Quotulatiousness

February 20, 2026

Stephen A. Smith as a Democratic Trump

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

It’s been noted many times that the Democratic Party has had a logjam of aged boomers at the top of their “bench” for future leadership positions. This is a serious problem for the self-described “Party of Youth”, that they have remarkably few viable Gen X, Millennial or Gen Z rising stars who might be future presidential candidates. Donald Trump took the political insiders by surprise in 2015/16, because he was an outsider with no political track record but a huge media profile. He may be the template that Stephen A. Smith hopes to follow on the Democratic side:

Stephen A. Smith at The Moody College of Communications, 23 January 2021.
Wikimedia Commons.

Stephen A. Smith is flirting with a run for president. In a recent CBS News interview, the telegenic ESPN commentator openly entertained the possibility of seeking the Democratic nomination in 2028. He offered additional comments on policy that were striking in their normalcy. He dismissed the idea that racism defines contemporary American life, rejected “defund the police”, and emphasized economic flourishing as the surest path to social stability.

Smith has a gift for performance, a fondness for hyperbole, and a resume devoid of elective office. Historically, that would have made him an unorthodox fit for the White House. But since Donald Trump’s 2016 election, those facts do less to disqualify a figure than to clarify his potential appeal.

And Smith seems to be taking the possibility seriously. His CBS interview builds on previous comments criticizing politicians who support income caps or engage in class-war rhetoric, framing prosperity as a moral and civic good, and condemning the Democratic Party’s excesses on cultural matters like transgenderism. In these comments, Smith captured the sensibility of millions of voters who feel alienated by the ideological vocabulary of contemporary Democratic politics.

While it’s tempting to write off Smith’s flirtation as unserious celebrity theater, that impulse overlooks the weakness of the Democratic field. Kamala Harris enters the cycle as the nominal frontrunner, but her standing reflects name recognition more than enthusiasm. Gavin Newsom commands attention through media savvy and partisan combativeness but carries the burden of California’s abysmal policy record. Other prospective contenders — none of whom have managed to crack double-digit support — may offer competence without excitement or excitement without coalitional appeal.

A primary defined by such choices creates space for an outsider, especially one who can command attention and articulate a distinct political persona. Smith lacks the accumulated baggage of conventional politicians. Even more importantly, he speaks like someone accustomed to unscripted confrontation. Two decades of live television have trained him to think quickly, read audiences, and project conviction. While such skills cannot substitute for governing experience, they matter a great deal in an era where voters evaluate authenticity and affect alongside ideology.

In fact, Donald Trump demonstrates that a candidate who pairs ideological flexibility with rhetorical aggression can reshape a party. Trump softened Republican orthodoxy on entitlement reform, health care, and even social issues — like gay marriage, guns, and abortion — at various points. Yet he maintained the loyalty of a base that valued his willingness to fight. That in turn forced GOP insiders to capitulate to many of his views. Smith shares Trump’s intensity, and could by the same method push the Democrats to moderate.

At the same time, his nascent platform could complicate Democratic coalition politics. The party’s donor and activist classes exert powerful pressure against moderation. These interests remain influential in candidate recruitment, messaging, and resource allocation. That influence often produces nominees who align with activist priorities even when those priorities diverge from median Democratic voter preferences.

February 13, 2026

QotD: The Democrats re-focus on the youth vote

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That’s why it might work. Young people’s lives are simpler; it’s one of the great things about being young. That’s not me, the old guy, knocking the kids; it’s just the way it is. If that’s the way they decide to go — Jungvolk uber Alles — then that’s how they’re going to have to do it. Mamdani, the young, vigorous, exotic, foreign-born socialist weirdo — you know, a Barack Obama for The New Generation.

Which is why I’m tempted to write it off. After all, Obama was just a Bill Clinton for The New Generation. Who was just a JFK for The New Generation. Who — we forget this — was just FDR for The New Generation. Most of the idiot Boomers who voted for Bill Clinton as “the New JFK” barely remembered JFK. Nor did JFK himself win “the youth vote” by all that much — or at all — because “the youth vote” wasn’t a thing back then. For one thing, the voting age was still 21. I’m in History, not math, but even I can do Historian math, and 1960 – 21 = 1939. Most of JFK’s voters had clear memories of The Depression; even his youngest voters remembered the tail end of WWII. JFK sounded like an East Coast patrician, just like FDR did, and as opposed to that young parvenu from California, Richard Nixon.

That’s just a wee bit different from “the Youth Vote” Bill Clinton appealed to. To say nothing of the later freaks.

I’m tempted to write it off, but I’m not going to. For one thing, Obama, Clinton … they all won, and look at the incalculable damage they did. More importantly, I want to return to an issue we tabled earlier: The fact that there’s no “middle age” cohort in the Donk Party. They really are the Volkssturm — kids and oldsters. Or, if you prefer, they’re the Bolsheviks — having shot all their “technical intelligentsia” during The Revolution, they have to go out there and reinvent everything. All their accumulated experience is gone, so their rookies don’t just make rookie mistakes, they make the kind of mistakes that anyone with the tiniest shred of experience could see coming.

You know, those “hmmmm, I wonder what this big red button does?” types of mistakes.

You see it in the business world. Z Man, may he rest in peace, used to talk about this all the time. The Boomers were retiring, the kids were just so epically clueless, and all the thousands of workarounds and jimmy-rigged stuff that makes any operation go were seizing up, for lack of maintenance. And even the smart, ambitious kids were having a hell of a time getting up to speed, because they were looking for a Policies and Procedures manual that simply doesn’t exist. There’s no Official Manual for jimmy-rigged workarounds.

Say what you will about the Boomers, they’re competent. They might well be the last competent generation …

… maybe the older, smarter half of Gen X, but a) there were never that many of us, and b) in politics, as in so much else, the Groovy Fossils just would. NOT. leave, and so the competent among Gen X had to go do their own thing, if they ever wanted a chance to move up. This leaves your big Legacy Systems — you know, like the Apparat — in one hell of a bind. The Groovy Fossils don’t want to leave, but eventually they have to — 90 may be the new 30, but dead is dead. And they’re the only ones who know how to operate the Legacy Systems, because there are two, three “generations” of people who, if they had anything on the ball, had to go their own way.

Those who stayed had no choice, and all they know how to do is push buttons and fill in blanks. Look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Anyone 50 or older looks at her with horror, because we’ve all had to deal with that kind of kid. That’s the kind of person who has filled up every layer of the Apparat below Top Management. If they had anything at all on the ball, they’d be somewhere else … but they don’t, so now they’re all in Senior Management, because somebody’s got to do it, and they were better at pushing buttons and filling in blanks than anyone else who was available at the time.

But note that I’ve just been talking about candidates, politicians. The VOTERS are like that, too. See what I mean? That’s why it’s so dangerous … and very likely to succeed.

Severian, “Groovy, Baby!!”, Founding Questions, 2025-11-10.

January 16, 2026

Rapidly declining democracy in the home of the “Mother of Parliaments”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As I’ve mentioned before, it sometimes seems that Australia, Britain, and Canada are in a three-way race to de-democratize themselves as fast as they possibly can. Here’s the free-to-cheapskates portion of Ed West‘s essay on the return of liberal authoritarianism:

“Palace of Westminster” by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It’s around this time of year that various NGOs give their assessment on the state of democracy and freedom of the world. The Fraser Institute’s Human Freedom Index was published earlier in December and Freedom House’s next report will arrive in February. It was at the start of last year that Romania was downgraded to a “hybrid democracy” by another body, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), while France is now merely a flawed democracy. Sacré bleu!

What about our own beloved island, the mother of Parliaments? It will be interesting to see where Britain features in this year’s reports, and whether recent developments will impact on our rating.

Just recently, for instance, the British government postponed four mayoral elections until 2028, elections they are certain to lose. The Electoral Commission warned that it risked undermining “the legitimacy of local decision making and damaging public confidence”, while the chairwoman of the Labour Party even refused to rule out delaying the next General Election, leading Nigel Farage to accuse her of having “total contempt for democracy”.

Keir Starmer has also taken effective control of the House of Lords and will almost entirely eliminate opposition among peers by 2027, which he is able to do to the second chamber thanks to Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms. While the government extends the franchise to children, and even plans to place voting booths in schools, a clear violation of rules about politicising the education system, they’re also keen to restrict who can stand in elections.

As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, “is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.”

This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but “non-crime hate incidents“, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions.

When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of “democratic backsliding” usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal “strongmen” we read about, just not a very effective one.

There are a number of accepted symptoms of democratic backsliding, among the most commonly listed being rejection of democratic rules, a disregard for constitutional norms, attempts to use legal mechanism to sidestep democracy, which is described as “stealth authoritarianism”, denial of opponents’ legitimacy, and the tendency to characterise them as outsiders or a threat to national security; on top of this, one might consider a willingness to curtail civil liberties, restricting the power of the media, and violating freedom of speech and association. Finally, and worst of all, is the toleration or encouragement of violence against opponents.

Credit: the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago

By these broad definitions, Britain arguably meets many of these criteria (but not, most importantly, the last). There is certainly censorship, which has increased with the Online Safety Act, designed to combat “hate” as well as “misinformation”. Misinformation, of course, is everywhere, but its existence certainly provides a convenient excuse for governments to clamp down on the sort of information they dislike. The Government has also pondered banning Twitter, and while I feel that the widespread disgust at the Grok “deepfake” feature is reasonable, such a ban would completely cripple opposition, returning control of the discourse to the old media.

As for the British state’s definition of “hate”, there is a widespread belief that people motivated by hostility to mass immigration are extreme and dangerous, so the full force of the law must be used to stop them gaining support among a public who are totally guileless when it comes to absorbing information. This belief has grown more entrenched with the rise of populism, and makes western European governments increasingly sceptical of democracy itself.

It’s obvious that many people are concerned about the prospect of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister, and as the election date comes closer, and if he’s still in a position to win, the tone will become more shrill. Starmer admitted to this terror when he said, tellingly, that “If there is a Conservative government I can sleep at night. If there was a right-wing government in the United Kingdom, that would be a different proposition.”

Update, 17 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 11, 2026

Nazis Are the Big Losers – Rise of Hitler 26, October-December 1932

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

World War Two
Published Jan 10, 2026

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party are forced to hit the campaign trail yet again for yet another round of elections. All this campaigning has seriously drained their finances, so they expect it to do some real good. Unfortunately for them, the November elections are very disappointing for the Nazi Party, and they lose a lot of seats in the Reichstag. Adolf Hitler is still demanding that President Hindenburg make him Chancellor, but the President still refuses time and again, although Hindenburg does have his hands full with two other Chancellors — Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, and their endless political intriguing.
(more…)

November 7, 2025

Milei – “If we don’t have [power], then the left will have it”

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Without Diminishment, Geoff Russ discusses Javier Milei’s recent podcast appearance and his demonstration that unlike a lot of theoretical libertarians, he understands the dynamics of political power:

    There are many liberals, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are really useless because all they do is criticise, let’s say, those of us who want to lead the world toward the ideas of freedom. And what they don’t realise is that power is a zero-sum game, and if we don’t have it, then the left will have it. Therefore, if you level your harshest criticism at those in your own ranks, you end up being subservient.

Have truer words ever been spoken by an English-speaking politician?

Argentine President Javier Milei’s words on the Lex Fridman podcast were a blunt reminder of something that many conservatives, particularly those in Canada, have chosen to forget.

Politics is the pursuit of political power and the chance to use it before your opponents can. Debates can be won, superb essays published, and quotes recycled from deceased politicians. Without power, however, it all amounts to nothing more than a glorified brainstorming session.

The thoughtful ideas and proposals go to waste if they lie stagnant in perpetual bickering opposition.

On October 26, Milei won a resounding victory in the legislative elections. His party, Liberty Advances, gained forty-two seats and smashed the hard-left Peronists who have dominated Argentina’s politics for more than half a century.

Milei is a fanatical believer in libertarian ideas, and has never pretended to be a moderate or incrementalist. He famously brandishes a chainsaw to represent his willingness to destroy the broken socialist status quo of Argentina.

Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

The rise of Milei has been a cultural battle for the soul of the country, and he is not shy about it. Milei leads a fresh, winning anti-Peronist coalition of forgotten and angry Argentines who want permanent, radical change.

It may be tempting to view Milei’s success as a pure affirmation of the appeal of libertarian ideology, but he is hardly Argentina’s first advocate of economic freedom. He succeeds because he is the opposite of a polite, centre-right reformer. Milei unapologetically embraces his place as a culture warrior seeking to remake the nation.

One of his targets is the institutional decadence and incompetence of the Peronist political machine. By swearing to snuff it out, Milei swept through traditional Peronist strongholds, whose voters had never considered voting for the formerly toothless Argentine opposition.

In Reason, Peter Suderman considers some of the lessons North Americans can learn from Milei’s stunning election victory:

To understand why Democrats overperformed in this week’s elections, look to Argentina.

Last month, Argentinian president Javier Milei won an unexpectedly large electoral affirmation, as his party significantly outperformed expectations by more than doubling its congressional representation in what was widely seen as a referendum on his agenda.

Over the past two years, Milei, the world’s most libertarian national leader, has slashed spending, cut red tape, and made his top priority restoring economic order and prosperity to a country that has long been a socialist basket case. Critics warned that his policies would be destructive, destabilizing, and unpopular. But not only did he deliver the country’s first balanced budget in over a decade, he oversaw a radical decline in inflation — from 200 percent when he entered office down to 32 percent last month.

Despite warnings that the country would reject Milei’s brand of austerity, the country responded with a strong vindication of his policies. In a post-election analysis, The New York Times noted that Milei’s message was that only he offered a “path for a country that has undergone years of runaway inflation under high-spending populist governments”. The report pointed to Milei’s economic record to explain his party’s win: “Many Argentines had grown tired of prices swinging wildly from day to day and of a ruling class they considered to be corrupt and irresponsible”.

The same report said Milei’s outsized victory was “unexpected”. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been, because economic stability and low inflation are what voters the world over clearly want.

When voters swept President Donald Trump into office for the second time last fall, large majorities of his voters gave the economy poor marks and said their own family finances had worsened over the years. Under President Joe Biden, the American economy had been wracked by the biggest surge in inflation in forty years. American voters punished the party that was in power when that happened.

This was true all over the world. After the pandemic, inflation skyrocketed globally, and in election after election, voters rejected ruling parties.

Inflation and economic instability have long been political losers: Look at Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, and his ensuing near-sweep of states in 1984 after taming a decade of out of control price hikes. The post-pandemic years have further reinforced this lesson.

Update: Undoctrination looks at Milei’s time in office so far.

Undoctrination
Published 6 Nov 2025

Javier Milei just pulled off the impossible … again.

In Argentina”s 2025 “midterm” elections, Milei’s 4-year-old party, La Libertad Avanza, went from a tiny minority to the largest party in the lower house, ending socialist dominance in Congress. The election was widely viewed as a referendum on Milei’s shock therapy plan for Argentina. The results are in: Argentines want more freedom.

In this video we cover:
How Milei slashed inflation from 211% to 31.8% in just 2 years
The 34,000 government jobs cut, 10 agencies eliminated, and 672 deregulations that freed the economy during Milei’s first year in office
How the Buenos Aires rental market exploded after lifting controls
How Peronists lost their veto-proof majority — and what it means for the future

And we feature expert analysis from Marcos Falcone, Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberal and Prosperity.

November 6, 2025

Mamdanimentum – NYC gets its very own Justin Trudeau clone

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

It’s been decades since I last visited New York City, so I don’t know if they really deserve what they’ve just voted for, but I guess we’ll all get to find out over the next few years. On the City Journal substack, Reihan Salam weighs in on the newly elected mayor and what to watch for:

New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani photographed in Assembly District 36, 10 February 2024.
Photo by Kara McCurdy via Wikimedia Commons.

A year ago, not even the most perfervid Astoria leftist would have thought that Zohran Mamdani would soon be elected mayor of New York City. Back then, it was easier to imagine Eric Adams coasting to reelection on the strength of declining crime, or state attorney general Tish James, who came close to running for mayor in 2021, swooping in to unite a fractious Democratic coalition. With Adams badly damaged by a federal indictment and James anxious about what a mayoral bid would mean for her ongoing battle with President Donald Trump, however, the path was seemingly clear for Andrew Cuomo to make a dramatic comeback.

Though it was no secret that Cuomo had real weaknesses, thanks to his polarizing tenure as governor, his name recognition and formidable fundraising machine were enough to freeze out other serious contenders. As a result, the Democratic mayoral field was so bereft of talent that Mamdani — an obscure, hard-left state assemblymember with no legislative or professional accomplishments to speak of — was able to cut through, buoyed by surging anti-Israel sentiment and a series of half-baked pseudo-solutions to the city’s very real affordability crisis.

From one vantage point, then, Mamdani is best understood as an accidental mayor. If federal prosecutors had declined to prosecute Adams, if James had jumped in and Cuomo had stayed out, if Hamas had surrendered its hostages a few months sooner, if moderates and conservatives had consolidated behind a single candidate in the general election, or if any of a number of other possibilities had obtained — the outcome of New York City’s 2025 mayoral race would have been quite different.

In another sense, however, Mamdani’s victory represents the culmination of New York’s larger leftward turn. The shift started in 2018 with the dissolution, at Cuomo’s behest, of the state’s Independent Democratic Conference, an eight-member coalition of centrist Democratic senators who caucused with the Republicans. Their subsequent replacement heralded a broader takeover of Albany by progressives who — again, with Cuomo’s assent — passed a series of ideologically inflected bills: bail reform, the “most aggressive climate change legislation in the nation“, and a major overhaul of tenant protection statutes, to name only a few.

The Mamdani revolution was led by downwardly mobile elites — children of the professional class struggling to make ends meet and entranced by the promises of frozen rent and fare-free buses. They were fired by the same ideas that animated those Albany progressives: that some New Yorkers have been handed the short straw, that soak-the-rich policies can correct these imbalances, and that New York’s private sector was resilient enough to sustain a further ratcheting up of punitive taxation and regulation.

The voters of NYC are not the same demographic distribution as of old … among other things, the Jewish population has shrunk while the Muslim population has grown to nearly the same over the last 25 years, although Jewish women probably voted more similarly to women generally in this election:

October 30, 2025

Javier Milei’s party does well in mid-term elections

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

J.D. Tuccille on the results of Argentina’s recent elections which returned significantly more of Javier Milei’s allies than pre-election polls predicted:

And things were going so well before 2am …

Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei won an important election victory on Sunday when his coalition, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), received a plurality of votes in the country’s legislative elections. With about half of the seats in the lower house up for grabs and a third of the Senate, LLA didn’t gain a majority, but it dramatically increased its share enough to block repeals of presidential decrees by lawmakers from other parties and to support presidential vetoes.

As Reason‘s César Báez commented, the results give Milei and his allies crucial time to continue needed free-market reforms and, hopefully, restore the fortunes of a country once held up as a model of prosperity, but which has been driven into poverty by decades of statist misrule.

In what it calls “a shocking electoral victory”, La Nacion reports that LLA pulled 40.66 percent of the vote. That’s well ahead of the opposition Peronists, who have long dominated the country and drew 31.7 percent of votes. Importantly, LLA won the populous province of Buenos Aires (home to 40 percent of voters), a Peronist stronghold where Milei’s allies were recently trounced in local elections.

From Wealth to Poverty Under Government Economic Meddling

This is good news for anybody who hopes for the advance of freedom, of course. But it’s especially encouraging for Argentines who, over the course of generations, have seen their country reduced from one of the wealthiest in the world to an impoverished basket case.

“At the end of the 19th century, economists agreed: Argentina, the ‘land of silver’, had a golden future ahead of it,” Deutsche Welle noted in 2020. “‘Rich like an Argentine’ was a common phrase at the time.”

The German broadcaster added, “in an unprecedented fall, Argentina went from ranking among the world’s top economies to one at the very bottom of the list. Today, economists simply roll their eyes at the fate of Argentina, which is now a developing country.”

The reason is simple enough: Argentines handed their political fates to a man named Juan Peron. In the 1930s, Peron served as a military observer in Europe, traveling to countries including Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He was deeply impressed by some of the worst ideas to ever motivate a government and blended them into his own “justicialist” ideology. Through decades of political dominance, first Peron and then successor justicialists demonstrated that, in practice, there’s no real difference between fascism and socialism and that statist economics by any name are destructive.

To illustrate just how destructive Peron’s legacy has been, it’s worth pointing out that after Sunday’s election, The Wall Street Journal reported that Milei’s free-market, smaller-government policies “have restored some credibility to Latin America’s third-largest economy, but about one in three people still live in poverty”. One-third of the population living in poverty is horrifying, but what’s remarkable is that this is an improvement over what went before. At the end of the preceding Kirchner presidency, poverty stood at 41.7 percent and then briefly rose to 52.9 percent before falling to its current level.

In Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that the success of La Libertad Avanza is almost diametrically opposed to what most mainstream media reports were saying in the days leading up to the elections:

Argentine president Javier Milei has won a significant victory in Argentina’s midterm elections, held on Sunday. His libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), claimed more than 40 per cent of the vote, effectively doubling its share of seats in the senate and lower house to 37 (out of 72) and 64 (out of 257) respectively.

The result came as a bitter shock to much of the mainstream Western press. Milei’s assault on established economic orthodoxies since his election in December 2023 led many “experts” to take it for granted that Milei’s party was in for a hiding.

In a primer for the election published last weekend, the Observer had already begun salivating over the prospect of Milei’s defeat. “Argentina is counting the cost of its turn to Javier Milei”, wrote economics editor Heather Stewart. Glum portraits of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump behind Milei loomed above the article. “Politicians around the world are closely watching what happens when populist economic prescriptions collide with reality”.

This was a comparatively soft take compared with what the Guardian published earlier in October. “Farage, Trump, Musk: your boy Javier Milei just took one hell of a beating. Why so quiet?”, blared the headline when Milei’s party was defeated in a provincial election in the capital Buenos Aires. The Guardian said Milei’s “hard right” administration was “melting away”, along with his “once-packed international throng of cheerleaders and wolf-whistlers”.

Unsurprisingly, the BBC struggled to get to grips with Milei’s victory on Sunday, even though its only job was to convey the results impartially. Apparently, the president made gains despite Argentina “hurtling towards an economic collapse”, it editorialised. It said the voter turnout of 68 per cent reflected “widespread apathy”. This might be lower than past midterm elections in Argentina, but it was still higher than turnouts at last year’s US presidential election (65 per cent) and the most recent UK General Election (60 per cent).

None of this should come as a shock. Since Milei’s rise to power in 2023, most of the commentariat has been eager to see him fail. His promises to radically cut public spending and deregulate key industries were seen in the eyes of many economic experts to only mean one thing: the dreaded return of Thatcherite “neoliberalism”, from which, they claim, Britain and America have never truly recovered.

The antipathy is mutual. In a speech to the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Milei famously referred to the world’s political classes as “parasites who live off the state”. That his speech was shared approvingly by Elon Musk on X confirmed, in the eyes of the Western establishment, Milei’s status as a dangerous insurrectionist.

October 26, 2025

The financial gap between Zohran Mamdani’s promises and what NYC can afford

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

Short of a couple of political earthquakes, Zohran Mamdani is going to be the next mayor of New York City. He has, as Andrew Sullivan admits, a lot going for him with Democratic voters, but he’ll have to get some special magic formula working to fund all the things he’s promising:

New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani photographed in Assembly District 36, 10 February 2024.
Photo by Kara McCurdy via Wikimedia Commons.

It is not hard to see the appeal of Zohran Mamdani. He is, after all, not Andrew Cuomo — another corrupt, old, Democratic sexual harasser who’s already spent years in power and thinks he’s entitled to be mayor because of his last name. He doesn’t appear steeped in petty corruption like Mayor Adams. He’s not as obviously nutty as Sliwa seems to be. And he has done politics, pace Ezra, the right way: listening to the other side, earning people’s votes one by one, talking to people on the street, and, of course, mastering our new collective replacement for civil discourse: 30-second videos on TikTok.

Those videos are fantastic. Check out this one in favor of freezing rents in NYC, with the man, in full suit and tie, jumping into a freezing bay and out again. Or this one about “Halalflation” — on how licensing food carts has become a grift for middlemen. Or this one, when he sits down with two old white men — one for Adams and one for Cuomo — and tries to talk them into an alternative. If I were a Democrat, I’d be thrilled to see someone this fresh, this approachable, and this likable as a new face of the party. He’s young and charming and upbeat in a party lacking in all three.

He’s also right to focus his campaign on the question of affordability. New York City is ridiculously expensive in every way; the toll that high taxes and inflation have taken on working-class residents has been huge. Capitalism isn’t working the way it should, and we need to reboot our economic policies to address that as a priority. Trump has promised this but is delivering the opposite. Just this morning, we see an accelerating inflation rate. An opening beckons.

So I get why Mamdani is popular. And I have little doubt he will be the next mayor, as well as a major national figurehead for the Democrats — a nice dose of youth to a party debilitated by seniorityitis. He will define the Democrats nationally — certainly if the GOP has any say in it. And in many ways, he is the perfect candidate for today’s Dem elites: wealthy, woke, with a degree in “Africana studies.” His only problem is not being female — but since he denies that the category of female exists, no big deal I suppose. He will give the MSNBC/Bulwark crowd a new lease on self-righteousness.

But to be honest, when I read his proposals, at first I thought I was reading a high-schooler’s essay. Free everything! I mean: why not? Free universal childcare for kids as young as six weeks old. Free buses for everyone. Rent control for everyone already privileged by it. Subsidized collective supermarkets. $30-an-hour minimum wage by 2030 — up from $16.50. Woohoo! And arresting Bibi as an added bonus. (I have to say the last plank might even tempt me to vote for him.)

The problem, of course, is how to pay for it. And a NYC mayor, quite simply, cannot. Mamdani simply won’t have the power. None of the tax hikes he proposes — a new 2 percent tax on everyone earning over $1 million a year, and jacking up the corporate tax to 11.5 percent — can be passed by his council. Albany has the final say, will almost certainly say no, and the Democratic governor, Hochul, opposes the hikes.

So a lot of this is purely performative, no? He has a good chance to create his Soviet bodegas and, in all likelihood, freeze rents if he replaces members of the board. (That will, of course, make housing availability and expense even worse.) He may be able to wangle some increase in NYC’s minimum wage — by trying to bypass Albany. But doubling it in five years? Meh. All of the economic stuff is iffy because of the very probable lack of funding. Maybe a big victory will change the dynamics and allow a big tax hike in one of the most highly taxed cities on earth. But it’s hard to believe it.

So what’s left? What’s left is cultural leftism on hormones. You may get daycare — but it will come with full woke indoctrination of kids from the earliest years on. No more “boys” or “girls” allowed! Mamdani, as we all know, regards the police as the enforcers of “white supremacy“, supports the end of Israel as a Jewish state, will subsidize the transing of children with no safeguards, and has erased gays and lesbians from our own history, re-marginalizing us as “queers”. There’s no one the woke left hates more than an empowered and integrated person who just happens to be gay or lesbian.

Like all good critical-theory racists, Mamdani believes in a racial hierarchy with whites, Jews, and Asians as oppressors, and blacks and Hispanics and “queers” as victims; he wants to make NYC “the strongest sanctuary city in the country” — i.e. go to war with ICE — and kill the educational programs that help gifted poor kids in kindergarten — because most turn out to be of the oppressor races. A racist, in other words — to his fingertips.

And he is a near-perfect foil for Trump. “Queer liberation means defund the police,” he once tweeted — though he says he no longer wants to defund the cops. It’s the kind of 2020 slogan almost designed to ensure MAGA control of the national discourse forever. And if I were a show-runner on the Trump show, Mamdani would be central to provoking the kind of real fascist putsch that Trump and Miller are itching for, if they can find a suitable provocation. Mamdani is that provocation. He will go to war with ICE in NYC, and Trump will go to war with him. And broadcast it every day.

“Canada’s elections used to mean something. Now they’re a joke”

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

Dan Knight on the recent presentation by former Elections Canada head Jean-Pierre Kingsley and current Quebec electoral officer Jean-François Blanchet to the Procedure and House Affairs Committee in Parliament:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold – CC BY-SA 2.0

What we just witnessed in Ottawa last Tuesday wasn’t a hearing, it was a slow-motion autopsy of Canadian democracy. The Procedure and House Affairs Committee gathered to talk about the so-called “Longest Ballot Committee,” a group of self-styled activists who decided to “protest” the electoral system by flooding ridings with hundreds of fake candidates, turning the act of voting into a bureaucratic endurance test. And what did the political class do about it? They shrugged. They nodded solemnly. They said “shared responsibility.”

In other words: nothing.

Former Elections Canada chief Jean-Pierre Kingsley and Quebec’s electoral officer Jean-François Blanchet were the adults in the room, the only people who seemed to understand what’s actually at stake when you weaponize procedure to destroy trust. Kingsley, who’s been overseeing elections since before most MPs had a LinkedIn page, didn’t mince words: “The Long Ballot Initiative is unjustified and exceedingly disruptive“. In other words, a circus.

He called voting the act that “establishes the very legitimacy of Parliament”. That used to mean something in this country. Now? It’s a joke being played on the people who still believe their vote matters.

Blanchet gave the numbers that should have every Canadian furious, 40 candidates in one riding, 91 in another, 214 in a third. Two hundred and fourteen names. That’s not democracy, that’s sabotage. He called it “a movement to challenge the voting system, not to get candidates elected”. Exactly. It’s the bureaucratic version of an online troll farm.

He told MPs what voters already know: “Overly long ballots irritate voters”. You think? Imagine trying to fold a sheet the size of a blueprint just to cast a vote for your MP. And yet, for this — for actively undermining elections — no one’s been charged, fined, or even reprimanded.

Then Conservative MP Blaine Calkins finally asked the question everyone else was too polite to touch: Should there be penalties for those who make a mockery of our electoral system? Kingsley didn’t hesitate: “Yes“. He said it should go to a court of law, not a bureaucrat, not some anonymous commissioner. A judge. A real trial. Because that’s how serious this is.

Meanwhile, the Liberals on the committee did what they always do, changed the subject. Instead of talking about ballot fraud, they went off about “AI misinformation” and “deepfakes”. Liberal MPs Élisabeth Brière and Arielle Kayabaga wrung their hands about artificial intelligence like it was the Terminator coming for democracy. Never mind that the real problem was sitting right in front of them: a political culture that treats fraud as performance art.

October 25, 2025

Foreign interference? In our elections? Say it ain’t so …

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Oh, but it is, fellow Canadians, and it’s going to continue because our government can’t or won’t lift a finger to stop it:

The cover of the NSICOP special report on foreign interference (PDF – https://nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf )

[Vancouver-East MP Jenny Kwan]’s recent comments, which correctly noted the incredible hardship that Canadians targeted by foreign regimes endure, typically with no help from an apathetic Canadian government, are important and deserve amplification — we must all hammer home just how vicious a foreign influence campaign can be for those on the receiving end, and how little help they can normally expect from Canadian officials.

But mystifying? I wish.

A recap of the timeline is useful: The Liberals were “actively considering” such a registry as early as 2021. Late the next year, the magnificent Marco Mendicino, living embodiment of Trudeau-era ministerial excellence, was talking about launching a consultation, to see if it was an idea worth pursuing. A few months later, Justin Trudeau himself said that Mendicino would be “moving forward” to study “various proposals” in the coming weeks.

And then, well. You know. Nothing happened. In short order the government had the foreign interference scandal blow up in its face. A public inquiry was eventually called, after a long, drawn out process of increasingly pathetic attempts to dodge the issue. The initial report by Justice Hogue was released in May of 2024, and that month, the House unanimously passed Bill C-70, the Countering Foreign Interference Act. This gave the government the legal tools to establish the registry, a process they said would take about a year. That year ran out five months ago, and at that point … the office wasn’t even operating yet, even just in preparation for eventually going live. The Carney government then said they’d appoint a commissioner by September of this year. This would mark the beginning of the registry’s work.

It’s now late October, with nary a new-fangled commissioner to be found.

The Hill Times article places Kwan’s comments, and the government’s overall lackadaisical effort on this front, in the specific context of the Carney government’s efforts to offset our lopsided reliance on trade with the United States by improving relations with China and India. These are not countries with which we have lately been swapping friendship bracelets, and a foreign influence registry would largely — not exclusively, but largely — be intended to address their interference. “I am constantly worried about [foreign interference], but that doesn’t mean I’m not also worried about affordability issues for Canadians; I can do both,” Kwan is quoted as telling The Hill Times. “The Carney government needs to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time; they need to address both with the level of seriousness and attention they require.”

Later in the article, Dan Stanton, a former senior CSIS official and current national security expert at the University of Ottawa, adds that the Carney government has likely postponed any further announcements on the registry to avoid complicating ongoing talks with the Asian giants.

Well, yeah. That’s pretty clearly an issue. Kwan and Stanton have the government about dead to rights on that one. You can see the proof of that everywhere — Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand’s recent trip to India and China, after which she called China a “strategic partner”, is a pretty clear signal. The latest blowup in U.S.-Canada relations, with Trump cancelling all trade negotiations with Canada because (or so he claims) Ontario ran anti-tariff ads on U.S. TV, will only increase the desire in Ottawa to realign our economy toward literally anyone else but the Americans.

October 23, 2025

Alberta considers rule changes to get rid of the “Longest Ballot” pranksters

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

The last couple of elections Pierre Poilievre has fought attracted the attention of a group of activists who claim their shenanigans are directed at effecting changes in our electoral system, by flooding the field with frivolous candidates to somehow change how we elect our members of parliament. It’s odd that these serial efforts were directed at the leader of His Majesty’s Official Opposition, who has no power to change the electoral system rather than, say, the Prime Minister or his cabinet ministers who, theoretically, do:

Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the last general election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.

On Monday, Alberta Conservative House Leader Joseph Schow mentioned to reporters that the province’s government has legislation in the works to protect the Alberta electoral system from the shenanigans of the Longest Ballot Committee (LBC). That’s the protest group that has been flooding some federal election ballots with spurious candidates — most recently in the federal riding of Battle River-Crowfoot, where Elections Canada had to desperately improvise an all-new write-in system after the LBC persuaded more than 200 people to contest an August by-election.

Kieran Szuchewycz, one of the whimsical conspirators behind the committee, was the person who successfully (and without hired legal counsel) persuaded an Alberta Queen’s Bench judge in 2017 to eliminate statutory election-deposit requirements as unconstitutional. Justice Avril Inglis accepted that the purpose of deposits — which had already been made unconditionally refundable — was to deter frivolous candidates, and that this was desirable and rational.

But she concluded that “it makes little sense to suggest that the deposit requirement achieves any filter other than for those that cannot part with $1,000 for the duration of the election.” Deposits, which had been part of Canadian elections since before Confederation, had suddenly failed the Oakes test. Inglis’s ruling immediately led to an intentional explosion in openly frivolous federal candidacies, engineered by the very same gifted amateur who had talked her into it.

With deposits proclaimed unconstitutional, the only remaining defences against the Longest Ballot Committee’s DDoS attacks on democracy were the requirements for candidates to gather a hundred signatures of constituency residents on their nomination forms and to hire an official agent. The LBC skates around those by recruiting nominators who are willing to endorse anybody, using the same hundred signatures for many candidates, and by providing the same official agent, often somebody named Szuchewycz, to multiple candidates.

These days Mr. Szuchewycz’s brother Tomas is the public face of the LBC: earlier this month he appeared before the House of Commons procedure committee, which has dedicated a few meetings to the subject of LBC tomfoolery. (Kieran, the original smooth talker who got rid of election deposits, is currently listed as “on leave” from the board of electoral-reform group Fair Vote Canada.) There was a heated but unenlightening contretemps between Szuchewycz and Conservative MP Michael Cooper over whether the LBC had used unlawful techniques in their signature-harvesting efforts.

Szuchewycz explained the goals of the LBC ballot-fouling. The group’s supporters and leaders are obviously garden-variety election-reform nerds, but they now focus on the need for taking election design away from the House of Commons and delegating it to an “independent, non-partisan” body. Election reformers have an absolutely terrible track record of advancing their ideas when they’re put to direct referendum tests, and they were hilariously betrayed by Justin Trudeau in the Commons itself, so it is natural that they would seek a side door to the reforms they want. Even if that side door itself has an anti-democratic rule-by-expert character, which it absolutely does.

Update: Added missing URL to the main story.

The Liberal-funded legacy media all chorus that the Conservatives are collapsing

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

On his Substack, Brian Lilley contrasts what the legacy media are all pushing with the actual conversation among Conservatives:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

Pierre Poilievre stood before his caucus Wednesday morning and was contrite. The Conservative leader has caused himself and his party headaches since his comments about Justin Trudeau and the RCMP on the Northern Perspective podcast last week.

Will it be enough?

Time will tell but his Conservative MPs who are upset will have forgiven him long before the media will. The stories about Conservative MPs or supporters being upset have not abated and hours before Poilievre did his mea culpa, Radio-Canada, the French wing of CBC had a story with MPs sniping at Poilievre.

Of course, none of them were on the record.

Later in the day, the rumour mill started that at least one Conservative MP, most likely a Quebec MP, would cross the floor by the end of the day. I’ll tell you from experience that when rumours start on Parliament Hill, they can take on a life of their own.

Will someone cross the floor?

Perhaps, and I’ve been given names of the potential floor crossers by Liberals, but none of them have done it so far.

We wait.

It’s all part of crafting a larger narrative…

If you only consumed legacy media, you might think the Conservative Party was falling apart, that the Conservatives were falling in the polls and that fundraising had dried up. None of that is true no matter how often they tell you it is while the facts tell a different story.

Were Poilievre’s comments helpful with swing voters? Absolutely not, and while he’s not focussed on them yet, he will need to be one day so he needs to be more careful.

As I’ve stated though, Poilievre was right on the RCMP dropping the ball on SNC-Lavalin and someone should have been charged with obstruction of justice in that case.

But none of this means the Conservatives are falling apart at the seams.

Will you get people grumbling, absolutely. Will some of them turn to the media as anonymous sources, considering many turned to me months ago, sure, it’s going to happen.

I also have my own anonymous sources telling me there is no one in caucus organizing against Poilievre. Speaking to veterans of the Scheer and O’Toole palace coups, they say this is a very different feel.

People are tired, they are tired of losing, but they aren’t looking to replace Poilievre. That’s not just because there is no one waiting in the wings, they genuinely want to give him a second chance.

Given the latest Abacus poll, I’d say he’s doing okay. That poll would show a minority government if an election were held today, one that could go Liberal or Conservative.

October 15, 2025

Hamburg votes to secede from industrial civilization

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

Despite my always plummetting hopes for Canada I have to admit that I do enjoy a little soupçon of schadenfreude with every new bit of evidence from eugyppius that Germany is determined to ostentatiously self-destruct even before the demented Dominion can:

Hamburg is German’s leading industrial city. Its companies add 20 billion Euros in gross value every year. Much of this economic output is related to Hamburg’s happy location on the Elbe and the fact that the city is home to Europe’s third-largest port. All of this has made Hamburg extremely prosperous, which prosperity has filled it with rafts of clueless virtue-signalling morons who have no idea how anything works, why they find Hamburg attractive in the first place or how their hip urban lifestyles are maintained.

In this photo, published by BILD, you can see some of these unmitigated retards having a happy because they’ve just scored cheap virtue points by voting in their own personal energy apocalypse.

Photo from BILD via eugyppius

Specifically, these dumbasses are celebrating because their completely insane popular referendum passed with 53.2% of the vote on Sunday. This referendum, the so-called Zukunftsentscheid (“future decision”), binds the Free and Hanseatic City to achieving total carbon neutrality by 2040, five years earlier than the 2045 goal set by the almost equally insane Germany-wide Climate Protection Law as emended in 2021, which is in turn five years earlier than the 2050 goal established by the selfsame law as it originally passed the Bundestag in the year of the child-saint Greta Thunberg 2019.

Turnout was pretty low in Hamburg last Sunday, with less than 44% of eligible voters bothering to cast a ballot, most of them by mail. Thus just 23% of the most deranged Hamburgians could take their city hostage and commit its government to destroying all of its industry and most of its economic activity inside the next decade and a half. The biggest joke is that when Hamburg has finally achieved the sacred Net Zero, it will make absolutely zero net difference to anything. Hamburg is responsible for something 0.022% percent of CO2 emissions globally. The city is not even a rounding error.

The referendum was an initiative of Fridays for Future, but it gathered the support of various social and environmental organisations, among them Greenpeace, the union Verdi and even FC St. Pauli. It will successively cap annual CO2 emissions sector-by-sector, imposing a slow and relentless strangulation in turn on transit, households, commerce and industry.

September 3, 2025

“Once is happenstance. Twice is co-incidence” … but SIX?

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

I depend on eugyppius to keep me up to date on German affairs, and despite the eyebrow-raising total of six AfD candidates dying unexpectedly, he doesn’t think it’s actually “enemy action” as Ian Fleming once wrote in Goldfinger, but it is statistically boggling:

I had plans to write about something else today, and I even have a half-finished post, but the story of the mysteriously dying AfD candidates is everywhere …

… and I feel compelled to address it.

The West German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) is slated to hold municipal elections in just under two weeks, on 14 September. Eighteen million Germans scattered across thirty-one districts and 393 municipalities will elect councillors, board members, mayors and district administrators.

It’s important to understand the scale of these elections and the enormous numbers involved: Tens of thousands are presently running for office in NRW. The exact number isn’t certain, but it may be as great as 90,000. Most of these candidates are totally ordinary people. They are not professional politicians and they are not widely known outside their communities.

Four days ago, the German press began reporting on bureaucratic chaos stirred up by a series of unexpected deaths in late stages of the NRW campaign. Each of these deaths happened so late in the game that ballots had to be reprinted and the postal vote repeated. The German economist and social media personality Stefan Homburg picked up the story and called the deaths “statistically almost impossible“. AfD co-chair Alice Weidel retweeted Homburg’s suspicions, ultimately attracting the attention of Elon Musk.

Despite the widespread interest in this story, I really think it’s a nothingburger. We may be looking at an unusual cluster of AfD deaths in the upcoming elections, but we don’t know enough to say for sure how improbable this cluster is. All we can really say is that the deaths themselves are not unexplained and that their coincidence doesn’t look that improbable on its face.

August 30, 2025

German politicians in Cologne come up with a bold strategy … let’s see if it pays off for them

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

Whenever I think I’ve got a vague idea of what’s going on in German politics, eugyppius can be counted upon to show me I still don’t have the first clue:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

From BILD:

    Bizarre muzzling agreement in Cologne’s local election campaign!

    The CDU, SPD, Greens, FDP, Die Linke, and Volt have signed an agreement initiated by the Cologne Round Table for Integration to refrain from speaking negatively about migration during the election campaign …

    In consequence: the only relevant party in the Cologne campaign that will address the negative aspects of migration is the AfD.

That’s right:

Everybody from the rebranded ex-communists in Die Linke to the centre-right Christian Democratic Union have agreed to give Alternative für Deutschland a political monopoly over the most important issue of our era ahead of municipal elections in Cologne on 28 September.

Specifically, the dumbass signatories have agreed “to respect the diversity of our society”; “to promote … tolerance and peaceful coexistence among people of different origins, cultures, and religions”; “not to campaign at the expense of people with a migrant background”; “not to stir up prejudice” and “not to blame migrants and refugees for negative social developments such as unemployment or threats to domestic security”. They have done this because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside even though it is plainly and objectively retarded.

Should any signatory violate this agreement, the other signatories can cry to teacher by contacting designated “arbitrators”, in this case the chairman of the Cologne Catholic Committee or the superintendent of the Cologne Protestant Church Association. These people will then … I don’t know, have a sad and the tell the press about it, I guess.

Amusingly, the CDU already stand accused of violating the agreement for circulating flyers in which they critique state plans to establish a 500-spot refugee intake centre in Cologne. Their transgression has given the spokesman of the Cologne Round Table for Integration – the excessively named Wolfgang Uellenberg-van Dawen – occasion to publish the following fatwa press release […]

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