Quotulatiousness

April 23, 2026

The SPLC in the news

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

The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) is in the news this week for unusual reasons — not SPLC lawyers levelling accusations against individuals, elected officials, or corporate leaders, but the SPLC itself being hit with very serious charges from the US DoJ:

For nearly a decade, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville has been portrayed as a defining moral crisis of the Trump era. Across the media and in political speeches, Charlottesville became shorthand for “Trump-era” hate. In his 2019 campaign launch, Joe Biden called Charlottesville “a defining moment for this nation”, describing how “Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis” marched bearing “the fangs of racism”.1

He condemned President Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment. In Biden’s words, the president’s equivocation “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it”, and thus signalled a threat “unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime”.2 Polling at the time showed the public broadly agreed, nearly 60% of voters said Trump had “encouraged” white supremacists by his response, and a majority disapproved of how he handled Charlottesville.3 In short, Democrats and sympathetic media used Charlottesville as a concrete proof-point that Trump had unleashed a racial crisis, and that the country was in “a battle for the soul of this nation”.4 This narrative was presented earnestly by them: far-right violence in Charlottesville would be a national wake-up call about racial hatred that, in their telling, demanded urgent political action.

The Indictment: SPLC Charged

Last week, a new development has upended that narrative. On April 21, 2026, the Department of Justice announced that an Alabama grand jury returned an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the prominent civil-rights nonprofit best known for its “hate group” lists, charging it with wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.5 The indictment alleges that from 2014 to 2023 the SPLC secretly funnelled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals in violent extremist groups.6 For example, DOJ spokesmen say SPLC paid large sums to figures associated with the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, the Aryan Nations and others. Crucially, prosecutors claim SPLC used covert methods: it opened bank accounts in the names of “fictitious entities” (with names like “Center Investigative Agency”, “Fox Photography”, and “Rare Books Warehouse”) to disguise payments to its paid informants. By routing donations through these shell accounts, SPLC allegedly hid the true destination of the funds. In effect, donors were told their money was helping to “dismantle” hate groups, but a portion of it was instead being diverted back to the leaders and organisers of those very groups, all while SPLC publicly denounced them.7

The indictment lays out telling examples. One SPLC “field source” reportedly received over $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance.8 Another informant was actually in the inner online circle that planned the Charlottesville rally itself: prosecutors say he “made racist postings” in that chat group and even “helped coordinate transportation” to the August 2017 march, all while being paid by SPLC.9 The DOJ press release quotes FBI Director Kash Patel, who bluntly said SPLC “lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups” while “paying the leaders of these very extremist groups”.10 Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche similarly charged that “the SPLC is manufacturing extremism to justify its existence”, using donor money not to combat but to “stoke racial hatred”.11 DOJ officials argue that, if proven, SPLC’s actions amounted to an elaborate fraud: donors were intentionally misled, and false statements were made to banks to conceal the program. In sum, the indictment portrays SPLC as doing “the exact opposite” of its claimed mission, funding racial hate rather than fighting it. All of these details are, of course, allegations. The legal question at this stage is whether prosecutors can prove intent to defraud, but the charges alone lay bare a startling claim: that an organisation central to defining and fighting extremism may have been materially involved with it.

  1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/25/joe-biden-charlottesville-defines-trump-presidency/
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid
  4. https://www.jta.org/2019/04/25/politics/biden-makes-trumps-charlottesville-reaction-the-center-of-his-campaign-launch/
  5. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and/
  6. https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/g-s1-118275/southern-poverty-law-center-indicted-on-federal-fraud-charges/
  7. https://abcnews.com/US/southern-poverty-law-center-facing-justice-department-probe/story/
  8. https://www.wunc.org/2026-04-21/southern-poverty-law-center-indicted-on-federal-fraud-charges/
  9. Ibid
  10. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and/
  11. https://abcnews.com/US/southern-poverty-law-center-facing-justice-department-probe/story/

On a lighter note, The Babylon Bee asks you to donate to the SPLC today to support a needy racist in your community.

April 12, 2026

“The ‘Green Energy Transition’ is … a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside”

Filed under: Africa, Business, Environment — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, John Robson discusses the state of the fake green economy in the wake of a carbon market scandal where a now-bankrupt “green” company appears to have sold far more “carbon credits” than they should have:

One problem among many with the “Green Energy Transition” is that it was always a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside. It wasn’t market-driven, it was designed, and hyped, by people who didn’t care what people actually wanted to buy and indeed, in many cases, who actively believed that consumer preferences were inefficient and unenlightened. As when Bloomberg Green worries about “What a Clean Cookstove Company’s Bankruptcy Means for Carbon Markets”. Why one company’s bankruptcy should mean anything for “carbon markets” is less clear even than what a “clean cookstove” would be. One where you sprayed and wiped the backsplash as well as the main surface? But both are clearer than “carbon markets”. You just can’t go into a store and buy carbon. What are they talking about? Why, another face-plant by central planning, of course.

According to the article, in case you weren’t independently aware of it:

    This year was supposed to be a turning point for carbon markets, with the United Nations’ long-delayed country-to-country trading system coming into force and airlines preparing to enter a mandatory program to offset their emissions.

Before we get to “a turning point for carbon markets” let us give a bit of attention to “supposed to be”. Supposed by whom? Perhaps people who think the United Nations was an efficient central planner, or some subset of them. But we’ll bet that nobody normal ever said to you, or anyone else, in the course of a chat last year, “2026 will be a turning point for carbon markets”. Nobody.

Also, who was going to compel airlines to enter a “mandatory program”? Laws are made at the national level, not internationally. Turns out it’s the UN too, via the International Civil Aviation Organization, so no one was going to bungle or cheat, obviously. What could go wrong?

[…]

Why? If a company selling stoves went bankrupt in Peoria, would it cause people in Kenya, or Patagonia, or Tokyo to reconsider the whole issue of applying heat to transform food and decide that stoves, food or both were overrated? No. Of course not. The problem here is that this whole business of carbon credits was flummery.

First you made an estimate of how much harm carbon dioxide did which was nonsense. Then you made an estimate of how much CO2 some activity would release that was also nonsense. And then you made an estimate of how much CO2 some activity would not release (in this case cooking with ethanol in Mombasa) that was also nonsense. And on that basis you proposed to link the worlds of high finance, aviation and having stuff generally to a system that would have been economic rubbish even if it weren’t flashing a big bright sign “Defraud the gullible foreigners HERE!!!” Which it was.

Mathiness being in vogue, Bloomberg Green has a colourful chart explaining that “Cookstove credits are expected to become more important from 2027” that deserves as much respect as the journalistic passive voice typically does. Or perhaps even less.

The story also says:

    Prices on Corsia, the marketplace for airlines where Koko was looking to sell its credits, fell as low as $12.25 from about $15 just before the firm’s collapse, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and now sit at $12.85.

As prices for tulips softened abruptly in the Netherlands in 1637. Except at least there really were tulips and markets for same. Corsia is not a marketplace. It is, instead, the ICAO’s (remember: the International Civil Aviation Organization) “Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation”. As if ethanol stoves in Kenya, a land of some 53.3 million people who presumably only eat three meals a day on average, could offset the vast clouds of so-called “carbon pollution” that travellers, including the big-carbon-footprint bigmouths who lead most western countries, emit every day. The whole thing is speculation piled on ignorance atop mismeasurement built on the sand of dishonesty. What could go wrong?

April 1, 2026

“Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”

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

Perhaps it’s just me, but I read Freddie deBoer‘s refutation of Facilitated Communication with a kind of rising horror, that a parent or trusted adult could so take advantage of a disabled person to commit this kind of fraud:

“Facilitated Communication” by Faure P, Legou T and Gepner B is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novel Upward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.

The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests … This is the inconvenient, damning reality.

Message passing, or double-blind, tests are simple and remarkably effective. Information is provided to both the disabled person and the facilitator, often in the form of pictures or individual words, with both the facilitator and the test subject receiving the same information some times and discordant information other times. That is to say, the disabled person and the facilitator will sometimes both be shown a star or a watermelon or a flower or a bird, while at other times one might get the star picture while the other gets the bird, etc. If the disabled person genuinely crafts their responses, this should be a trivially easy test to pass: the facilitated communication will produce the information that the disabled subject received. And yet very close to literally 100% of the time in rigorous research, across dozens of studies with thousands of combined attempts, interactions produce the information the facilitator received and not the information the disabled person received. Surveying the literature, the consistency of this finding is remarkable — and there is no coherent explanation for how this could happen if indeed FC results in messages being sent from a conscious and alert test subject. Instead, these findings are perfectly consistent with Occam’s razor and the assumption that the facilitator is the one speaking.

Thanks to this overwhelming body of research literature, professional societies have tended to be unusually blunt about FC. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the leading professional body in this field, states unequivocally: “Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”. It continues: “There is no scientific evidence of the validity of FC, and there is extensive scientific evidence … that messages are authored by the ‘facilitator’ rather than the person with a disability”. This is not a marginal view; it reflects decades of careful studies across multiple countries. There are many other statements from relevant medical organizations and expert bodies that reach the same conclusion, which is to be expected, considering that the evidence points in only one direction. Are the facilitators deliberately engaging in fraud? No, it’s very likely that they’re being sincere, at least in the large majority of cases. The explanation is the ideomotor effect, the same unconscious motor influence that drives Ouija boards. The facilitator is not deliberately faking communication but unknowingly producing it, usually to satisfy their own desperate longing to connect with the disabled person.

So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling”, which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.

March 30, 2026

Canada’s immigration fraud system

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

As Alexander Brown points out, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and Canada’s immigration system produces vast amounts of fraudulent immigrants with only token attempts to detect and punish it. So Canada actually has an Immigration Fraud System, because that is what it does:

Let’s be clear about immigration fraud.

It started at the top. It was on purpose. And it’s still happening on purpose.

After a week of damning reports, and even a craven disregard for a return to decency, it has become abundantly clear that the government’s much-touted “reforms” are more about managing political perception than fixing a broken system. Behind the rhetoric lies a reality of widespread fraud, a continued lack of oversight, and an immigration department which has lost even greater control of its own bastardized mandate.

One of the most glaring failures has been the confirmed explosion of fraud within the international student program. Earlier this week, a scathing report from the Auditor General revealed that the IRCC failed to investigate the vast majority of cases flagged for potential fraud or non-compliance. Out of 153,000 cases identified in 2023 and 2024, only about 4,000 investigations were actually launched — a measly 2.6%. Even more troubling, 40% of these investigations were simply dropped because the students didn’t bother to respond to emails.

Speak to industry insiders and they’ll tell you that a “pay-to-play” market ran rampant between the years of 2021-2024, almost entirely on the basis of an understanding that fraudulent letters of acceptance, through equally dodgy institutions, would not be investigated through official immigration channels.

Let us not forget, even Ontario Premier Doug Ford touted this unvetted explosion — the worst policy decision in our nation’s history — as a success story. And yes, his office assisted in building for Conestoga, the worst offender of all the nation’s illegitimate institutions.

This culture of non-enforcement extends to the asylum system, which has seen a massive surge in claims. Since 2015, the backlog of refugee claimants has grown by a staggering 2,900%. While the government speaks of protecting the “vulnerable,” critics (read: normal people with morals and scruples) point out that the system is being exploited by those using it as a legal strategy to stall their removal from Canada. International students have spammed asylum claims after striking out in the labour force, making the trend so obvious that even then-immigration minister Marc Miller admitted it “[didn’t] smell good.”

Record levels of asylum fraud, in the six figures, is no mere matter of paperwork. The programme has become the safe haven for serial extortionists, varying degrees of triggermen from the Indian subcontinent, and those who have exploited a key loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement: Canadian judges no longer care to enforce the law.

March 22, 2026

QotD: The treason of the scientists

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

    Luca Barbato @lu_zero_
    Research is not taking money and then creative-write whatever fits the political faction you align with.

    And that’s why there are at least some people, that value science a lot, that consider burning down or starve “institutions” the correct first step to amend course.

One of those people is me.

I can still keenly remember my first feelings of crushing disappointment back in the 1980s when I started reading the “scientific” literature on gun policy and realized how utterly fraudulent much of it was.

I had grown up loving The Science, thinking of research scientists as the best of humanity, carrying us forward into a better future with honesty and courage. Discovering that there were people who would violate this sacred trust to push a political agenda hurt me.

But it only started with the gun policy literature. Sociology, psychology, political “science”, climatology. Learning how far the rot had spread was deeply dispiriting to me.

And the worst of it wasn’t even the hacks and partisans. The worst was noticing the cowardice of the people who failed to oppose them. Because that part isn’t just an indictment of the successful activists and manipulators, it’s an indictment of almost all scientists, everywhere.

Which is why I now contemplate rude, ignorant populists proposing to burn down large swathes of research funding and find myself rooting for the populists, not the scientists.

Because the lesson needs to be learned. It’s not just about driving out the hacks and partisans. Scientists, as a culture, need to learn the hard way that cowardice has a price — that if you don’t call out politicization when it’s happening, you don’t deserve the trust of the rest of our society, or the funding and privileges that come with it.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-21.

Update, 23 March: 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 8, 2026

Minnesota in the news

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

Like most people, I don’t normally pay much attention to news from Minnesota unless it involves my favourite NFL team. Thus far, thank goodness, the Vikings seem to have avoided being entangled in the latest scandals, starting with YouTuber Nick Shirley’s exposé of blatant fraud in daycare centres in and around Minneapolis that triggered Governor Tim Walz to end his re-election campaign. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Andrew Neil summarizes the situation so far:

The usual suspects have been claiming on X that the Minnesota fraud scandal is no big deal and that it was racist to place Somalis at the centre of it. They lie. Some facts:

The fraud scandals in Minnesota are a very big deal, involving (so far) the theft of over $1 billion in taxpayer funds across multiple schemes, primarily from federal and state programmes meant for child nutrition, autism services and daycares during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Federal prosecutors have already charged almost 100 people. Dozens convicted or pleading guilty. Investigators suggest the total could exceed $9 billion in fraudulent claims.

It is already the largest pandemic-related fraud case in US history, with money siphoned off for personal luxuries like expensive cars and real estate, rather than the intended recipients — like low-income children.

The majority of those charged (around 85 out of 98 defendants in the core cases) are Somali-American. Why? Because the fraud often involved networks of Somali-owned “nonprofits” and businesses inflating claims or billing for nonexistent services.

Governor Tim Walz labeled the scandal being inflamed by “white supremacy” In fact, systemic fraud was enabled by his state’s lax controls. Walz now so discredited he won’t run for Governor again. His political career is over. How this bozo ever passed Kamala Harris’ vetting procedures to be her running mate is a mystery.

At PJ Media, Matt Margolis discusses the latest Nick Shirley video release:

Shirley’s new video dials things up to 11.

David Hoch, co-founder of Minnesotans for Responsible Government, joined him on the ground in Minneapolis, revealing an insane truth: this fraud hits hundreds of billions nationwide. Minnesota’s slice? At least $80 billion. Layers of shell companies obscure the cash trail, including 1,200 medical transport outfits in the area that do nothing while collecting taxpayer dollars.

Hoch swears by his evidence. “I have been to many of these transportation companies, and I’ve been time-stamping my photographs for a whole year at one facility in Minneapolis, and those vans in that parking lot had not moved one inch in an entire year. They’re all still sitting there.”

Hoch also revealed a widespread ballot-harvesting operation tied to Somali communities in Minnesota, claiming the scale of the activity is “way beyond anybody’s imagination,” adding that “the state doesn’t even know” and “the feds don’t even know”.

Shirley asked Hoch why a judge would allegedly defer to what he described as the “head of the Somali mafia”. Hoch responded that the influence stems from raw political power. He described the Somali community as a unified voting bloc that has effectively held Minnesota Democrats hostage. “What they say is if you do something to go against our community, we’re gonna vote for, and they all vote together, and there’s ballot harvesting, I’ve seen them do it, that, ‘We’re gonna vote for your opponent, unless you do what we tell you to do’.”

“And so it’s all purely for votes?” Shirley asked.

“Yes,” Hoch replied.

The conversation then turned to Cedar Riverside, a massive apartment complex in Minneapolis. Hoch said it was just one of many similar developments. “You’ve got 20 more just like this around the Twin Cities, and they’re all Somali,” he said. Hoch estimated “probably 100,000 or more people,” claiming they live rent-free and receive taxpayer-funded benefits. “They’re driving a vehicle that you paid for. They’re eating food that you paid for. Everything they do is, is something that you paid for,” he said.

Hoch also described how he claims the voting process works within the bloc. He alleged that a single individual collects ballots for large numbers of residents, with little oversight. “They’ll have one person go there and collect all the ballots and nobody tracks,” Hoch said. He added that apartments can claim inflated numbers of residents: “They could say they have nine people living in an apartment. They’re gonna send them nine ballots,” which are then gathered by a designated collector.

Later on Wednesday, an altercation between organized protesters and law enforcement resulted in the death of a woman after she tried to run down an ICE agent, who shot her in self-defence. The mayor of Minneapolis (Mogadishuapolis?) responded as you might expect:

The debate over this incident breaks down on the usual partisan lines. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Kurt Schlichter summarizes the pro-law enforcement position:

On the other hand, it’s the lockstep belief of the anti-Trump politicians and activists that the agent shot a “legal observer” in the performance of her peaceful, completely legal duties:

January 3, 2026

America’s secret UBI programs

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds puts the Somali daycare scandal into its proper perspective: it’s not old-fashioned graft but something far bigger and far more destructive to the pillars of western society:

The explosive unveiling of the wildly extensive Somali-run daycare scams in Minnesota has drawn attention to a huge shadow economy, and not just in Minnesota. America, it turns out, is full of people, companies, and organizations that basically live off of fraud. We’re not talking old-fashioned waste, like $600 hammers or $1200 toilet seats. We’re talking about entities whose sole reason for existence consists of being a conduit for taxpayer money to flow directly to the people controlling them, with some of the proceeds being diverted to politicians and political organizations.

People are noticing.

This reverses an old joke told by my Nigerian relatives. A Nigerian visits his rich relative in the United States and is awed by the penthouse apartment, the limo, the private jet and so forth. “How did you make so much money?” he asks. The relative points out the window. “See that bridge? 15%. See that shopping mall? 15%. See that train station? 15%.”

The visitor, inspired, returns home to Nigeria and becomes fabulously wealthy. His rich cousin from America visits and says “How did you make so much money so fast?”

“You see that bridge over there?”

“Nope,” responds the confused relative. The Nigerian cousin points at himself and says “One hundred percent!”

Well, this joke has now been turned around. Leaving aside that we don’t really even build train stations, bridges, or even shopping malls in this country anymore, now it’s America where people are pocketing one hundred percent and not even trying to actually deliver any goods or services. That the people doing this are mostly Africans only adds to the irony.

But what happened?

Well, several things. At base, people defraud the government for the same reason that dogs lick themselves — because they can. One of the things you find in these programs is that there are virtually no controls to ensure that the recipients of the money are legitimate, that the money is spent as promised — in essence, that the bridges get built. (Or, in the case of California, the high speed rail lines.) That lack of controls, of course, is no accident. The systems are designed to promote fraud and to make it hard to catch or punish.

Second, the culture is weaker. In a high trust society, people get angry when there is fraud and move to punish and ostracize the perpetrators. In a low-trust society, people expect it.

Older generations of politicians used to engage more in what George Washington “Boss” Plunkitt called “honest graft”. He defined honest graft as legally exploiting insider knowledge and opportunities from one’s position for personal financial gain, while also benefiting the public or party. A classic example he gave was learning about upcoming public projects (like a new park or bridge) and buying nearby land cheaply before the plans became public, then selling it at a profit to the city. He famously summarized it as: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” comparing it to savvy stock trading on Wall Street. In contrast, dishonest graft involved outright illegal acts, such as blackmail, embezzlement, or extortion (e.g., shaking down gamblers or saloon keepers).

God knows what he would have said about simply taking money for nothing. Would his reaction have been horror? Or admiration?

December 31, 2025

Do you want tribalism? Because this is how you get tribalism

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort asks the key questions about where our “elites” are taking us:

What’s the point? No, tell me, what’s the point?

What’s the point of laws if judges reinterpret them until they protect everyone except the people who obey them?

What’s the point of defending a nation if the same system refuses to defend your family from criminals it imported on purpose?

What’s the point of paying taxes if they fund fraud, reward deception, and subsidize parallel systems that never owed this place loyalty?

What’s the point of working, building, serving, if your labor is redistributed to those who broke the rules to get here?

What’s the point of accountability if paperwork matters more than reality, and intent matters less than optics?

I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is that any human with a brain is going to retreat to whatever group rewards his values and sacrifice. If it isn’t the nation, it becomes the tribe. And when it becomes the tribe, this American experiment is over.

A warrior can endure hardship, loss, and some long odds. What he cannot endure is betrayal by design.

When a nation stops enforcing its boundaries, its laws, and its obligations to its own people, it doesn’t just lose control, IT BURNS THE VERY WILL REQUIRED TO DEFEND IT.

I want something to defend that I believe in. We all do. I take the oath deadly serious. But one begins to wonder after awhile if that makes for a patriot or a sucker.

If a Soldier can follow it and die in defense of his country, but on the other side of the coin, there is a politician who can spit on it and get rich while importing and funding pirates … it really makes one wonder: What’s it all for?

@POTUS we know what problems you face. It’s not lost on us. But we are running out of time sir.

One of the things that makes these kinds of scam viable in western culture is that we are high-trust cultures with default assumptions that most people are not trying to exploit kindness and charity. This breaks down quickly once you introduce enough people from low-trust and tribal cultures:

The fraudulent spending of taxpayer dollars we are seeing uncovered nationally all rotates around the essential goodness of the American people.

Daycare for children? Of course — we don’t want our children or parents to suffer because Mom has to work.

Foodbanks? We don’t want anyone to starve. Our nation is better than that.

Homeless shelters? Homelessness is a scourge upon the American dream. We’re better than that.

Home elder care? The generations before us deserve dignity and respect. How could anyone oppose that?

Deep down we are a charitable and giving nation unlike most others. That sense of goodness and charity has been hijacked and exploited by foreign predators for their own material gain.

We need to wise up and toughen up, and understand that not every siren song of charity is on the level, particularly when our tax dollars are involved.

(Also, this reality gives an added layer of meaning to the concept of “suicidal empathy”.)

Ian at The Bugscuffle Gazette explains that importing the third world means that you need to expect your culture will start becoming more like the third world:

It says something1 about he state of Legacy Media when a 20-something kid with an iPhone can do a better imitation of 60 Minutes than 60 Minutes can.

No, Gentle Readers, I am not — in any way — surprised that Somalian immigrants in Minnesota are happily committing fraud — remember, do, that I grew up in Africa.

One of the things that endear Americans — and Western Europeans in general — to me is the sheer naiveté displayed by same. The ability of the average American to remain convinced that the entire World is just like them is rather cute.2

Folks, fraud and bribery is the norm in the Third World. In tribal cultures fraud and bribery are not only the norm, but are the rule.

If the average American reader takes nothing else from this essay, please understand that fraud and bribery are not crimes in the Third World; that fraud and bribery are not only not crimes in tribal society, but they are expected, required, and a perfectly acceptable part of every day tribal life.

And Somalia is not only Third World, but it is excessively tribal.

So, I’m not really mad at the Somalis. You can’t get mad at a gopher for digging up your yard. Gophers got to dig, and tribal cultures got to tribal.

That by no means signals that I don’t think the fraudsters should be excused. Hell, no. Public trials, and if found guilty — maximum sentences. Those lacking in U.S. citizenship, once the full prison sentence is completed, loaded onto a C-5 Galaxy and bodily pitched off of the ramp onto a random Somalian airport tarmac.3

What has stoked my ire is the fact that the Somalis used one of the most heavily-regulated industries to commit their fraud — that should have everyone up in arms.

Childcare is the responsibility of at least one Minnesota State agency — probably more — and will have mandated State-level inspections and audits.

Let me re-state that: Minnesota government employees would be legally-required and paid to walk their happy little arses into those businesses and use their Mk1 Mod 0 Eyeballs to look around at least once a year. If you were an inspector for whichever Minnesota agency(ies) regulates child care facilities, and you never filed a “Hey, something ain’t right” report, it’s time for a Come-To-Jesus Meeting in a brightly-lit room with humour-impaired law enforcement types.

If nothing else, the fact that one of these allegedly fraudulent pre-schools not only mis-spelled “Learning” as “Learing”, but mis-spelled the name of the street in the publicly-posted address should have been a red flag to someone.4

This sheer dollar amount of fraud, over this amount of time, and using this many separate corporate entities means that multiple people in the Minnesota State government knew something stunk to high heaven.

Minnesota government employees who knew of this fraud need to do the maximum allowed felony time.

  1. Not, you know, anything good.
  2. The ability of the average American leader — who is supposed to know better — to do the same is aggravating and dangerous.
  3. Bringing the aeroplane to a full stop during this process not absolutely required.
  4. Us cynical retired law enforcement types call this a “clue”.

December 23, 2025

Suspicious work-permit activity in Saskatoon

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Darshan Maharaja links to a detailed Reddit post that reveals some pretty shady stuff operated out of a small office in Saskatoon:

The Reddit user, /u/SimonBirchDied, says this is the result of only fifteen minutes of investigation:

Like countless others, I’ve grown disheartened and disillusioned with the hiring process in Saskatoon and Canada as a whole. Some of you may have seen more attention around job postings on JobBank offering seemingly great wages, yet applying for LMIA’s due to no suitable local candidates. This post is simply meant to expose what appear to be obvious scams in Saskatoon, so please don’t let it devolve into derogatory racial or immigration issues. This is about the exploitation of both immigrants and the Canadian working class.

Looking at Saskatoon on lmiamap.org, which is a webmap that takes data from JobBank showing businesses that have been approved for LMIA permits, you can see business that have been granted LMIA’s to hire temporary foreign workers. A permit given “>only if no suitable Canadian citizen or permanent resident is available to fill the position. The process is designed to ensure that Canadian workers are considered first for available jobs.”

For example, in 2024 Road Rex Trucking Inc. was granted 5 LMIA permits. When you search Road Rex Trucking Inc., their company address is 2002 Quebec Ave, which is a small generic office building home to the likes of the famous MLM “World Financial Group”. Oddly enough, from one angle on Google Street View the building is blurred, which means someone has specifically reached out to Google and requested it be blurred for privacy.

When you look at their website, https://roadrextrucking.com/team-2/, their “Team” has very generic, obviously stock photos with names that, on the surface, don’t seem to match.

Oddly, the website makes no mention of the sole registered director of Road Rex Trucking Inc, Jaspreet Singh Dhaliwal. There is only one result for that name in Saskatoon, and here is his Facebook account, flexing in front of fancy cars and on vacations. Some of his pictures appear to match the buildings in the Saskatoon neighborhood of Road Rex Trucking Inc’s corporate registered address.

When you Google the name of their founder, Alaxis. D. Dowson, there’s dozens of websites with the exact same template as Road Rex Trucking Inc, with the same layout and “team members”, but for different businesses like electronics, solar panels etc., and listed in all sorts of locations from Edmonton to Dubai.

As they say on the interwebs, Read the whole thing.

December 14, 2025

Where does all the money go for so many First Nations bands?

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

Earlier this month, I shared a long thread highlighting some incredible findings from the audit of a single First Nations group in Saskatchewan (here). On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @Martyupnorth discusses how the federal government has gone out of its way not to ensure that First Nations funding is transparent:

    Cory Morgan @CoryBMorgan
    The Siksika reserve got $1.3 billion a few years ago and the housing is still predominantly shit.

    It’s not lack of government funding folks.

    It’s a broken system of racial apartheid.

    This ruling won’t help a bit.

Let’s talk about transparency in First Nations reserve finances in Canada. It’s topic that’s sparked a lot of debate.

Back in 2013, the Harper government passed the First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA), which required chiefs and councils to publicly disclose their salaries, expenses, and audited financial statements. The goal? To ensure accountability for the billions in federal funding going to reserves, empowering community members to hold leaders responsible and curb potential corruption.

But the Act was controversial from the start. Critics, including many First Nations leaders (no surprise there), called it paternalistic, imposed without proper consultation, and an infringement on Indigenous sovereignty. Some argued it violated privacy by forcing the public release of sensitive financial details, like personal remuneration schedules.

Enter Justin Trudeau. During his 2015 campaign, he promised to repeal the FNFTA, saying it wasn’t “respectful” to First Nations and needed replacement with a co-developed approach. Once in power, his government didn’t formally repeal the Act, but effectively reversed it by suspending enforcement. They stopped withholding funds from non-compliant bands, halted court actions, and reinstated frozen money. Compliance rates plummeted afterward, with fewer bands disclosing info publicly.

See the screen shot below. The Siksika Nation, to whom Cory refers to, hasn’t dislosed financial data since 2013.

The Liberals’ rationale? Building “mutual accountability” through partnership rather than top-down rules, addressing privacy concerns and respecting self-governance. But a decade later, as of 2025, the Act remains on the books unenforced, while polls show most Canadians still want transparency in how reserve funds are mis-managed.

What do you think? Does ditching enforcement help or hinder real accountability?

Update: At some point, the audits have to start and the government and the courts will then have their hands full:

December 9, 2025

Auditing where the money goes, First Nations edition

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

I don’t think many Canadians would argue with the government providing funding to First Nations groups in remote areas so they have access to services and amenities that most of us take for granted. But the government has been giving so much money for so long with very little evidence that the money is actually making a difference. Surely, a regular system of audits would show what happens to the money after the feds cut a cheque and why conditions in First Nations communities aren’t improving? Well, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @The Reclamare shares a thread detailing some of the findings of a recent audit of a First Nations NGO and it’s kind of disturbing:

Where our taxes go, First Nations Edition

KPMG audited the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) representing 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan

They analyzed spending between April 2019 and March 2024

Hang on🧵

#1 – COVID Funding

$26 million was audited
KPMG found $23.5 million was questionable
** an 89% failure rate**

– no records
– missing contracts
– missing invoices

# 2 – Travel expenditures

$800K of travel spending was audited
$316K was flagged by auditors, a 39% failure rate

Half the travel bookings couldn’t be justified, either policy violations or they couldn’t explain the purpose. And one Vice Chief was billing personal trips

# 3 – Executive Pay Raises during Covid

On November 5, 2020, a briefing note went to FSIN’s Treasury Board recommending:

$60,000 pay raise for the Chief
$40,000 pay raise for each Vice Chief

Retroactive 8 months prior

(more…)

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.

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.

October 26, 2025

“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 14, 2025

QotD: The trade in fake doctor’s notes

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A suspended doctor in England is running a company that sells people sick notes to excuse them on medical grounds from their work. “When you’re ill,” said an advertisement for the company, “our prices will make you feel better”.

A reporter for the Daily Telegraph newspaper managed to obtain a certificate from the company to excuse him from work for five months, because he claimed (falsely) to be suffering from the long-term effects of COVID. He obtained the note without providing any medical evidence whatsoever.

The only thing that surprised me about this was that anyone thought that it was necessary in Britain to buy or pay for such a certificate. I thought of the famous lines of Humbert Wolfe, the otherwise all-but-forgotten England man of letters:

    You cannot hope
    to bribe or twist,
    thank God! the
    British journalist.
    But, seeing what
    the man will do
    unbribed, there’s
    no occasion to.

The same might almost be said of British doctors, many of whom, I suspect, issue such certificates incontinently, for one of two reasons: fear of their patients, and sentimentality.

Not surprisingly, doctors do not like unpleasant scenes in their consulting rooms, and refusal of requests for time off sick can easily lead to such scenes, and occasionally to threatened or actual violence.

Naturally, no doctor likes to think of himself as a coward, the kind of person who caves in to such threats. The best way to avoid so humiliating a thought is never to risk having to think it, that is to say by granting the patients’ wishes in this matter immediately.

But in order to do this without feeling self-contempt, it is necessary to rationalize, that is to say to find supposed reasons for why everyone who wants a certificate should be given one. The English philosopher F.H. Bradley once said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, adding however that it was a human propensity to do so. In like fashion, we could say that doctors find bad reasons for giving sick certificates when they suspect that not to do so might lead to a confrontation with a patient.

Thus they convince themselves that if a person tells them that they are unfit for work, for whatever reason, it would be wrong to question it. No one would make a claim to be unable to work unless he were in some way discontented, unhappy, depressed, anxious, stressed, in a word suffering, and it is the object of doctors to reduce human suffering.

The doctor is aided in this train of thought by the looseness of psychiatric diagnosis, so that practically all forms of distress can be fitted into the procrustean bed of diagnosis. Even outright faking can now be construed as an illness or disorder, provided only that it goes on for long enough or is deceptive enough.

Does this mean that the patients seeking sick notes are all faking it? The matter is more complex than this would suggest. There is, of course, conscious, outright fraud, but this is comparatively rare. Just as doctors don’t like to think of themselves as cowards in the face of their patients, so patients don’t like to think of themselves as frauds.

Distress can be conjured out of almost anything and is not necessarily proportional to whatever causes it. Dwelling on the ill treatment one has suffered — and who has not suffered ill treatment at some time in his life? — can magnify something minor into something major, to the point at which it seems almost to have ruined one’s life. And it is certainly capable of rendering a person unfit for work in his own estimation — though in fact continuing at work would be a remedy for, rather than an exacerbation of, the problem.

However, where economic loss is not too severe when stopping work on medical grounds is possible, medical grounds will be both sought and found. In the days of the Soviet Union, the workers had a saying: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In our kinder and more enlightened societies, we pretend to be ill, and they pretend to treat us — except that the word “pretend” does not quite capture the subtlety of the transactions between doctor and patients.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Make Me Sick”, New English Review, 2025-07-04.

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