Quotulatiousness

December 3, 2025

Like him or loathe him, Trump’s response to the DC shootings was “spot on”

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

In The Conservative Woman, Richard North makes the case that US President Donald Trump is the only western political leader who can stop the migration crisis:

Like him or loathe him, question his inconsistencies and his many other flaws, but in my view Donald Trump’s response to the shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington DC by an Afghan migrant was spot on.

There was none of the pussyfooting “my thoughts are with …” etc. Without equivocation, he immediately branded the shooting “an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror”, adding: “It was a crime against our entire nation”.

Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a tweet declaring: “President Trump’s State Department has paused visa issuance for ALL individuals travelling on Afghan passports. The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people.”

Attached was an official tweet from the Department of State making it clear that the ban was of immediate effect, with the Department “taking all necessary steps to protect US national security and public safety”.

This added to the ban in June when Trump imposed restrictions on citizens from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, but that ban did not revoke visas previously issued, and holders of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) were exempt.

Now Trump has gone further. In a Thanksgiving message posted on X, he offered a salutation which, in Trumpian style, didn’t mince words. It started with: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the world, for being ‘politically correct’, and just plain STUPID, when it comes to immigration …”

That was only the start of a very long and quite extraordinary tweet which, if nothing else, can be criticised for a complete absence of paragraphs and sentences which rivalled in length those in a Dickens novel.

With his opening out of the way, Trump asserted that the official United States foreign population stands at 53million, most of whom, he averred, “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels”.

“They and their children,” Trump continued, “are supported through massive payments from patriotic American citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape or form”.

Warming to his theme, he declared: “They put up with what has happened to our country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 [£27,000] with a green card will get roughly $50,000 [£38,000] in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher.”

Pressing his point, he stated what none of Starmer’s motley crew will admit.

“This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc)”, the Donald wrote.

In a passage which might have got him arrested had he posted in the UK, with refreshing candour, the President gave the example of “hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia” who were “completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota”.

Somali gangs, he said, “are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone”.

No matter which country they end up in, Somalis tend to be bad news. There are multiple reports stretching back to 2007 of a plague of criminal gangs among the 32,000 Somalis who have settled in Minnesota.

Recently the Minnesota gangs have been associated with a series of massive welfare fraud schemes, the proceeds of which may have been funnelled to the Somalia-based terror group al-Shabab.

The largest fraud scandal involving Somalis was the “Feeding Our Future” scheme. Prosecutors racked up 56 criminal convictions in what they alleged was a plot to steal $300million (£270million) from a federally funded programme meant to feed children during the covid event.

December 2, 2025

The elites will continue pushing high immigration despite the obvious social costs it imposes

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

One of the very tip-top luxury beliefs is that massive immigration is always and under all circumstances a good thing. A great thing, even. One of the things about the holders of luxury beliefs is that they are almost always completely insulated from any of the consequences of their beliefs, and this is especially true in this case. As Lorenzo Warby points out, the elites’ devotion to this cause contributes to collapsing levels of trust in the society absorbing all those immigrants and deeply undermines confidence that the leadership have anyone else’s but their own best interests at heart:

There is a straightforward, respectable view on immigration to Western countries. More people means more transactions, means more gains from trade, so immigration is a good thing. Immigration grows the economy, it increases GDP, so sensible folk support immigration.

There are extra bells and whistles, such as providing needed skills; compensating for falling fertility; willingness to do jobs locals are not. All the extra bells and whistles have responses. Why not train locals (i.e., citizens)? Won’t the immigrants’ fertility also fall? (Yes, though possibly more slowly.) The real willingness is to do jobs at lower wages and conditions than the locals would accept. For instance, potentially using US H1B visas to bring in entry-level employees who will work for less, and in worse conditions, than the locals.

Moreover, increasing total GDP is not the same as increasing per capita GDP. Even with per capita GDP, there are always questions about the distribution of those gains to GDP.

Nevertheless, the basic intuition is: immigration means more transactions, more gains from trade. Those who believe in markets — in positive-sum interactions — should support immigration.

This is not the trumping response it appears to be. Immigration does not only import workers—nor even just increase mutual-gain transactions — it imports people, so potentially affects all aspects of the receiving society. This means, of course, that there are a much wider range of possible concerns about immigration that “yes, but more gains from trade” is not an adequate response to.

Efficiency and number of transactions are not the only issues for a social order, particularly not a flourishing social order. There are also issues of social cohesion; social resilience; connections and social capital; the distribution of GDP gains; effects on relative prices; congestion costs; how well institutions are managing the influx; effects on local communities; cultural differences; social coordination issues and the ability to manage collective action problems; increased competition for positional goods — goods that cannot, or are blocked from, responding to increased demand.

These are all legitimate grounds for concern that are not answered by “yes, but more gains from trade“. How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with mass rape and sexual exploitation of young women and girls as a cost of culturally divergent immigration (and its systematic mismanagement)? How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with violent disturbance, even civil war, as a potential cost of immigration, even though we have historical examples of precisely that?

If, on one hand, the respectable people insist “yes, but more gains from trade” is an adequate response, and that other concerns are not legitimate, this will almost certainly be taken as the contemptuous dismissal it is. Not only will it not be persuasive, it will (and does) generate anger and resentment.

If people have concerns that the “reasonable”, “liberal-minded” folk will not deal with — or, worse, are dismissive of such concerns even being raised — then people will turn to unreasonable and illiberal folk, if they are the only people who will respond to their concerns. Significant gaps in political markets will be filled by political entrepreneurs.

If folk are told that “if you believe in markets, you have to support (high levels of) immigration” then many folk will respond with “OK, I reject markets“. Moreover, it is simply false that market economics entails that mass immigration is a good thing.

The idea that there is some economic phenomena such that marginal costs exceeds marginal benefits for all people over all ranges in all forms is not Economic thinking, it is magical thinking. (More precisely, it is class-signalling parading as Economics.)

It is magical thinking that falls foul of economist Thomas Sowell‘s dictum that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Immigrants may be engaging in lots of positive-sum, gains from trade transactions, yet still be imposing more costs than benefits on a society, and on resident citizens, precisely because societies are not just efficiency arenas for free-floating transactions and no one is just an economic transactor.

Update, 3 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 1, 2025

If they’re behind bars, they can’t easily re-offend

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

In City Journal, Tal Fortgang makes the case for keeping repeat offenders in prison (which used to be the norm) rather than allowing the small minority of violent criminals to rejoin society ever more easily and more speedily:

Approaching the dock at Alcatraz on a foggy January afternoon, 1991.
Photo by Nicholas Russon

It’s fashionable to blame America’s high incarceration rates on social injustice — and law enforcement — rather than lawbreaking. If policymakers would just provide disadvantaged people with sufficient resources and economic opportunity, on this view, the crime problem could be solved. That utopian vision gained traction during the mad summer of 2020, when activists, rioters, and the mainstream press, reacting to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sought to replace law enforcement with programs that target the root causes of antisocial behavior. “As a society,” wrote activist Mariame Kaba in the New York Times, “we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm”.

The truth is otherwise. As Hyland’s case exemplified, violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders — that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, as [political scientist James Q.] Wilson argued half a century ago in his classic book Thinking About Crime, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again.

Most people are not teetering on the edge of felony, waiting to become, in the Left’s favored euphemism, a “justice-impacted individual”. The overwhelming majority of Americans never engage in serious criminal behavior, let alone commit violent felonies like murder or armed robbery. But those who do are likely to do so again, the evidence shows. Indeed, crime’s concentration is one of the most well-established findings in social science. In 1972, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang reported that just 6 percent of males in a birth cohort accounted for 52 percent of all police contacts. (Violent crime, in particular, is overwhelmingly committed by young males.) Thirty years later, a similar study in Boston found that 3 percent of males were responsible for more than half of their cohort’s arrests after age 31.

The pattern holds across time and place. In 2014, data showed that three-quarters of state prisoners — the core of America’s incarcerated population — had at least five prior arrests. Nearly 5 percent had 31 or more, a larger share than those imprisoned after just a single arrest. In 2022, the New York Times reported that “nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City … involved just 327 people,” or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been “arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times”. And in Oakland, a gun-violence-prevention group found that about 400 individuals — 0.1 percent of the city — were responsible for most of the city’s homicides. Violence is concentrated geographically as well. It occurs primarily in poor minority neighborhoods, whose members make up most of its victims.

These figures may even understate how concentrated antisocial behavior is. Wolfgang found that the offending minority committed dozens of crimes for every one that led to arrest. Fifty years later, a similar study reported that delinquent youth “self-reported over 25 delinquent offenses for every one police contact … with some youth reporting upwards of 290 delinquent offenses per police contact or arrest”. Combined with the fact that more than 60 percent of violent crimes reported each year go unsolved, the implication is clear: by the time a violent offender ends up in prison, he has likely committed multiple violent acts and many lesser offenses. Again, these patterns are most common among young men “who exhibited more psychopathic features”, the 2022 study’s authors noted, and “who displayed temperamental profiles characterized by low effortful control and high negative emotionality”. As a massive study from Sweden concludes: “The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality”.

Update, 2 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 29, 2025

“There comes a point where government waste stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like treason”

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

Canadians must be literally the most passive and forgiving people on Earth. It’s the only thing that can account for how we are governed by incompetents or idiots, yet keep re-electing them despite all the clear signs of failure and opportunistic crony looting of the public purse:

Image from Blendr News

There comes a point where government waste stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like treason. Canada has long passed that point. What we are witnessing now is not mere mismanagement or bureaucratic drift — it is the systemic looting of a nation by the people meant to serve it. Billions vanish with no oversight, no accountability, and no shame. The numbers have grown so grotesque that one struggles not to call this what it is: organized theft.

Take Stellantis. Ottawa handed the automaker $15 billion — the largest corporate subsidy in Canadian history — and the industry minister didn’t even read the contract before approving it. This, despite Stellantis shifting Jeep production to the U.S., delaying its employment targets at the Windsor battery plant, and refusing to appear before Parliamentary Committee hearings. Honda received a major subsidy without full Treasury Board review. Volkswagen hid its cost estimates. Northvolt was showered with subsidies and then slipped into insolvency. Each scandal blurs into the next until you realize the pattern is not incompetence but a business model.

Then there’s the LNG project in British Columbia. The main industrial partner is an American firm. The terminal will be built overseas, floated to Nisga’a land, and subsidised by Canadian taxpayers. In other words: Canadians take the risk while the profits flow abroad and the jobs go to Korea or Japan.

Or consider Telesat. They received $2.14 billion to connect rural Canadians to high-speed internet — with no obligation to connect a single home, no penalties for failure, no clawbacks if the project collapses, and no enforced timelines. Three years later, the network still does not exist. Meanwhile, Starlink already worked, already served rural communities, could have done it for half the cost, and offered immediate deployment — but was rejected because Elon Musk is “polarizing”.

ArriveCAN? $54 million spent on an app worth $80,000, much of it funnelled to GC Strategies, a boutique firm that admitted it didn’t actually build anything. Then the Sustainable Development Fund — the so-called green slush fund — where $400 million flowed into Liberal-friendly firms.

The State tells us its creed is “responsible governance”. Yet almost every act defies that claim. What we have instead is a system run by well-dressed operators who treat the public purse as their own. Canada is now a nation run by criminals, for criminals.

QotD: Are there no prisons? Are there no asylums?

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When the Trump administration proposed imprisoning homeless people who don’t voluntarily go to shelters, and the predictable howls of outrage arose, I remembered the most interesting fact I’ve ever learned about imprisonment rates.

The US is often pilloried for having a high level of imprisonment per capita relative to other countries. The US is also quite unusual in having shut down most of its insane asylums many decades ago.

My perspective on these facts changed a great deal when I learned that if you aggregate rates of imprisonment with rates of commitment to mental institutions, the US stops looking like an outlier.

The low-level mentally ill didn’t go away when we closed the asylums. Nor did they magically become more able to function in society when we pushed them out the doors. Instead, they now land in our prisons.

Another implication of all this is that it’s not “structural racism” or any other specific evil that gives the US high imprisonment rates. It’s an inevitable consequence of the social decision to make it very difficult to involuntarily commit people to asylums.

I’m not going to argue today about whether that decision should be reversed. I have an opinion about that, but this post is about facts and consequences, not value claims or what “should” be.

Let’s return to the homeless. It is now common knowledge that homeless people are almost never simply poor or down on their luck. Almost all have serious issues with mental illness or drug addiction, or both. Many refuse to go to shelters because they don’t want to — or are not capable of — complying with a homeless shelter’s behavioral restrictions.

While I don’t have firsthand knowledge or controlled studies to back me up, it seems obvious that the shelters are acting as a filter — the least damaged and most functional homeless go to them, leaving the crazies to inhabit the streets.

Thus, throwing homeless people who won’t go to shelters in prison is an exact functional equivalent of involuntary commitment to a mental asylum.

My question for people who object to imprisoning the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless is: what do you propose we do instead? Are we prepared to reopen the asylums and lower the bar for involuntary commitment?

I don’t think there’s a third alternative anymore. Donald Trump, whatever his other failings might be, has an acute sense of the zeitgeist; popular tolerance for having the streets of our cities inhabited by crazy people is collapsing. It turns out we can only tolerate so many news stories about naked screaming nut-jobs on the subway.

I’m not going to propose an answer to the question I just raised, because I’m conflicted about it myself. My goal is to start people thinking about the right question, which is a very large one.

What is the humane way to treat people who are too damaged or broken to be functional members of society, and who inflict large costs on others if they’re not separated from society?

If it’s not prisons or asylums, what are we going to do? And given how ineffective psychiatric treatment is at anything beyond management of symptoms, is “prison” vs. “asylum” even a meaningful distinction?

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-13.

November 15, 2025

There’s not much room for men and boys in the “Female Future”

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

Janice Fiamengo responds to a recent discussion between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and happiness coach Chris Williamson which was intended to be about men’s lives but “quickly becomes a conversation about what women want”:

Chris Williamson: “It’s very hard to try and put forward something that doesn’t sound like putting the brakes on women. And I don’t think that’s what either of us …”

Here is the problem in a nutshell. We must never say No to a woman, no matter the social atrophy and misery she and her sisters are causing. Carlson, in turn, gives the only permissible response: “Are women happier than they were?”

A conversation about men’s lives quickly becomes a conversation about what women want.

**

Men’s issues have long been the purview of a tiny group of outliers who gained traction in the early days of the internet and were popularized in Cassie Jaye’s The Red Pill.

Following in the footsteps of iconoclasts like Ernest Belfort Bax (The Legal Subjection of Men, 1896), Esther Vilar (The Manipulated Man, 1971), and Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power, 1993), they questioned standard feminist wisdom, focusing on male disposability (see also here) and the empathy gap. For years, they were voices crying in the wilderness.

Now, decades into our Female Future, it’s becoming harder to ignore the suffering and plummeting fortunes of men and boys — and their knock-on social effects. But what happens when the red pill begins to go mainstream?

As the recent discussion between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and happiness coach Chris Williamson makes clear, most hard truths get leached away, and we’re left with half-hearted calls for a compassion that the influencers themselves seem unable to maintain.

Spoiler Alert: “Chris Williamson’s Guide to Being Happy, and Debunking the Feminist Lies Sabotaging You” doesn’t debunk any feminist lies. Even the MeToo movement, which harmed or destroyed thousands of men’s lives through unproven accusations (some of them almost inconceivably ridiculous and trivial), is accepted as an attempt to “sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior”. Accusers’ falsehoods, ‘Poor-me-I’m-so-desirable’ showboating, manipulations, and blithe indifference to evidence are all passed over in feminist-compliant silence.

Sadly, the discussion is full of feminist lies.

**

Near the beginning of the discussion, Williamson expresses frustration that in order to acknowledge any of the troubles of men and boys in the modern world, it has become obligatory first to rehearse women and girls’ (always at least equal, if not greater) suffering. Unfortunately, Williamson is a prime example of such gynocentric genuflecting, visibly uncomfortable every time the conversation seems to be moving into non-feminist territory.

In order to talk about the drastic decline in men’s higher education attainment, for example, Williamson seems to think it necessary to point out that women were at some point in the past discouraged from getting university degrees. Both Williamson and Carlson refer to men’s diminishing earning power, but pivot immediately to stressing how hard this is on professional women looking for marriageable men.

The sexual revolution is alleged to have mainly benefited men who can now, with impunity, “use and abuse women”; nothing is said about women’s rampant OnlyFans activity or their exploitation of men in divorce.

It goes on and on like this: for every male suicide, divorce-raped father, falsely accused or incarcerated man, there must be at least one woman somewhere who felt at some point that she wasn’t encouraged to do something.

There is a small amount of criticism directed at women, but only when women act badly towards other women, as is the case, according to Carlson, with female bosses. But about female cruelty to men or children (over half of child maltreatment, for example, is female-perpetrated), we do not hear anything.

There is a good deal said about women as a civilizing force, how much women bring to family life, how women are better with social cues, how they are “unbullshittable.” Carlson even gushes about how kind women are to their hubbies: “They wash your underwear. They listen to you snore,” he rhapsodizes. For the considerable number of men who have rarely had a kind word from any woman or who have gone through a hellish marriage and/or divorce with a vindictive shrew, the adulation seems quite unhelpful.

November 8, 2025

All cultures are not equal, especially when it comes to crimes like rape

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dr. Sydney Watson responds to a post on feminists blaming all men for the actions of some men from other cultures:

    Jessica Pin @jess_ann_pin

    It bothers me so much when some feminists act like men are just as misogynist and violent everywhere.

    That’s not true. Men from some cultures are absolutely worse than others.

    I’m not saying there is a genetic difference. But there are definitely cultural differences, and we need to be careful about who we let in.

    [Full sized images in the linked post]

I don’t know how to explain this succinctly —

But, ages ago I watched this series about prisons around the world. There were a few episodes that focused on prisons in African countries – how the prisons ran, what people were charged with etc.

What stood out to me was that over 50% of the male prisoners were there for some sort of sex crime – rape, sexual assault, child sexual abuse etc.

What was even worse was that, when asked about why they committed these crimes, a lot of the men said things about how they were “teaching the woman a lesson” or raping her was some sort of “punishment.”

And I couldn’t help but think, “well, that checks out. Given how these men from these places come to Western countries and rape women.”

People might not like hearing that, and the less evolved among us chalk it up to “racism” (lol) but if someone comes from a culture that views rape as a form of punishment for unruly women, then why would that viewpoint suddenly change when their feet hit British/Swedish/Canadian soil?

If, culturally, you view women as barely people, why on earth would you suddenly start because you’re in a new place?

Point being – it’s utterly mad to put women and girls at risk because people don’t want to admit that some cultures are horrible. I’m tried of pretending that all cultures are equal when they’re so obviously not.

Update, 10 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 2, 2025

“Why not go all the way and order His former Royal Highness to wander the streets as Mr Sarah Ferguson?”

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

Mark Steyn has a bit of fun at the expense of the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, His Royal Majesty King Charles III, and the current British government:

The royal family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour 2010, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.

Last night, HM The King announced that his brother, until recently HRH The Duke of York KG KCVO, will now be formally stripped of all his titles, styles and dignities and will be reduced to trying to book fashionable London restaurants — or even Pizza Express in Woking — as plain old Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. As longtime readers may recall, I dined at Buckingham Palace, midst princes, dukes, earls, viscounts and knights, as the only mister at the table and rather enjoyed it — although, even at that lowly rank, the sense of remorseless imperial decline down the decades is palpable: from Mr Gladstone … to Mr Steyn … to Mr Mountbatten Windsor … Why not go all the way and order His former Royal Highness to wander the streets as Mr Sarah Ferguson?

Be that as it may, it was the final sentence in the Palace’s 109-word statement that caught my eye:

    Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

Had the King said that to me in person, I would have had great difficulty in restraining myself from punching him on the nose. Their Majesties have never expressed any “utmost sympathies” for the thousands upon thousands of their own young subjects in virtually every town up and down what passes for the spine of England gang-raped, sodomised, urinated on, dangled off balconies, doused in petrol, burned alive, fed into kebab mincers, etc. A decade ago, when I first met “grooming gang” victims in Rotherham, one of Sammy Woodhouse’s chums told me that “Charles and Camilla” were said to have expressed interest in meeting with survivors — although Sammy herself, ground down by official dissembling even then, expressed some cynicism as to the likelihood of any such Royal audience ever happening.

It never did. The Prince of Wales has his Earthshot campaign to save the planet, and for a while the Duke of Sussex had his HIV-Aids charity in Botswana and Lesotho. You would think one’s “utmost sympathies” for such uncontroversial apolitical causes as climate change and Aids could be easily extended to little girls taken as sex slaves — particularly when it’s visible from the sod-bollocking turrets of Windsor Castle. Just to pluck at random, less than three miles from St George’s Hall, where the King uncontroversially celebrates Ramadan iftars and where equally uncontroversially Princess Beatrice’s masked ball once hosted not only Jeffrey Epstein but also Harvey Weinstein … how does the old song go? “I Danced with a Perve who Danced with a Girl who Danced with the Prince of Wales“? Anyway, less than three miles from Windsor Castle lies Diamond Road in Slough, where a chap called Azid Ahmed was found to have engaged in “five acts of sexual activity with a child”.

Any “utmost sympathy” for that victim, sir? Or does your sympathy in such matters not extend beyond the territorial waters of Epstein Island? England is a land that, literally, rewards sex predators. If you want the Andrew Formerly Known as Prince to bugger off out of sight, why not give him a year’s salary as the British state has just done to Hadush Kebatu? Mr Kebatu is the Ethiopian who two days after arriving by dinghy sexually assaulted a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in Epping and set off the summer of “far-right” “racist” protests. He was convicted and imprisoned at HMP Chelmsford, which then managed to release him — “accidentally”. He spent two days wandering around the most surveilled city on earth and piling up enough camera footage to outpace the director’s cut of Lord of the Rings. So, for the crime of embarrassing Sir Keir Starmer, he was immediately put on a flight to Addis Ababa and given five hundred quid if he would agree not to contest his deportation.

Average annual salary in Ethiopia: 524 pounds sterling. So Hadush Kebatu is back home living large and telling friends he had a great holiday in England and this King Charles guy paid him a year’s wages for raping a fourteen-year-old.

Next time (he’ll be back by Christmas) he should make like Harvey Weinstein and hold out for a CBE.

The taqiyya mayor of London, soon to be joined by the taqiyya mayor of New York, claims that the “King apologised for taking so long to knight me“. I can well believe it. So Sir Sadiq Khan now outranks Mr Mountbatten Windsor at state banquets (my palace dinner was a little more informal, so I got to sit between Sir Angus Ogilvy and the Earl of Carnarvon). Is that because Sir Sadiq has also expressed his “utmost sympathies” for “victims and survivors”? Not at all. As the political overseer of the Metropolitan Police he has consistently lied about the existence of any Pakistani Muslim rape-gangs in London. The official position of the British state was that “grooming gangs” may all very well be operating in Newcastle, Middlesborough, Blackpool, Bolton, Manchester, Rotherham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Telford, Leicester, Birmingham, Coventry, Banbury, Aylesbury, Oxford, High Wycombe … but that it all mysteriously grinds to a halt once you hit the outskirts of the Metropolitan Line.

Alas, there are now so many dark secrets swept under the rug even Scotland Yard has noticed the bulge. So the Met has just announced they’re “reviewing” one or two … er, actually, no, nine thousand cases of “grooming”.

The striking feature of the end-phase Yookay is its total lack of “utmost sympathies”. Earlier this week, in Uxbridge (where, as it happens, the Metropolitan Line does end), an apparently pleasant fellow called Wayne Broadhurst was taking his dog for a walk when he was fatally stabbed by an Afghan who’d arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry and had, as is traditional, been given “leave to remain” — because of his potential contribution to GDP through increased machete sales.

October 24, 2025

British and Irish media try to hide the crime that triggered Dublin riot

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

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill on the complicity of British and Irish media in trying to cover up the reasons behind the violence in Dublin outside a hotel housing migrants:

Last night, the BBC told one of the grossest lies of omission I have ever seen in the mainstream media. It published a report about the disturbances outside a migrant hotel in County Dublin and nowhere did it mention what triggered the riotous behaviour. Three hundred and eighty-seven words pumped into the gadgets of the masses, every one of them devoted to damning the “thuggery” of those who assembled at the hotel. Not one of the words – not one – addressed the thing that angered them.

What was that thing? It was the alleged sexual assault of a 10-year-old Irish girl by a failed “asylum seeker” on the grounds of the hotel. An alleged assault so serious that the girl was hospitalised. What’s more, this is a highly vulnerable girl in the care of the state. Maybe none of that matters to the BBC. Perhaps the alleged violation of a defenceless innocent by a man who was meant to have been deported from Ireland is immaterial to the aloof scribes of Britain’s public broadcaster. How else do we explain that they essentially redacted this information, one of the most salient parts of the story, from their initial dispatch on the fury gripping a community across the Irish Sea?

The irony of the BBC’s seeming indifference to the alleged horror that provoked last night’s disturbances is that it will compound the unrest on the streets. Indeed, it will confirm the sense that the media classes, in Dublin and beyond, give not one toss for the safety of people’s children or the validity of their own views on immigration. In so heartlessly erasing that girl from its early reportage, the BBC will have intensified the fiery anger of the very “thugs” it hates.

The disturbances made for unpleasant viewing. They took place outside Citywest Hotel in Saggart, a town in County Dublin about 12 miles from Dublin city. This is a hotel that just last month was sold to the state for €148million for the purposes of housing migrants. Then this week, an assault of the most appalling kind allegedly took place either on its grounds or in its vicinity. A girl was hospitalised, and a man in his thirties was arrested.

The details are distressing. The 10-year-old girl was in the care of the Irish Child and Family Agency. She reportedly absconded from staff during a recreational trip to Dublin city. She was reported missing to An Garda Siochana (the Irish police). She was later found close to Citywest Hotel and reported that she had been assaulted. As part of their investigations, the Gardaí have arrested a man who arrived in Ireland six years ago, who failed in his application for asylum, and who has been the subject of a deportation order since March.

Everyone must let the investigation take its course and the truth be ascertained. The anger of the people of Saggart is wholly understandable but riotous violence is never the answer. Cops outside Citywest were pelted with a volley of bottles. Brick walls were dismantled to turn into projectiles to hurl at the guards. At one point, Irish lads even charged the police lines with horse-drawn sulkies (carts). These were grim scenes, echoing the riot that rocked Dublin city in November 2023 following the stabbing of three children by a man from Algeria.

Not the Bee has some video clips of the scenes outside the Citywest migrant hotel.

Update, 27 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 19, 2025

Mandating the use of bodycams for ICE agents

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR discusses the results of mandating bodycams for police officers, suggesting that bodycams on ICE agents won’t drive the changes activists are hoping for:

This is a followup on my earlier post about the expected effects of requiring bodycams on ICE agents.

I used Grok to do some digging into the literature examining the effects of bodycams on measurable statistics of unlawful police violence.

I did not have any strong expectations about what I was going to find.

Do the query yourself if you like, but I can tell you that the answer is going to reduce to two sentences:

1. Bodycams do not have any statistically significant effect on measures of unlawful police violence.

2. Body cams do have a statistically significant effect, reducing allegations of unlawful police violence.

This means that the only statistically significant effect of bodycams is to deter false claims of police brutality and bigotry.

Note: do not read this as me claiming that cops are untarnished angels. I know people who have been brutally abused by police. I know this does occasionally happen, and I condemn the police culture of silence about such abuses.

What I am saying is that what you see on bodycam footage, which is almost always police exercising commendable restraint in dealing with extremely violent and stupid people, reflects reality. If it didn’t, reality would leak around the edges of the camera non-coverage as an observable effect on incident statistics.

I don’t expect the effect on ICE to be any different. I expect mandatory body cams to backfire rather badly on people who pushed them in the hopes of exposing ICE as some sort of out-of-control Gestapo.

If anything, I expect the consequence to be an increase in already high levels of public support for mass deportations of illegals. Because I know what the results of lots of bodycam and security camera footage has been about public perception of underclass criminality. It gets more difficult to sell the narrative of these people as innocent victims of a repressive society after you’ve seen your 47th video of a screaming semi-psychotic trying to knife a cop during a traffic stop.

Some of the activist orgs that wanted the body cams made mandatory for street cops now want them turned off. I think it’s pretty likely the same thing is going to happen with immigration enforcement sooner or later. Most likely sooner.

October 17, 2025

QotD: Wickermanism

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

“What do you call your ideology”

I’m a Wickermanist.

Conservative? Classical Liberal? Libertarian? Anarcho-Capitalist?

All of these got immediately diluted by moderates and blackmail curious boomer compromisers.

Conservative … “but leave the blackmailed pedos alone.”

Classical Liberal … “but let us just have totalitarian surveillance.”

Libertarian … “but what do you mean ‘taxation is theft’ and IRS agents should die in work camps … We’re Socially liberal and fiscally conservative.”

Anarcho-Capitalists … “But like private violence to enforce natural law doesn’t mean YOU should shoot criminals and state enforcers.”

I’m a Wickermanist.

I’m naming my ideology after the execution method I want to see practiced annually either by governing entities, private paramilitaries, or radicalized individuals.

Pedos. Corrupt politicians. Traitors to foreign governments. Would-be tyrants. I want them burnt alive in giant Wickermen every year.

Not one time during the revolution, not once everyone agrees, but irrespective of any institutional authority save the match lighter. That ongoingly every year to appease the sun or whatever.

If it’s formalized and good governance is actually achieved and they didn’t find suitably corrupt politicians one year, they can draw lots or an extra old one can volunteer and be remembered as a hero. but I want wickermen burning.

I’m tired of having to constantly rebrand as somehow every ideology becomes “Pay your taxes, don’t ask about Epstein, don’t enact private vengeance no matter how precedented or implied by the ideology or demanded by the founders and the entire western cannon.”

Even “Nazi” has become something Elon, Trump and Grok are …

“MechaHitler” is a popular product by a Fortune 500 and somehow IT got lame within 24 hours.

I’m naming my ideology after an execution method so you moderate losers can’t poison it.

“But muh mass appeal!?”

Democracy is old women and the hormonal equivalent, who can’t commit violence, betraying their kinsmen who can so that the enemies of their nation will tell them their opinions matter.

No change that has ever mattered has been spearheaded by the Median voter, and no great person in history has ever paid them any note.

The only tragedy is that there is neither the time nor the lumber to burn the average voter.

Kulak, Substack Notes, 2025-07-12.

October 11, 2025

Crossing the line between “justice” and “persecution”

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

At The Intrepid Viking, Roxanne Halverson notes just how determined the Canadian justice system was to inflict the most pre-trial punishment as possible on Tamara Lich and Chris Barber for their leadership role in the Freedom Convoy:

Tamara Lich and Chris Barber
Photos from The Intrepid Viking

The convoy leaders, Lich and Barber, […] finally learned their fate in an Ottawa courtroom on October 7th, 2025, almost four years since the trucks first rolled into the capital, and over two years since their trial began on September 5, 2023. Rather than the unwarranted and what can only be described as vindictive prison terms sought by the Crown, Justice Heather Perkins-McVey instead sentenced them both to conditional non-custodial sentences of 18 months. A decision, one can be sure, the Crown is not pleased with and one that is nothing short of humiliating given it falls farther short from the seven and eight year terms they argued for than they could have possibly imagined.

[…]

But Lich and Barber have indeed suffered. Both have been put through the legal grist mill of what now serves as Canada’s justice system since they day they were put into handcuffs and arrested on February 17/18, 2022. Barber was released on a bail bond of $100,000 after a night in jail with his wife acting as surety, meaning she would forfeit that amount if he breached his bail conditions. Under those conditions he was required to leave Ottawa within 24 hours of his release and depart Ontario in 72 hours, no longer support the Freedom Convoy and cease contact with fellow organizers. Breach of these conditions could also have landed him back in jail. His business and personal finances were also frozen for three months as part of the government’s illegal actions under the Emergencies Act. And now, to further try and impair and punish him financially the Crown prosecutors on this case are still attempting to seize and destroy his truck and livelihood, Big Red, which became a symbol of the Freedom Convoy. That matter is expected to be settled by Justice Perkins-McVey in court in November of 2025.

Lich, after her arrest spent a total of 49 days in jail before she was even convicted of any offence. Denied bail after her initial arrest in February, she spent 19 days in remand custody in an Ottawa jail because a judge deemed it was “necessary for the protection and safety of the public“. She was finally released on March 7, 2022 after an Ontario Superior Court Justice overturned the lower court’s outlandish ruling.

The vindictive nature of the first Crown prosecutor on their case, Moiz Karimjee, soon came to light when Lich was announced the winner of the George Jonas Freedom Award in May of 2022. He petitioned to have her bail revoked, arguing that being a recipient of the award was a breach of her bail conditions. Justice Kevin Phillips disagreed and amended provisions of her bail to allow her to attend the award dinner in Toronto, but still prohibited her from communicating with “certain” individuals at the dinner unless in the presence of legal counsel.

Karimjee, seemingly obsessed with seeing her back in jail, accused Lich of another alleged bail breach after she attended the award dinner when video evidence later surfaced of her having a brief congratulatory interaction with Tom Marazzo a Freedom Convoy organizer she was prohibited from interacting with. As a result, on June 27 Karimjee dispatched two Ottawa homicide detectives, yes homicide detectives, to her home in Medicine Hat to put the diminutive grandmother in shackles and fly her back to Ottawa and throw her back in jail. She was finally released following another bail hearing, in which Karimjee made every effort to keep her behind bars, but justice prevailed and she was released from custody on July 27, 2022.

Lich’s lawyer Lawrence Greenspon was highly critical of Karimjee’s actions stating, “This is the third time the crown has tried to incarcerate Ms. Lich, this time for a three-second interaction, and a photo. The prosecutorial response to this far exceeds the severity of the alleged breach“. Further remarking on the situation, Greenspon added, “Had there been a proper investigation before Tamara Lich was arrested, shackled, hauled halfway across the country and then kept in jail for 30 days, they would have realized that her then-counsel were present at the time and therefore these charges should never have been laid“.

And like Barber, and many other convoy protesters, Lich’s bank accounts were also frozen by the government under the Emergencies Act for a period of three weeks.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Chipiuk posted:

Read it and weep, snowflakes. The lies are exposed, the facts don’t lie, and people across the world can see the truth.

The question remains: when will you stop lying to yourself and others, and start thanking your fellow citizens for fighting for your freedom?

“Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, organizers of the most successful protest in Canadian history, kept their cool, kept the peace and brought national unity, patriotism and common sense back to Canada after the pandemic – this, despite the sustained efforts of the most aggressively controlling, divisive government the nation has ever had. They achieved this under intense pressure and at great personal cost.

They’re national heroes, and the persecution waged against them is destroying trust in the Canadian judicial system, though the judge involved does not seem to realize it. Justice Perkins-McVey said in court that if she discharged the defendants, it would “undermine confidence in the administration of justice”.

But it’s quite the opposite …

There was another ironic moment at the sentencing. The judge announced, “Politics has no place inside this courtroom” – yet the trial has been widely viewed as nothing more than the political vengeance of Doug Ford and the Ontario government.

If it weren’t for politics, Lich and Barber would never have been arrested, let alone put through jail time, solitary confinement, loss of employment, years of drawn-out, costly legal proceedings, onerous bail conditions and emotional strain …

This means the public is paying twice – once as taxpayers, with money intended to pursue real criminals wasted on a political vendetta – and once again, voluntarily, to support the brave people who stood up to ask for an end to lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

This is the same public that already gave $24 million to the truckers to help them go to Ottawa and protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns: $24 million that never reached them, because politicians colluded with fundraising sites and banks to freeze the money, debank the protestors and doxx the donors, all without a court order. No criminal charges have been laid in Canada, to this writer’s knowledge, against the perpetrators of these deeds, though they damaged national institutions far more than any protest ever could.

Justice Perkins-McVey is right to be concerned about confidence in the administration of justice. Many Canadians share her concern. Sadly, her handling of this case has done little to dispel their fears.”

Antifa declared a foreign terrorist organization

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR claims a win from his earlier analysis posts on Antifa in the United States:

For those of you who have been tracking my intelligence analysis posts about Antifa, I now get to claim a correct prediction.

The President of the United States has declared Antifa a foreign terrorist organization.

Providing aid to an FTO is a crime (18 U.S.C. § 2339B). This declaration unlocks the legal tools required to go after Antifa’s funding network and allies, both foreign and domestic.

Those of you who are watching as USAID was unmasked as a left-wing slush fund won’t have any trouble understanding how the funding network functions. Allies of revolutionary Communism and nihilism at large charitable foundations direct money to smaller foundations which act as pass-throughs to others. After enough layers of this to maintain deniability (because the federal statute specifies “knowingly”), direct enablers of terrorism collect the money and use to fund things like a bullet ripping through Charlie Kirk’s neck.

There’s some rake-off along the way, of course. Can’t have all those elite failsons and faildaughters going without sinecures, after all. They have expensive habits to maintain.

Following the FTO declaration, the government can now gin up a case for seizing the assets of anybody in the funding chain, all the way back to the initial donors. The usual doctrine that “knowingly” extends to those who should have known, and who willfully failed to perform due diligence in order to avoid criminal exposure, applies here. Precedent for this was well established by organized-crime prosecutions 50 years ago; it’s why we have RICO laws.

It remains to be seen how much political will there is to actually bring down this hammer. In the maximal scenario,

(1) Trump issues a loud public warning to all charitable donors that they’d better cut ties to any organization that doesn’t provide them with full transparency about where the money is going.

(2) Left-wing dark money outfits like Arabella and the Tides Foundation get sent formal spoliation-of-evidence warnings, followed swiftly with audits by people with zero sense of humor.

I wish I were confident that all of this is going to happen. There’s going to be a lot of obstruction from Democrats and screaming by the media — the people who keep telling you that Antifa doesn’t exist because they want to keep their army of brownshirts intact. The administration could lose its nerve.

But at least it’s possible now. The political conditions for it are better than they have been in my entire lifetime.

Update: Fixed messed-up URL.

October 8, 2025

Sentenced for their role in the largest peaceful demonstration in Canadian history

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

The longest “mischief” trial in Canadian history finally concluded on Tuesday with Chris Barber and Tamara Lich receiving much lighter sentences than the crown had asked for, but in my opinion, far harsher than justice demanded:

One of the readers at Small Dead Animals got a clanker to summarize this: “Regarding the convictions of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, compare their trials and sentences to leftwing protesters who have openly and violently broken laws in Canada.”

In comparison, left-wing protesters in Canada involved in violent or disruptive actions — such as anti-pipeline blockades (often tied to environmental and Indigenous rights causes) or Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations against racism and police violence — have typically faced shorter trials and lighter sentences for similar or more destructive offenses. These cases often involve civil disobedience escalating to property damage, blockades, or clashes with police, but convictions emphasize non-violent intent or police misconduct, leading to minimal incarceration.

Overall, Lich and Barber’s cases drew unusually aggressive prosecution (e.g., multi-year sentences sought) despite no violence, contrasting with lighter outcomes for left-wing actions involving property destruction or direct confrontations. This disparity has fueled debates on selective enforcement, though courts in both contexts prioritize deterrence while considering protest motivations.

Unlike a lot of clanker slop, that is pretty fair. More reactions on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

In the Toronto Sun, Joe Warmington accurately calls it a “show trial of sorts”:

Even though this is far better than making these two go to prison or jail, these are still stiff sentencing considering neither were violent during the Convoy and both worked with police to tone things down during the three week protest that came to an end when the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act.

But this was a show trial of sorts, and Lich and Barber were political prisoners. Remember, both of these people have had the hardship of waiting 1,328 days through the longest mischief trial in Canadian history to get to this point. They had their bank accounts frozen during the convoy, Lich lost her job and Barber’s business is at risk of going under. A hearing is scheduled for next month in an effort to seize his famous “Big Red” truck.

It’s also lost on few that so many criminals with far more serious crimes have received far less in terms of length of trial, effort of the Crown and sentencing.

These are certainly stiffer sentences than some parliamentarians have received. For example, in 2021, Former Liberal Kitchener South-Hespeler MP Marwan Tabbara was handed a conditional discharge and put on probation for three years after his guilty plea was entered for two charges of assault on a man and a woman in Guelph. He also pleaded guilty to the amended charge of “unlawfully” being “in a dwelling” or home.

Conservative Sen. Patrick Brazeau was given an absolute discharge in 2015 on his guilty plea to assault and narcotics counts, which allowed him not to serve time or gain a criminal record. But while they did avoid jail time, Lich and Barber did get the book thrown at them harder than most.

Update, 9 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 3, 2025

Mulligan “Hobo” Stew from the Great Depression

Filed under: Food, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Apr 2025

Soup with canned peas, canned corned beef, onion, and ketchup

City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1940

Today the word “hobo” is usually used in a derogatory manner, but back in the time between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Great Depression, it referred to a specific group of migrant workers and their culture.

Part of that culture was mulligan stew, which was basically a stew of any meat and vegetables that were thrown together. The ingredients would be made up of things that keep well, mostly food that was canned or bottled.

The flavor of this soup is surprisingly good, but it’s maybe a little too sweet, even for me. The prodigious amount of ketchup is the dominant flavor, and maybe 1940 ketchup was less sweet than modern versions.

    Mulligan Stew (Serves 6)
    1 medium size can corned beef — minced
    1 onion — minced fine
    1 No. 2 can peas with liquid
    1 medium size bottle tomato catsup
    1 cup water
    Salt and pepper to taste

    Put all ingredients in saucepan and simmer gently over low flame for about one hour. The flavor improves with the length of cooking time.

    — The Brookshire Times, August 2, 1940

(more…)

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