on any given day. I’ve posted this image a few times, showing the “free range” diminishing generation by generation for an English family, and it’s mostly true here in Canada and in the United States as well:

Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.

At Classical Ideals, Megha Lillywhite discusses the “political extremism” involved today in trying to raise your children:

One of the most fundamental things that children require in order to grow up healthy, strong, wise and good, is a lot of time outdoors and in public spaces. Yet what we see from more traditional families in the west, as well as from extremely wealthy families, is that they are holding their children closer than ever, and enclosing them in increasingly smaller and more carefully selected bubbles of protection.

This is because “the outdoors” and “public life” is territory that has increasingly been ceded by western society to violent criminals, the mentally ill, and drug addicts. Parenting, for those who are vigilant to the threats, can no longer be “laissez-faire” and it has become less about choosing the ideal, and more about choosing the least damaging option.

But what has been lost? And what must be reclaimed for those of us with power and spirit to have any kind of meaningful victory in this world?

Most leftists see politics through the framework of wanting to be “a good person” as it is defined by their peer group and ideology. The ordinary person, on the other hand, views politics through the set of decisions that would best protect their children and give them the best chance at a good life.

Why is this? Leftists either don’t have children, or they have children but live in gilded cages and are therefore untouched (yet) by the consequences of their ideological beliefs.

Children must exist as part of a broader community in order to develop healthily. They must be able to go to a public library, the local shop, ride their bikes to the park, take the city bus or walk to their grandmother’s house on their own. They must be able to play outside unsupervised for hours on end in their neighbourhoods.

[…]

But some measure of freedom is also necessary for children to develop a healthy psyche. A child who can go to the shop and pay for milk on his own and bring it home will develop not only a sense of responsibility, but will feel confident in his ability to do useful things. A child who can visit his friends and relatives on his own will develop social skills and a sense of belonging. A child who can go to the library on his own can begin the lifelong journey of guiding his own learning.

[…]

In a 2007 study done in Sheffield, UK by Dr. William Bird, he found that children in 1926 were allowed to roam up to six miles away from home unsupervised and by 2000, that number dropped to 300 metres. The major drop off happened around 1979 which is coincidentally the time when mass migration began in the United Kingdom and demographics of towns like Sheffield began to seriously shift. In the recent “Rape Gang Inquiry” released by the Restore Party of Britain, the report which details three decades of kidnap, rape and murder of a quarter of a million British girls which would have began around this time. So English parents restricting their children’s freedoms around this time period was not something hysterical or unfounded.

We must be politically courageous in order to admit what is required to maintain that kind of a world. Stated simply, a safe, healthy and good childhood requires a fundamental rejection of leftist “empathy” politics. There is one incident in particular that can help to describe how this system functions today.

Link from John Carter on Substack Notes, who commented:

The same shift towards a confined, highly monitored childhood took place in the US, corresponding to the great suburbanization. The suburbs grew due to white flight from the cities, following their colonization by blacks and the de facto ban on community defence enforced by the civil rights act.

Suburban municipal architecture is largely comprised of informal defensive barriers that prevent undesirable elements from penetrating the neighborhoods undetected.

This enables middle class parents to deniably insulate their children from the worst consequences of diversity, but at the cost of raising their children in open air prisons, in a stifling social atmosphere characterized primarily by a brittle insistence upon euphemistic avoidance of direct acknowledgement of the real issues. “Racism is simply terrible! We just wanted to live somewhere with good schools.”

Children brought up amidst the tedious fakery of the suburbs naturally become attuned to the pervasive hypocrisy of suburban white culture. They have to: simply navigating this culture requires the ability to understand the unsaid, while pretending that one has not understood it. Combined with the open air prison environment inhibiting emotional development, this is a powerful recipe for induced neurosis.

There are only a few possible outcomes: 1) they become cowardly hypocrites themselves; 2) they reject the hypocrisy and become fanatical anti-white race communists; 3) they reject the hypocrisy and become fascists.

June 29, 2026

A “good guy with a gun” is responsible for stopping a lot of crime in the US

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

If you’ve paid any attention, you’ll have been told that private gun owners are rarely if ever able to stop a crime, and even that you’re somehow in more danger if you carry a gun than if you go unarmed. The FBI certainly contributed to that message with their annual Active Shooting Reports, which seemed to indicate that civilians with guns were only responsible for stopping gun attacks 3.7% of the time. This understates the frequency by a very large margin:

The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a public place, not involving gang violence or some other crime such as robbery. Such an incident could be something as minor as one person being shot at and missed up to a mass public shooting.

While the FBI includes cases where civilians stop active shooters, the news media frequently relies on the limited number of these cases to argue that such interventions are rare. Headlines illustrate this framing: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander” (Associated Press); “Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting” (Washington Post); and “After Indiana mall shooting, one hero but no lasting solution to gun violence” (New York Times). The FBI’s reports acknowledge that armed civilians stopped active shooting attacks in seven of the eleven years they reviewed.

When John Stossel asked the FBI about our claim that they had omitted many cases, the Bureau responded: “[Our data is] not intended to explore all active shooting incidents but rather to provide a baseline understanding …”

[…]

Between 2014 and 2024, citizens stopped 178 out of 339 potential or actual mass shootings where we could identify that guns were allowed in the area. So 52.5% of attacks were stopped by people legally carrying concealed handguns.

The numbers indicate that if we didn’t have gun-free zones, we would have more people stopping these attacks.

Finally, even these numbers underestimate the usefulness of legally carried concealed handguns in stopping mass public shootings because many of these active shooting incidents involve only one person being targeted. For example, suppose one person is targeted and only one person may be present. In that case, there is relatively little opportunity for people to stop attacks compared to a mass public shooting where many potential victims are present.

The general public seems to agree. A July 2022 survey by the Trafalgar Group showed that a plurality of American general election voters believe that armed citizens are the most effective element in protecting you and your family in the case of a mass shooting. First on the list was “armed citizens” at 42%, followed by “local police” (25%) and “federal agents” (10%). [“None of the above” was the answer chosen by 23% of respondents.] A survey by YouGov in May – before the Uvalde, Texas, attack – found that by a margin of 51% to 37% American adults supported letting schoolteachers and administrations carry concealed handguns.

June 27, 2026

“To quote the immortal Miles Gloriosus, ‘Even I am impressed’. It would be more merciful to just hang them.”

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Tom Kratman discusses the recent trial and sentencing of a group of Antifa terrorists:

On 4 July, 2025, a group of ANTIFA engaged in a baited ambush outside an ICE facility, using fireworks and various riotous behaviors to entice out some members of law enforcement and shooting one of those.

They were quickly identified, in anything from some hours to two days. Of the presumed eleven of them on site, ten were also arrested within two days. Only Benjamin Song, the ringleader, managed to evade arrest for a while. Song, however, was captured within eleven days. Of those who were not present at the site but were part of the conspiracy, all were arrested within a few weeks. The total number of defendants is twenty-two, but six of those, so far, face only state charges.

Seven of the sixteen have already made plea bargains. So much for revolutionary solidarity. These have not yet been sentenced, though sentences of up to fifteen years in the big house can be expected. Of the nine who have already been tried in federal court, eight have been sentenced and one is pending. The eight sentenced, and their sentences, are as follows:

  • Benjamin Hanil Song: 100 years
  • Maricela Rueda: 70 years.
  • Cameron Arnold (aka Autumn Hill): 50 years.
  • Savanna Batten: 50 years.
  • Zachary Evetts: 50 years.
  • Bradford Morris (aka Meagan Morris): 50 years.
  • Elizabeth Soto: 50 years.
  • Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada: 30 years.

Think about it, an average of fifty-six years and three months each. To quote the immortal Miles Gloriosus, “Even I am impressed”. It would be more merciful to just hang them.

Think, too, dear lefty, about how you would face that sentence.

So what can you, left-wing reader, take away from this incident? First and foremost, you should understand that you’re not going to get a lot of mercy in a federal court (and probably none from any southern state court) for this kind of behavior. Song and Rueda, for example, are somewhat unlikely ever to see the outside world again. Yes, there is time off for good behavior — Good Conduct Time, or GCT — in federal prison, but, Song, for example, will still serve eighty-five years even if he gets all of that GCT to his credit. There is another kind of mercy the Bureau of Prisons can grant, First Step Act sentence reductions, which can chop a sentence by up to fifty percent. However, since these convictions are for terrorism or terrorism-related crimes, FSA does not apply. Yes, Song is still going to stay in prison for at least eighty-five years.

Secondly, you should be very wary of ex-military types who might claim to know how to do things like train for, rehearse for, and conduct even comparatively simple operations like ambushes. It is hard to imagine a less competent ambush than the one run by Song. No, he had no idea what he was doing. We don’t know what Song’s (he was a Marine Reservist) MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) or even unit were, but the fact that that area has only artillery and aviation should have given the people he recruited some pause to reflect on how likely he was to understand how to do any of this or anything beyond, perhaps, shoot qualification on an administrative range. No, Marine REMFs,1 are still REMFs. Yes, they are REMFs who can to some extent shoot a rifle. This does not change them from REMFs. Yes, I know that few, if any, of you are knowledgeable enough even to suspect the difference between an MOS of tutu wearer and an MOS of cold-blooded killer. Take your ignorance into account, too, before taking direction from those who can talk the talk – or seem to you, in your incarnate ignorance, to be able to – but are unlikely to be able to walk the walk.

No, I am not going to tell you – and, yes, I definitely do know how to run an ambush – how it’s to be done properly. I will tell you that calling out “Get to the rifles”, as Song did, is not the way to do it.

Your movement probably has a bare handful of people who actually know what they’re doing, violence-at-scale-wise. So before signing your life away to someone claiming to be one of them, ask yourself, “What are the odds?” And then walk the other way. No, I’m not about to tell you how to tell the difference.


  1. Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers

June 25, 2026

Formerly Peru’s First Lady, Keiko Fujimori is now President in her own right

The new President of Peru, Keiko Fujimori, faces a big economic challenge to her nation:

With just over 99% of ballots counted, Keiko Fujimori holds a lead of roughly 40,000 votes over Roberto Sánchez — less than half a percentage point, and the third consecutive Peruvian presidential contest decided by a margin that narrow. Sánchez led through the early days of counting, carried by rural and highland turnout; but the overseas votes, which broke for Fujimori above 63%, pulled the result the other way as the tally crossed 95%.

The outcome is no longer seriously in doubt. What remains in doubt is whether a victory this narrow constitutes a mandate to govern, or merely a turn to occupy the office in impotence.

Fujimori has never held executive power. What she inherits, however, is a name: her father, Alberto Fujimori, governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, stabilizing a hyperinflationary economy and crushing the Shining Path insurgency, albeit with darkly authoritarian techniques for which he was later convicted. Long known as Peru’s answer to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Fujimori has cast a long shadow over Peruvian politics ever since.

Keiko served as his First Lady through the latter half of the 1990s, then built her own career: a congresswoman from 2006 to 2011, and the leader of Fuerza Popular (“Popular Force”) since. She spent 13 months in pretrial detention on corruption charges tied to Odebrecht financing; a court voided the case in January 2025. She has run for president four times, losing the previous three runoffs by margins under a single percentage point before, now, winning her fourth.

Her governing history is, as a result, tied deeply to her father’s. She has spent two decades defending it rather than living it, which is itself a kind of qualification in a country where economic memory often prevails over institutional memory. The model her father installed — trade liberalization, fiscal orthodoxy, an open door to foreign capital — has outlasted eight changes of president in ten years. The claims of Fujimorismo — the governing-economic doctrine named for Fujimori that has dominated ever since his time — is that it alone can be trusted to keep that model standing.

Keiko Fujimori’s flagship commitments are, consequently, the two pillars of Fujimorismo itself: a hard line on crime, and an unapologetic defense of the market economy.

The security platform proposes deploying the military against organized crime and prison disorder, taking inspiration both from Peru’s own recent past, and Nayib Bukele’s divisive tactics in El Salvador. Alongside this, the platform promises expanding video surveillance, and modernizing this apparatus through the use of artificial intelligence to detect corruption in public contracting. She insists that her father’s system’s abuses will not be repeated.

The economic platform is a much-needed deregulatory shock: cutting investment-approval timelines by 40%, reducing the fiscal deficit from 2.2% to 1% of GDP, and shrinking the state. As for exactly how that shrinking will be achieved besides the aforementioned measures, Keiko is not clear.

Nevertheless, both pillars of the plan were sold on a single word, repeated at her closing rally and in her final debate: order, against the chaos she says the left represents.

In counterpoint to recent claims that cutting USAID funding cost the lives of millions of children who depended on those funds, taking away USAID support in much of South America led to a number of electoral changes:

June 24, 2026

This is why the media didn’t want to share the murderer’s manifesto

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In short, it does not support the narrative. Ezra Levant shares the details of the manifesto left behind by an Alberta man after he killed a police officer in Côte-des-Neiges, a Jewish section of Montreal the other day:

READ HIS MANIFESTO: The Montreal murderer was a Jew-hating Communist censor

The murderer in Montreal has been named: Seth Hatfield, from Alberta. He murdered a policeman in a shooting spree in a Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal.

Soon afterwards, government journalists at the CBC and elsewhere started describing a manifesto that he had left behind. But none of them published the actual document — they just quoted the odd phrase from it, and called him an “incel”. That’s a term for someone who was “involuntarily celibate”, or someone who didn’t do well with women. The usual suspects were doing the media circuit claiming that Hatfield was a “right wing” extremist.

But if that was true, why was the manifesto being shown only to selected, government-friendly journalists? Why were the rest of us blocked from seeing it for ourselves?

Well, that just changed. Rebel News has acquired a copy of the full, 104-page manifesto. You can read it for yourself right here: https://rebelnews.com/manifesto_reveals_alleged_montreal_gunman_s_antisemitic_far_left_and_incel_ideology

It’s true that the murderer had extreme ideas about women. But that was only a small part of his world view. In most of the rest of his rambling remarks, he was indistinguishable from left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders, Avi Lewis, or half the Liberal cabinet.

He praised Communism. He called for the abolition of private property. He railed against the Jews, and Zionism. And — like Mark Carney himself — he demanded the censorship of the Internet.

Read the manifesto of a crazed, left-wing extremist.

And never forget: the mainstream media lies to you about everything important.

If you trust Grok, here’s a summary of the manifesto:

Anarchy and poverty are the “natural state” of man

Filed under: Economics, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen has a bit of fun refuting a silly diatribe about the evils of capitalism:

Of course capitalism isn’t natural, you incomplete set of plastic picnic utensils.

What’s natural is theft, robbery, and murder.

What’s natural is anarchy, chaos, the rape of the weak by the strong, and nature red in tooth and claw.

The free market, which you call “capitalism”, is not called “free” because everyone is free to do whatever they want. Because what a lot of people want to do is steal. You’ll know which ones by the hammer and sickle logo they draw on things.

No, the free market is called free because it is freed from coercion and violence.

And of course it was spread by violence, you factory-defective lawn flamingo. Because it was spread by hanging all the bandits and robbers, and if hangings aren’t violence I don’t know what is.

And of course it’s maintained by coercion, you British pub food connoisseur. If you don’t coerce thieves not to steal, then they will steal everything you build faster than than you can build it.

You have to use violence to stop the violent, and coerce the coercers not to coerce.

And of course it’s maintained by the superficial facade of liberal democracy, you Vogon poetry appreciator. The global average citizen is a mentally retarded third-world savage with less emotional self-control than my cat. If we let them have candidates that truly represented their agenda, then every useful thing humanity has built for the last twelve thousand years would be torn down in a week to buy them more party drugs. Followed by every woman being raped to death, and then uncomprehending starvation as they slowly and painfully learned that grocery stores don’t spontaneously spawn food pickups, like in video games.

Jesus Christ, woman, you’re talking about a species that evolved to live in hominid tribes of 100 apes, and throw rocks at zebras. In modern civilization, the so-called “average” person is so far out of his depth that the fish have lights on their noses.

And the more complex and sophisticated civilization gets, the more investments in the future that we need to protect, so that the retarded monkeys don’t steal them all to buy more vodka and cigarettes.

Yeah, sure, sometimes capitalist systems end up defending property that someone’s great-grandfather stole. But so fucking what? You think communism is gonna fix that? You think communism is gonna bring justice?

Communist nations can’t afford justice. They can’t even manage to feed themselves half the time. Get back to us when you’ve mastered the agricultural revolution, we’ve only been waiting since the beginning of recorded time.

The trick is to put the seeds in the dirt, guys.

June 20, 2026

Lessons learned: “In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not”

The flare-up of anti-immigrant/anti-government violence in Belfast has drifted out of the headlines lately, as state-oriented media try to get their audiences back onto safer topics like footy and hissing at the Bad Orange Man. But the situation in Northern Ireland has not resolved itself in the preferred way — preferred, that is, by the British government. John Carter responds to some American social media users who loudly wonder why British men generally are not “doing something” now:

In response to the migroid atrocity du jour, one often hears Americans ask “why haven’t British men done anything?”, to which Americans will flatteringly reply to themselves, “It’s because those BRITCUCKS have gone SOFT, they gave up their GUNS like little BITCHES, but you won’t see anyone trying THAT in a SMALL TOWN”. Which conveniently elides the awkward detail that American men, armed to the teeth as no other people on Earth, have allowed themselves to be pushed around this way and that since the sleep of the good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior (PBUH) was disturbed by his little dream. “Just you wait”, Americans will promise when this is pointed out, “The electric boogaloo will come any day now, you’ll see!” Sure we will. In the meantime, all those guns have done precisely nothing to prevent the relentless incursions of Section 8 housing, disparate impact, affirmative action, DEI, anti-discrimination training, Title IX, human resources, and all the rest of the soft tyrannies that flew out of the Pandora’s box of America’s ersatz race communist constitution. There was no resistance to any of this. Heavily armed red state Americans abandoned the cities for the suburbs rather than standing and fighting for them, and then stolidly watched as their kids were sidelined in education and employment while being terrorized by black criminals.

American speech is protected by the first amendment and backstopped by the second, yet nevertheless you will not find many Americans daring to even so much as mutter the forbidden word of power. This is not because white Americans don’t understand the problems. They have developed an elaborate vocabulary of “bad neighbourhoods” and “good schools” and “urban crime” and “troubled youth” and so on and so forth with which to discuss, in whispers, after glancing twice over their shoulders, the realities of life in the USSA. There is no law against parrhesia [Wiki], technically an American citizen may say whatever he pleases without consequence, but of course frank speech in this Greek sense requires courage by definition, and there has been a great shortage of that. You can say whatever you please, yes, of course, fill your boots, but you will find yourself ostracized, divorced, unemployed, and homeless if you speak too directly, so you know, shut up. The unspoken strictures of the longhouse are a more effective prison than iron bars for those whose spirits have been cowed.

Meanwhile, last week there was a minor uprising in Belfast. Hadi Alodid, a gentlemen of Sudanese extraction, enriched the face of Stephen Ogilvie, a local bloke with special needs, providing him with extensive tribal scarring in a generous act of cross-cultural exchange, and only claiming two of his eyes in payment. The entire incident was caught on video. Ogilvie’s life, though not his sight (and he was already hard of hearing) was saved by three Irish men who rushed in to beat the innocent Sudanese rocket surgeon off with their hurling sticks. In the aftermath, it emerged that Ogilvie had helped Alodid move in to his new accommodations just a few days before. No good deed, etc.

[…]

The uprising was variously described as a protest and as a riot, but it was neither of these. A protest is when an angry crowd gathers to chant some slogans and wave around some signs, pretending that their numbers are a display of power, and deluding themselves that Power will redress their grievances because a noisy lump of quivering biomass is somehow intimidating to Power. A riot is an explosive release of emotional energy that results in some property destruction and futile confrontations with armoured riot police, typically ending with the rioters being rounded up and jailed. In some cases, it’s true, protests and riots appear to produce political change, but this is almost invariably because Power has orchestrated these little carnivals in order to sanctify the policies it’s already decided upon under the guise of “bowing” to “pressure” from the “public”. The Canadian government, by the way, has long since mastered a non-violent variant of this dark art: practically every “public policy research group” in the country is funded by the government to pressure the government to do what the government already wants to do. Show me what Our Democracy looks like; this is what Our Democracy looks like.

There were no signs being waved around in Belfast, no chanting of slogans. While there was a great deal of violence, it was not random and senseless, but methodical and carefully targeted. It unfolded with the tight discipline of a coordinated military operation.

The day before the uprising started, a communique was sent out to local businesses, instructing them to close before the fun started. At the appointed hour loose formations of young men, indistinguishable in black hoodies, fanned out across the city.

[…]

The uprising in Belfast was not nihilistic violence for the sake of violence, though I’ve no doubt the lads were enjoying the opportunity for mayhem. It was violence towards a specific political objective: driving the foreigners out. Migrants whose domiciles were destroyed were directly deprived of housing. Migrants who managed to avoid this were made to worry that they will be next. Landlords taking government money to house migrants, or even thinking about doing so, now need to worry about the immediate cost of repairs and the ongoing expense of higher insurance premiums, making the Home Office’s lucre a lot less attractive. Landlords also need to worry about escalation: reportedly, letters were circulated which heavily implied that bricks and petrol bombs were just the first step on the violence ladder, and that the paramilitaries would be quite happy to take more decisive measures against the landlords themselves should the message not be received.

All of this is very sad, and I don’t want to seem heartless. The immigrants whose houses were destroyed were probably innocent; there was one particularly touching video of a nurse from Ghana or somewhere. Unfortunately, that is the nature of these things. They were brought in by the government en masse as a form of biological warfare against the native population. The government wants them there, the people want them gone, and the government refuses to listen, so, this is what happens.

Only 27 migrants were actually made homeless by the arson, but reportedly, quite a few are already clearing out on their own. The British government quite naturally condemned the violence, organizing a rally against racism in the aftermath, but it also responded by instructing the media to emphasize that it would be cracking down on illegal immigration into Northern Ireland. Underneath the condemnation, there is a clear message to all of this: in this case, violence worked.

That message has been sent before in Northern Ireland. Exactly one year to the day before the uprising in Belfast, there were riots in the small town of Ballymena after the courts let two gypsy boys off with delicate wrist taps for raping an Irish girl. The rioting went on for two weeks, and resulted in two thirds of the gypsy population clearing out. Again: violence worked.

Contrast Ballymena with the other major British protest movement last summer: the anti-migrant hotel protest in Epping, a London exurb populated largely by Londoners driven out of their city by diversity, which started when one of the migrants diversified a teenage girl. In contrast to the eruption in Ballymena, the protest in Epping was explicitly non-violent: the only violence came at the hands of the cops arresting people for flying Union Jacks. The mothers of Epping spent months gathering outside the migrant hotel, holding signs and raising awareness. The council also fought the migrant hotel in the courts, and enjoyed early success when a judge found that the location was zoned as a hotel but not as a migrant dormitory, essentially telling the Home Office that they didn’t have a loicense for that. This legal victory was short-lived. The decision was overturned almost immediately by a higher court judge, who explicitly found that whatever the concerns of the people of Epping as to their children’s safety, these were outweighed by the human rights of the mystery meat that had washed up on Britain’s shores, and by the government’s interest in housing them. As a result, parallel lawsuits that had been launched by councils across the country were dropped. The migrant hotel in Epping was eventually shut down, but this likely had more to do with the government’s switch to “Operation Scatter” in which migrants were garrisoned in smaller houses all over the country, rather than concentrated in a few large centres, than it did with the government responding to the concerns of British subjects.

In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not.

Update, 22 June: 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 Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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