Quotulatiousness

February 21, 2025

“… a sea change in American foreign policy priorities”

Theophilus Chilton on how the markedly changed US foreign policies under Donald Trump are roiling the old certainties of so many western “transnational” elites:

Last Friday, an event occurred which represents a sea change in American foreign policy priorities, but the importance of which may have been missed by many. Vice-President Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference. In this speech, he basically pulled no punches, calling out the various Western European governments for their support for mass immigration, their opposition to free speech, and the erosion of democratic functions within their governments. The speech itself presented a stark contrast between the new American administration and the “leadership” that currently exists in most European countries. It represents a decisive rupture between an American executive which is in the process of refuting the influence of a globalist transnational “elite” over its country and European governments which are still firmly ensconced in that elite’s thrall.

The thing is, Vance was pretty much right about everything he said. Mass immigration, especially that part of it coming from Africa and the Muslim world, is absolutely destroying the social fabric of every European nation as well as dragging down their standards of living toward third world levels. Euro governments, in fact, do absolutely hate freedom of speech and apply strictures that medieval monarchies would never have dreamed of instituting. For all their talk about the importance of democracy and the “threat” to it represented by Trump and his administration, Euro countries make an absolute mockery out of the entire concept. Those European slaves of the globalists can grumble and sit there aghast at Vance’s words, but the simple fact of the matter is that he was right in every way in the criticisms he leveled against them.

After all, these are the people who overturn Romanian elections because actual Romanians voted for the wrong person — all to “defend democracy”. These are the people who ban political parties to “defend democracy”. These are the people who let “migrants” stab little girls to death to “defend democracy”. These are the people who arrest Christians for singing hymns on a public street to “defend democracy”. These are the people who do armed midnight raids and throw people into prison for sharing memes on social media to “defend democracy”. You get the picture. Populism and popular sovereignty are such a threat to these regimes because their democracy is a sham, a foil used to give a pretended legitimacy to globalist policies which are destroying the actual people of these various countries.

For all the breathless hyperventilating about Russia “invading Europe” (which it is in no position to do, LOL), the fact is that there is nothing that the Russians could do to the people of Europe that would be worse than what their own governments already subject them to.

What makes this all the more amusing is the excited “nationalism” we’ve been seeing from the lefties and globalists in several of the countries that have been in the Trump/Vance crosshairs over the past month. A good example would be in Canada, in response to the tariff threats that Trump made to try to push the Canadian government into being a little more proactive about securing their side of the border from the fentanyl and illegal aliens that enter the USA. Watching the Canadian government fall all over itself trying to fake an exuberant pride in their Canadian-ness, even as they continue to turn their country into an Indian colony and treat their own White Canadian population like a bunch of expendable paypigs has been enlightening, to say the least. Obviously, what’s driving the reaction is not a genuine love of country or people, but loyalty to the transnational elite that is piqued at recently being disempowered in the USA.

In all of this, it’s important to remember that the enemies here, the people who deserve our ire and derision, are not the peoples of Canada, the UK, the European countries. It is the transnational clique and their progressive Left hangers-on, the same people who were until very recently doing the exact same things to the American people, too. We need to be very clear that regular, everyday Americans and regular, everyday Frenchmen, Germans, Canadians, Italians, and all the rest are on the same side here. We have the same enemy. The European and other peoples are victims of their own governments, first and foremost. I mean, their own governments are now formally making them eat the bugs as part of their anti-human green agenda, just to give one example.

February 17, 2025

The growing problem of “America’s hat”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, History, India, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Carter’s latest post is excellent — but that’s his usual standard — but it’s of particular interest to inhabitants of what used to be the proud Dominion but who now live in a “post-national state” with “no core identity” as our outgoing prime minister so helpfully explained it:

Canada and the US have been frenemies for most of the last two hundred years. With the exception of some spats in the 19th century, they’ve fought on the same side in all major wars, and haven’t taken up arms against one another. At the same time, Canada has from the very beginning fiercely guarded its independence. Through the 1950s, this came from Canada’s self-conception as an outpost of sober, orderly British traditionalism, in stark contrast to the chaotic liberal revolutionaries across the border. Following the Liberal Party’s cultural revolution in the 1960s, Canada increasingly came to see itself as different from the US primarily in that it was more liberal, in the modern sense, than it’s Bible-thumping, gun-toting redneck cousins – which is to say more socialist, leftist, multicultural, gay-friendly, internationalist, feminist, and so forth. In fairness to Canada, the British government, having long-since fallen under the sway of the Labour party, had followed the same ideological trajectory, so Canada was really just taking its cue from Mother England as it always had. In further fairness to Canada, all of this has been aggressively pushed by Blue America, which has been running American culture (and therefore everyone else’s) until about five minutes ago.

Despite these differences, the US could always rely on Canada being a stable, competently run, prosperous, and happy neighbour – perhaps a bit on the prickly side, given the inferiority complex, but much less of a headache than the entropic narcostate to the south that keeps sending its masses of illiterate campesinos flooding over the banks of the Rio Grande. Canada might be annoying sometimes, but it didn’t cause problems. To the contrary, Canada and the US have maintained one the world’s most productive trading relationships for years: America gets Canadian oil, minerals, lumber, and Canada gets US dollars, technology, and culture.

Now, however, Canada has become a problem for America. Not yet, perhaps, the biggest problem – America has a very large number of extremely pressing problems – but a significant one nonetheless, with the potential to become quite acute in the near future.

The problem is that Canada has become a security threat.

[…]

The next security problem is the border, an issue which Trump has repeatedly stressed as a justification for tariffs. The 49th Parallel is famously the longest undefended border on the planet. It is much longer than the Southern border; there are no barbed wire border fences; most of the terrain is easily traversed – forest, lake, or prairie – in contrast to the punishing desert running across the US-Mexico border. Militarizing the US-Mexico border is already a huge, costly undertaking. Doing the same on the Canadian border would be vastly more challenging.

Canada’s extraordinarily lax immigration policy has, in recent years, led to a much higher encounter rate at border crossings with suspects on the terrorism watch list. These people come into Canada legally, part of the millions of immigrants Ottawa has been importing, every year, for the last few years. When you’re bringing in over one percent of your country’s population every single year, it is simply not possible to properly vet them, and it seems that Ottawa barely even bothers to try. Given that not every such person of interest will get stopped at the border, and that not every terrorist is on a watch list, one wonders how many enemies have already slipped across into the US by way of Canadian airports.

RCMP officers with their haul from a fentanyl superlab. Only one person was arrested.

The second border problem is fentanyl. Like the US, Canada has a raging opiod epidemic. We’ve got tent cities, zombies in the streets, needles in the parks, and this is not limited to the big cities – it spills out into the small towns, as well. Like Mexico, Canada has fentanyl laboratories. Precursor chemicals are imported from China by triads, turned into chemical weapons in Canadian labs, and then distributed within Canadian and American markets by predominantly Indian truckers. The occasional busts have turned up vast quantities of the stuff, but have resulted in very few arrests. The proceeds are then laundered through casinos or fake colleges, with the laundered cash then parked in Canadian real estate. There are estimates that the volume of fentanyl money flowing through Canada’s housing markets is significant enough to be a major factor (immigration is certainly the main factor) distorting real estate prices – keeping the housing bubble inflated, propping up Canada’s sagging economy, and pricing young Canadians out of any hope of owning a home or, for that matter, even renting an apartment without a roommate or three.

It’s generally understood, though essentially never acknowledged at official levels, that poisoning North America with opiods is deliberate Chinese policy, both as revenge for the Opium Wars of the 19th century, and as one element in their strategy of unrestricted warfare i.e. the covert but systematic weaponization of every point of contact – economic, industrial, cultural, etc. – between Chinese and Western societies. By allowing the fentanyl trade to continue, the Canadian government is complicit in an act of covert war being waged by a foreign power, one whose casualties include the Canadian government’s own population.

February 11, 2025

Many young white men are choosing to “own the insult” when accused of being a fascist

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

Lorenzo Warby points out that some — even many — young white men are reacting to repeatedly being called “Nazi” or “fascist” by embracing the slur:

Still from Pink Floyd: The Wall

For the fuel of the contemporary networked authoritarians are angry young men. Angry young men who have a great deal to be angry about.

In so many modern schools, universities, and much of social media, if you are a low melanin count, heterosexual male you are absolutely at the bottom of the “woke” oppression-bingo hierarchy. You will be implicitly, or explicitly, held to be somehow tarred with every bad thing any person “like” you has done in history, no matter how long — even how many generations — before you were born that it happened, nor how dubious an historical characterisation it might be. There is no identity open to you that you can celebrate, or feel positively attached to, without potential or actual denigration.

If you do any reading, you can quickly work out that this is a ludicrously one-sided — and deeply unfair — way to look at history. Even in its own terms, it is nonsense, as “folk like you” — i.e., low melanin count heterosexual males — voted for every single legal advance any of the celebrated-as-oppressed groups made. “Folk like you” built the Scientific Revolution, Parliamentary Government, mass prosperity.

Of course, this was a matter of culture, institutions, the happenstance of history, not melanin content. The trouble with the racialisation of history and identity is that it is, indeed, the racialisation of history and identity. As Jews are currently (re)discovering.

Nor can many of these angry young men take much refuge in the good life, work or entertainment. Online dating has turned into a hypergamous nightmare that excludes most guys, in-person connections are fraying and migration-plus-restrictive-land-regulation has shot rents up and made home-owning unattainable.

In entertainment, masculine heroes are being replaced and degraded. Online games are being systematically “wokified”. There are systematic attacks on their heritage. Sport and advertising is also being wokified, is “bending the knee”. Where to go?

If folk systematically tar or denigrate someone’s identity, a natural response is to say “no, my identity is great, it is wonderful”. There will be certainly a market for such a response. The natural response to systematic denigration is some form of “fuck you!” and the politics of “fuck you!“.

In the contemporary world, what is the most dramatic way of saying “fuck you!“? To take the racist!, fascist! abuse and go “right on!“. Even more so if you take the ideas they invoke and turn them back against them.

Of course, if you just reverse what left-progressivism — in its “woke” iteration — stands for, you are still dancing to their tune. But rage can easily work like that.

So, these angry young men look at the folk who treat them with such continual, institutionalised, contempt — who stack everything they can against them — and decide “we hate you”. If you are going to abuse us anyway no matter what we do — the seductive logic goes — then why not simply embrace the identity you impose on us if we put our heads up? There is, after all, no more in-your-face way to shriek their anger and rejection back at those who are abusing, denigrating and excluding them than to embrace racism and fascism.

They look at ordinary conservatives, at ordinary liberals, they look at Boomers, and think “you did not stop it, you did nothing to protect people like me”, so they — and their politics — get no respect.

Instead, they go to the politics of using the operational tactics used against them — the operational politics of “wokery” — in support of politics that most completely expresses their rage. This is the updated version of what happened with 1920s Fascism in Italy and 1930s Nazism in Germany. Like the original versions, they are using — and so helping to legitimate — the operational methods of the left-progressivism.

Not that left-progressives, the “woke”, will see it. They are way too full of the stupidity of arrogance, of the blindness of moral narcissism, to pick what is happening, still less take any responsibility for it. They utterly fail to see themselves; to understand how much they come across as smug, arrogant, condescending, self-righteous, shits whose politics again and again ends up favouring people like them and whose recurrent response to disagreement is to de-legitimise, denounce and censor. Their entire view of themselves is they are the oh-so-clever, oh-so-moral people. Nothing they do is ever seriously counter-productive or fundamentally mistaken.

Faced with the rise of actual racism and actual fascism, they will shriek racist! and fascist! even harder. But they are in the situation of the boy who cried wolf! Except worse, as the boy in the story neither created, nor trained, the wolf.

They have so debased that currency, so debased historical analogy, that fascism has lost its rhetorical, or even its warning, power.

Besides, how many people will say: these folk against whom you are shrieking the same terms of abuse you have shrieked at people for decades. Are they making excuses for the mass sexual predation on young girls by migrants we did not want? Are they supporting the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors? Are they teaching folk to despise their own countries and heritage? Are they pushing the narrative lies of the moment? Have they proved to be incompetent at elementary things, such as fighting crime and managing fire risk?

No? Then they sound good to me.

Left-progressives: so good at finding new ways to make the same mistakes. It is almost as if they have a pathological relationship with information. Oh, wait, they do.

January 29, 2025

German democracy in its death throes as extremely extreme extreme right gets an anti-immigration bill up for a vote

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

The situation in Germany appears critical, as the extreme right Christian Democrats (CDU) seem to be moving closer to working with the extremely extreme extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to pass an anti-immigration bill:

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

Despite everything, the cordon sanitaire against the Evil Hitler Nazi Fascist party known as Alternative für Deutschland really appears to be crumbling. CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz has set in motion a chain of events he can no longer control. This coming Friday, there is every chance that anti-migration legislation will pass the Bundestag and become law with the help of AfD votes – an eventuality that was unimaginable even seven days ago.

As I reported in my prior post, Merz said last week that he was open to passing anti-migration bills with AfD support. His statement was remarkable, because it violated the most important tabu in German politics, namely that against achieving any outcomes with votes from the AfD. This tabu excludes the political voice of opposition voters and insulates the traditional party system from political change.

Almost from the beginning, there was messaging confusion from within the CDU about Merz’s statement. The reversals, re-reversals, doublings down, and contradictions that have flowed from Merz and his party over the weekend are highly significant. They suggest a panicked CDU leadership that is in disarray, eager to stem the tide of defections to the AfD and desperate to weaken the negotiating positions of the leftist SPD and Green parties. The cordon sanitaire is a wedge driven straight through the right that allows an ever more unpopular left to punch far above their weight and maintain their vice-grip on German migration policy. It was intended to wall out the AfD, but as the AfD has grown stronger, it has only walled in the CDU. Remarkably, the CDU seem to have finally figured this out.

Merz responded to the growing cries of outrage from the left at first predictably – by backtracking. He insisted he wanted not the AfD but the “political middle” to support his anti-migration legislation. In a strange statement on Saturday, he announced that “We have sent the SPD, the Greens and the FDP all the texts that we want to pass next week” so that “We can … agree on how we will vote next week.” He added bizarrely that “The AfD is not receiving these texts.” These “texts” leaked almost immediately; they turned out to be resolutions calling on the Green and SPD government to tighten border security and increase deportations.

January 26, 2025

Andrew Sullivan reluctantly welcomes Trump’s actions to undo Biden’s radical agenda

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

I have to admit that I didn’t expect to see Andrew Sullivan saying nice things about Donald Trump, and I’m sure it caused him much personal distress to have to write this:

A quick image search turns up plenty of examples of Presidents proudly showing off freshly signed documents. Usually these will be laws passed by the legislators but sometimes (especially in January 2025) it’s rule-by-decree on steroids.

To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs.

But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad.

Joe Biden brazenly lied when he promised moderation in 2020. Check out my column on his initial flurry of executive orders four years ago this week:

    [Biden] is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.

All Trump had to do was wait. But Biden’s EOs on “equity” were even more extreme, effectively ending any pretense of color-blindness in American law and society. Biden, I wrote four years ago, was:

    enforcing the Ibram X. Kendi view that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”. And he’s enforcing it across the entire federal government and any institution the federal government funds.

It was a direct and proud embrace of systemic race and sex discrimination by the federal government. It was accompanied by a massive shift in the private sector toward illegal race and sex discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion. This was buttressed by actual mandatory workplace indoctrination in critical race, gender, and queer theory. This was authoritarian brainwashing, accompanied by blatant race discrimination.

Biden also decreed by executive order that the postmodern notion of “gender” would henceforth replace biological sex in determining who is a man or a woman. He mandated that any school or university getting federal funds should remove distinctions between boys and girls — even in sports and intimate spaces. His administration fully backed the medically irreversible transing of children with gender dysphoria, lied about the science, and secretly urged removing all age restrictions on transition — subjecting countless gay and autistic children to the permanent destruction of their future ability to have kids or even an orgasm.

Biden was, in these respects, an unremitting extremist; and almost all Trump is doing this week is unraveling this insanity. The one actually radical act from Trump is rescinding LBJ’s “affirmative action” directive of 1965. Reagan wanted to do this, but he faced bipartisan opposition. One justification of the feds moving from anti-discrimination to being pro-discrimination was because, in LBJ’s words, African-Americans “don’t have their 12 percent” in federal employment, i.e. their proportion in the country at large. Today, African-Americans are almost 19 percent of federal employees — much higher than their population share. The MSM won’t frame it this way. But that’s the truth. And Trump’s EO language suggests he now has a staff shrewd and determined enough to push back. This week was more regime change than shit-show.

It is, however, far too soon to declare the war on left authoritarianism over. It is far from dead; it has replaced Christianity entirely for many, as we saw with Bishop Budde at the National Cathedral this week, or the Oscars giving an unpopular film 13 nominations just so they can give a Best Actress award to a biological man. The Ivy League will do everything it can to keep discriminating against members of “oppressor classes.” The MSM is too far gone to reform itself. If you want proof of that, notice that the NYT has two emphatically “queer” columnists pushing gender woo-woo, and it just fired the only writer in that publication, Pamela Paul, who helped expose the medically baseless transing of children.

Not only will the Trump EOs end the systemic racism in the federal government and its contractors, his people are also aware of attempts to foil color-blindness by their own woke bureaucrats, and will be vigilant. More importantly, the new administration will deploy the DOJ to restore equality of opportunity in the private sector. After so many major corporations have been openly bragging about their race and sex discrimination these past few years, they sure have been asking for it.

German democracy under further threat from extremely extreme extreme right

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

German voters seem to be under the misapprehension that their votes should have something to do with the composition of the government. Because the voters increasingly cast their votes for the extreme right, government in Germany finds itself under incredible pressure to actually pay attention to the pestiferous voters:

This is a potentially huge story. It could be the beginning of a sea-change in German politics, that is how big it is. At the same time, it could be also be nothing. We’ll have to wait and see.

For those who don’t want to read my ramblings (this will be a longer post), I offer this TL;DR: The cordon sanitaire against Alternative für Deutschland is showing signs of serious rupture. The centre-right CDU are suddenly – without warning – reconsidering their long-standing tabu against cooperating with the “extreme right” opposition. It is this singular tabu that has kept the traditional German party system frozen in amber despite a massive rightward political shift across the West. Should the cordon sanitaire crack even a little, its days are numbered. The simple arithmetic of parliamentary majorities would sooner or later make the most noxious political fixtures of current-year Germany, like the Green Party, broadly irrelevant at the federal level. The German left would be deprived at once of almost all their power.

I am sceptical that this can really be happening. Yesterday, I would’ve expected a change like this in 2029 at the earliest. Many are saying (justifiably) that the CDU should not be trusted, that they will say anything to get elected and that nothing will come of their promises. All that may well be true. Words, however, matter all by themselves: In 2019, tacit cooperation in Thüringen between the CDU and the AfD unleashed an entire national scandal; the press hyperventilated for weeks. Now the federal leadership of the CDU is openly pledging to pass legislation with AfD votes in the Bundestag, and major CDU-adjacent journalists are writing long opinion pieces about why this is just the right thing to do.

This development arises directly from the pressure of mass migration, and specifically from the four recent deadly migrant attacks I have covered in the past year:

  • On 31 May 2024, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Sulaiman Ataee killed the policeman Rouven Laur and severely wounded five others in a knife attack in Mannheim.
  • On 23 August 2024, at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen, a Syrian migrant to Germany named Issa al Hasan killed three people and wounded eight in an apparently Islamist attack for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
  • On 20 December 2024, a Saudi migrant to Germany named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a rented BMW through the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, killing 6 people and wounding 299.
  • On 22 January 2025, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Enamullah Omarzai killed two people and wounded three in a knife attack in Aschaffenburg.

Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg: That is the catalogue of migrant terror pounding like remorseless waves on the brittle outdated politics of the Federal Republic.

These attacks have become a symbol for the entire mess migrationism has wrought. The dead and the wounded count for a lot in themselves, but they have also come to represent the dwindling social cohesion, the stretched financial resources and the erosion of domestic security that accepting entire foreign populations into one’s nation entails. All of it is for nothing, nobody has any solutions and there is no end in sight.

In liberal democracies, policies have to be normie-friendly, and mass migrationism was normie-friendly only until enough migrants crossed our borders to make their presence felt socially and culturally. Mass migration isn’t normie-friendly anymore. It’s become a foul political poison.

Mass migration is also a very hard nut to crack. We have outsourced a great part of our border security and migration policy to highly bureaucratised international authorities and a tangle of high-minded humanitarian legislation that leaves us little room to manouevre. Solving mass migration will require a great deal of political resolve and a willingness to pick fights with globaloid EU pencil-pushers. All of this meant that, until Mannheim, Alternative für Deutschland had a near-monopoly on hardline anti-migration politics. The unrelenting series of attacks by people who have no business being in Germany, together with the collapse of the government and the impending early elections in February, have left the centre-right CDU desperate to stake their own claim to this increasingly central political space. That, and perhaps a healthy dash of the Trump Effect, are the forces currently pushing the traditional party system of the Federal Republic to the brink.

January 25, 2025

The stabbings will continue until morale improves

Sebastian Wang discusses the stabbing attacks in Southport, Merseyside last year:

On the 29th July 2024, a man went on a stabbing spree in Southport, Merseyside, killing three children and injuring ten others. The attacker, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the son of Rwandan immigrants, was arrested at the scene. By all accounts, the attack was shocking not only in its savagery, but in its attendant circumstances. Witnesses report that Mr Rudakubana shouted slogans as he killed that suggested he was an Islamic terrorist. Almost at once, social media was filled with questions and with speculation. Also, protests began in several northern cities – Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford, for example – where demonstrators blamed the Government and the ruling class for immigration policies that had made the killings both possible and likely.

Instead of considering these protests and promising to address the causes of the crime, the British Government and the legacy media focussed on managing the narrative and silencing comment on the immigration policies that had allowed Mr Rudakubana’s family into the country. Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister, seemed more worried about potential “violence against Muslims” than the actual brutality of Mr Rudakubana’s attack on English people. “For the Muslim community I will take every step possible to keep you safe,” he said in his first public statement on the killings. On the protests he added: “It is not protesting, it is not legitimate, it is crime. We will put a stop to it“. His focus was not on the victims, but on ensuring that no one questioned the system that had allowed this to happen.

In the days after the attack, several men were arrested for spreading what the government called “misinformation” online. Their crime? Posting details about Mr Rudakubana’s background and motivations — details that turned out to be broadly correct. Despite being right, these men were prosecuted and imprisoned under Britain’s hate speech laws. The most recently convicted, Andrew McIntyre, was sentenced earlier this month to seven and a half years in prison for postings on social media. Peter Lynch, a man of 61, was sent to prison last August for two years and eight months for the crime of shouting “scum” and “child killers” at the police. Last October, he hanged himself in prison. I am told he was seriously “mistreated” in prison. British prisons for many years have been overcrowded. Room was found for these prisoners of conscience after the Government began releasing violent criminals.

The injustice of this is glaring. These men were punished not because they lied, but because they spoke approximate truths the government wanted to suppress. Their imprisonment sends a clear message: in modern Britain, it’s better to be wrong on the side of the Government than right and against it.

A Carefully Managed Narrative

The media played its part in the cover up. At first, Mr Rudakubana was described, without name, as “originally from Cardiff“. It took days before we were told he was a child of asylum seekers from Rwanda. Even then, the coverage was carefully balanced by a picture of him as a respectable schoolboy – not at the beast in human form shown by more recent photographs.

Only much later, when the story had faded from the headlines, did the real facts emerge. Mr Rudakubana was not just a troubled individual. His phone contained materials linked to terrorism and genocide, and his actions appeared to have an ideological motivation. Yet by the time these details came out, they barely caused a ripple. The public had been moved on to the next distraction.

It’s hard not to assume that the British media was fully in on gaslighting the public about the accused murderer, when you compare the photo that almost universally was used in the time before the trial and a more recent image:

Mark Steyn:

Say what you like about Axel Rudakubana, the slaughterer of three English girls under ten years old, but — unlike the British Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Liverpool Police and most of the court eunuchs in the UK media — he appears to be an honest man:

    It’s a good thing those children are dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.

He has always been entirely upfront about such things, telephoning Britain’s so-called “Childline” and asking them:

    What should I do if I want to kill somebody?

Judging from his many interactions with “the authorities” (including with the laughably misnamed “Prevent” programme), the British state’s response boiled down to: Go right ahead!

It seems likely that the perpetrator of Wednesday’s Diversity Stabbing of the Day — the Afghan “asylum seeker” who killed a two-year-old boy and seriously wounded other infants in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg — is also “so happy”. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” deliberately targeted a gathering of the very young — in this case, a kindergarten group playing in a municipal park. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” did not just deliver sufficient stab wounds to kill: he plunged his knife into each target dozens and dozens of times. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” was well known to the authorities: he had been detained for “violence” at least thrice.

Did these guys also enjoy it? From our pal Leilani Dowding:

For the benefit of American readers, being stabbed in Asda, Argus and Sainsbury’s is like being stabbed in Kroger, Costco and Wegman’s. As you may recall, a DC jury awarded climate mullah Michael E Mann a million bucks because someone unknown gave him a mean look in Wegman’s supermarket. No one stabbed in a UK supermarket will get a seven-figure sum: it’s increasingly a routine feature of daily life — per Sir Sadiq Khan, part of what it means to live in a great world city.

Sir Keir Stürmer and every outpost of the corrupt British state have lied to the public about every aspect of the Southport mass murder since the very first statements by the Liverpool chief constable passing off the killer as a “Cardiff man”. Her officers knew within hours that the Welsh boyo who loved male-voice choirs was, back in the real world, an observant Muslim in possession of the Al-Qaeda handbook and enough ricin to kill twelve thousand of his fellow Welshmen. But they did not disclose this information for months — not until freeborn Britons minded to disagree with Keir Stürmer’s Official Lies by suggesting that this seemed pretty obviously merely the umpteenth case of Islamostabbing had been rounded up, fast-tracked through Keir’s kangaroo courts, gaoled for longer than Muslim child rapists, and in at least one case driven to his death. Does Sir Keir feel bad about the late Peter Lynch? Or does he take the same relaxed attitude to his victims as Axel Rudakubana?

    It’s a good thing that that far-right extremist is dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.

Even now, six months on, the organs of the state are still lying — although, with all the previous lies being no longer operative, Stürmer & Co have had the wit to introduce a few new ones. For example:

    ‘A total disgrace’ that Southport killer could buy a knife on Amazon aged 17, says Cooper

That would be Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary — which is the equivalent of what Continental governments usually call the Minister of the Interior, because that’s where the knives penetrate.

January 19, 2025

California’s wildfire plight

Theophilus Chilton on the end of California dreamin’:

Southern California has had a REALLY rough week. Wildfires, started by arsonists and driven by the Santa Ana winds, have burned thousands of acres in the city and county of Los Angeles and destroyed over $150 billion worth of property (and counting). As I write this, the fires still burn and largely remain uncontained, even as new blazes break out. It is a disaster of epic proportions, striking one of the richest and most economically and culturally relevant portions of the country.

Never ones to let a crisis go to waste, the Left responded to this disaster by … focusing on climate change. Not empty fire hydrants, not drained reservoirs, not incompetent leadership, but climate change. These fires, we have been breathlessly assured, are the result of ever-worsening climatic conditions in the region, drying it out and making it susceptible to this kind of affliction. Never mind that observers since Spanish times consistently noted the same kind of weather conditions and hazards that we see today, which suggests that maybe things aren’t actually changing all that much. Of course, those who are blaming climate change fail to recognise the fundamentally chaotic, nonlinear nature of the Earth’s biosphere and the interactions of its constituent parts, something governed by complexity (in the chaos/complexity theory sense of the term). As a result, it’s somewhat foolish to try to draw a direct, causal link between two variables (such as atmospheric CO2 content and temperature) which depend upon nonlinear interactions with hundreds of other factors. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be getting much traction with this.

So what did create the conditions that burned down Los Angeles?

First of all, there was the implementation of a number of policies driven by the state’s radical environmentalist lobby. Thanks to the fanatics, common sense policies that would help to mitigate the region’s inherent fire hazard went undone. Regular controlled burns of underbrush are a standard conservation technique in dry areas that help to thin out brush and prevent wildfires from getting out of control. Building a sufficient number of desalination plants is a good way for coastal desert areas to provide themselves with abundant fresh water for things like drinking, watering crops, filling reservoirs, and fighting fires. In fact, filling reservoirs for future needs would make a lot of sense. But all of these things are “unnatural” and might have “negative impacts” on local wildlife and whatnot.

Another contributory issue is the state’s policies towards the chronically homeless and its de facto sanctuary status for illegal aliens. The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years and California’s particular policies have made the situation in their state even worse. For decades, California has regularly seen wildfires caused by untended campfires started by homeless junkies getting out of control, which the state’s liberal approach to its indigent population has only made more prevalent. Likewise, California’s harbouring of illegal aliens has created a situation in which the state is flooded with masses of hostile foreign elements, some of whom have been caught starting fires all around the LA basin and creating the current catastrophe.

Then there is the fact that California has systematically implemented a set of DEI policies for its governmental workers, including its firefighters. As a result, the state’s leadership in the relevant departments is very good at “promoting inclusion,” but not so good at dealing competently with emergencies when they take place. Indeed, Los Angeles’ mayor Karen Bass and LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley presided over budget cuts for the city’s firefighting capabilities while adding layers of “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy aimed at systematically de-white-maleing the department and depriving it of the demographic most prone to self-sacrifice and overall technical competence. That reflects trends across the board in which the state and the city have regularly spent more on gay choirs and social justice artwork than they have on necessary functions of government.

(more…)

January 1, 2025

Mark Steyn – “This is not a healthy development in world affairs”

Mark comments on the ongoing political punch-up over the US government’s H1B visa program for foreign workers:

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as the figureheads of D.O.G.E.

As you’ll have noticed, the world’s most uniquely unique peaceful transition of power turned suddenly violent over Christmas with various of America’s super-brainy Indians beating up on each other: Nikki Haley, the Boeing board’s token Sikh, lit up Hindu monotheist Vivek Ramaswamy’s tweet like Air Canada overhead baggage in objection to Vivek’s remarks on US “mediocrity”. The offending Ramaswamy tweet was in response to MAGA objections to Trump’s appointment of Madras techie and open-borders fanatic Sriram Krishnan as his AI advisor. This was a very 2025 brouhaha: while you knuckle-draggers down in flyover country were arguing about sub-minimum-wage Hispanics turning down the sheets at Motel Six, the Hindu billionaires have been busy taking over the country.

Is everyone in this all-American punch-up an Indian? Well, no, eventually a South African weighed in. The Boers don’t like the Hindus, do they? I think I got that from Gandhi. Ah, but in this case Elon agrees with Sriram and Vivek.

A couple of very general observations:

1) The MAGA base intuits that H1B visas are a racket. Why wouldn’t they be? Everything else the federal government touches is — from presidential pardons to West Point to Jan 6 justice. America is the third largest nation on earth — a third-of-a-billion people, officially (rather more in actual reality). Why does it need to hire entry-level workers from the first and second largest nations? Yes, yes, too many Americans graduate in non-binary studies rather than any serious academic discipline but simply because you’ve bollocksed up your entire education system is no reason to (as my former National Review colleague John Derbyshire puts it) “import an overclass“.

The MAGA objections to mass immigration (ie, not just illegal immigration) are primarily cultural. They didn’t like it eight years ago when Trump would add to his wall-building promises the line about “and that wall will have a big beautiful door”, and he should have got that by now. Besides, to address the counter-argument more seriously than it merits, a nation of a third-of-a-billion that “needs” to import entry-level accountants is so structurally dysfunctional that no amount of immigration can save it. How about entry-level lawyers? Do we need more of those?

As an aside to that, for all you Constitution fetishists, I’m increasingly sceptical that a Constitution designed for an homogeneous population of two-and-a-half million people can be applied to a third-of-a-billion with a cratering fertility rate of 1.6. The only two more populous nations — China and India — are both more or less conventional ethnostates. Which is a great advantage. America is the only large-scale polity founded on a proposition — that, simply by setting foot on US soil, one becomes American. Immigration on the present transformative scale will nullify the Constitution. So the Dance of the Constitution Fetishists will get even sadder.

The Constitution is increasingly for judges rather than citizens. May be time to import more Supreme Court justices.

2) Besides, H1B is what the government calls, correctly, a “nonimmigrant” visa. One of Rupert Murdoch’s minions offered me an H1B thirty years ago. I looked up the terms and declined to sign on to indentured servitude. You’re not importing “the best and brightest”. You’re assisting well-connected corporations in advantaging themselves at the cost of the citizenry among whom they nominally live. [NR: Emphasis mine.]

3) Have you noticed that almost everyone involved in this spat is a billionaire? Today’s rich are not just rich in the old Scott Fitzgerald they-are-different sense. They approximate more to the condition articulated by Lord Palmerston in his observation that England had no eternal friends or enemies, only eternal interests. For a billionaire, friends and enemies come and go, but, like any medium-sized nation-state, he has his interests.

To most Americans, Elon was largely unknown until he started weighing in on and then buying social media; Vivek was entirely unknown until he ran for president; Sriram is still unknown. But they are far above not just the schlubs who lost their jobs to cheaper H1B types but also to the more famous political class whose poll numbers in Iowa so obsess the hamster-wheel media but which are increasingly irrelevant to anything that matters. Among Sriram Krishnan’s minor claims to “fame” is that he’s the guy who introduced Boris Johnson (remember him?) to Elon Musk — and you can bet that was after desperate wheedling and pleading from the Shagger, not because Elon had any desire for dating tips.

This is not a healthy development in world affairs.

4) Vivek Ramaswamy’s sweeping paean to American “mediocrity” as manifested by everything from prom queens to sitcoms was probably ill-advised but it was certainly entirely sincere — and would be widely shared by his fellow members of the Hindu overclass. The Indian tycoon (and David Cameron advisor) Ratan Tata, who died in October, is best remembered in the UK for his 2011 Vivek-like attack on the natives’ “work ethic“. As Sir Ratan marvelled after buying Jaguar-Land Rover:

    I feel if you have come from Bombay to have a meeting and the meeting goes till 6pm, I would expect that you won’t, at 5 o’clock, say, ‘Sorry, I have my train to catch. I have to go home.’

    Friday, from 3.30pm, you can’t find anybody in the office.

That may well be true, as Vivek’s musings re Urkel and football jocks may be true. On the other hand, as a rather precocious lad, I observed to my mum that, five years after the Gambia’s independence, nothing seemed to work as well as it did under colonial rule. True, conceded my mother, then added: “But in the end people want to be themselves, as themselves. At least it’s their chaos.”

December 28, 2024

How the H1B visa argument follows an earlier political struggle

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, ESR points out that the arguments over US work permits for foreigners might well have been prefigured by the now-receding tide of attempts to gut the second amendment:

    alexandriabrown @alexthechick
    It is difficult to overstate how caustic this is to public debate and public acceptance of legislation. If you give us X, we will accept restriction Y is the basis of all compromise. When a party gets X on the basis of accepting Y, then immediately undermines Y, the deal is void.

This was part of a thread about H1B abuse, correctly pointing out that the companies who lobbied for H1B didn’t hold up their end of the deal, leaving many Americans feeling betrayed — especially tech workers who were fired in favor of an imported hire, then told their severance pay would be denied if they didn’t train their replacements.

I am, however, irresistibly reminded of another betrayal. One I’ve written about before — but maybe at least part of this story needs to be told again.

Today in the 21st century most of the American gun culture is bitterly, even fanatically opposed to more “gun control” laws, and howling for all of them clear back to the National Firearms Act of 1934 to be repealed. Donald Trump earned huge support with his promise to get national concealed-carry reciprocity pushed through Congress.

We weren’t always like that. Long ago, before 1990, many of us were less resistant to new gun control measures. Sometimes major gun-rights organizations would even help lawmakers draft legislative language.

(Yes, I was a gun owner then. So I’m not going by legends, but by lived experience.)

What changed?

The quid-quo-pros we were offered were many variations of “If you will accept this specific restriction X, we will stop pushing. We will stop trying to undermine your Second Amendment rights in general. Help us save the chilllldren!”

That promise was never kept. Gradually, we noticed this. It always turned out that the minority of angry suspicious people who said “This won’t be enough, they’ll come back for another bite!” were right.

Eventually, some documents leaked out of one of the major graboid organizations that revealed a conscious strategy of salami-slicing — instead of challenging gun rights directly, they intended to gradually make owning personal weapons less useful and more onerous until the culture around them collapsed.

So nowadays we’re pretty much all angry and suspicious. Even restrictions that do little harm and might be objectively reasonable (bump stocks, anyone?) touch off tsunamis of protest.

People offering us more “deals” (just give up this one little thing, mmmkay?) now have negative credibility.

Are you paying attention, Big Tech? (Particularly you, @elonmusk, and you, @VivekGRamaswamy.) Because you’re almost there, now. Too many people see that H1B has become an indentured-servitude fraud that victimizes both the workers it imports and the Americans it displaces.

You credibility isn’t as shot as the gun-banners’ yet. You still have some room for recovery on “high-skilled immigation” in general, but it’s decreasing.

Your smart move would be to sacrifice H1B so you can keep the O-1 “genius” visas. I advise you to take it, because if you dig in your heels I think you are likely to lose both.

And on the reason so many Americans have become angry about blatant and exploitive H1B visa abuse:

Today’s big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don’t want to pay competitive wages to Americans.

To be honest, I think both sides are making some sound points. But I’d rather focus on a different aspect of the problem.

When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn’t have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I’m a straight white male.

I also didn’t have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets.

It’s a bit much to complain that today’s American students won’t grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago. Nothing disincentivizes working your ass off to excel more than a justified belief that it’s futile.

Right now we’re in and everybody-loses situation. Employers aren’t getting the talent they desperately need, and talent is being wasted. That mismatch is the first problem that needs solving.

You want excellence? Fire the goddamn HR drones and the nepotists. Scrap DEI. Find all the underemployed white male STEM majors out there who gave up on what they really wanted to do because the hiring system repeatedly punched them in the face, and bring them in.

Don’t forget the part about paying competitive wages. This whole H-1B indentured-servitude thing? It stinks, and the stench pollutes your entire case for “high-skill” immigration. You might actually have a case, but until you clean up that mess Americans will be justified in dismissing it.

These measures should get you through the next five years or so, while the signal that straight white men are allowed to be in the game again propagates.

I’m not going to overclaim here. This will probably solve your need for top 10% coders and engineers, but not your need for the top 0.1%. For those you probably do have to recruit worldwide.

But if you stop overtly discriminating against the Americans who could fill your top 10% jobs, your talent problem will greatly ease. And you’ll no longer get huge political pushback from aggrieved MAGA types against measures that could solve the rest of it.

Doesn’t that seem like it’s worth a try?

December 11, 2024

Canada’s current situation, as viewed by Fortissax

Fortissax recently spoke to an audience in Toronto. This is part of the transcript of his speech:

No doubt, many of you already have an idea.

The fact of the matter is this: 25% of the people in this country are, or soon will be, foreigners. Most of them are not the children of immigrants but fresh-off-the-boat migrants.

The economy? It’s in the dumps. Canada has the lowest upward mobility in the OECD for young people. One of the lowest fertility rates in the Western world. And the fastest-changing demographics in the Western world — as I’m sure you’ve all noticed here in the streets of Toronto, the old capital of Anglo-Canadians.

Think about this: approximately 4.9 million foreigners are classified as “temporary migrants.” Combine that with permanent residents, refugees, and immigrants, and that number swells to 6.2 million in just four years.


And it doesn’t stop there.

Crime is reportedly the highest it’s ever been. We have no military. The Canadian Armed Forces has faced retention issues for two decades. And what is command preoccupied with? Men’s bathrooms stocked with tampons and servicemen being “radicalized” by wearing extremist clothing like MAGA hats.


Let’s not forget foreign influence.

The Chinese Communist Party exploited the Hong Kong handover in the 1990s to infiltrate Canada, using British Columbia as their foothold. As Sam Cooper exposes in Claws of the Panda and Willful Blindness, they established a stronghold in Metro Vancouver, taking over the business community.

This “Vancouver Model”, as we Canadians ironically call it, normalizes our capitulation to foreign hostiles. Triads, working hand-in-glove with the Chinese communists, built a global drug empire. Fentanyl, mass-produced in football field-sized factories in China, is shipped to Vancouver and distributed across the entire Western Hemisphere.

Let this sink in: more Canadians have died from this economic warfare than all our soldiers lost in the Second World War.


And now, there’s India.

Intelligence agencies from the Republic of India have demonstrated their ability to conduct assassinations on Canadian soil. Recently, a Khalistani nationalist and separatist was killed — a figure I’ll leave to your sympathies or judgments. Regardless, this marks a disturbing shift.

India weaponizes its diaspora against the international community. In exchange for non-alignment with China, the West — particularly the Anglosphere — uses Indian migrants as wage-slave labor to suppress costs.

The result? A disaster.

In Canada, Australia, the U.K., and increasingly the United States, we see Indians climbing the ladders of power, pursuing their own interests — often brazenly. In Brampton, part of Greater Toronto, a 50-foot statue of the Hindu god Hanuman looms.

And let’s not forget the Punjabi Sikh population. They openly support an independent Khalistan — or remain at best indifferent to the cause. They have infiltrated Canada’s state apparatus, even reaching the Ministry of National Defense, where Harjit Sajjan prioritized rescuing Afghan Sikhs during Kabul operations over broader Canadian interests.

In Surrey, British Columbia, the trucking industry is effectively controlled by Sikhs. In online spaces, Sikh nationalists demand Brampton be recognized as a province, seemingly aware that their homeland exists more abroad than in Punjab itself. The leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, serves as yet another example — barred from entering India due to his sympathies for separatism.


But foreign influence is only half the story. Among our own lies another problem: disintegration.

Decades of Western alienation and economic parasitism by the federal government are fueling separatist movements in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Quebec, the Parti Québécois is polling higher than the ruling CAQ, openly advocating for secession from Confederation.

Meanwhile, the federal Conservatives court immigrant voters, alienating native Canadians and abandoning their base.


And then there’s the economic misery.

The average Canadian home costs $700,000. The median income? Just $48,000. Upward mobility is nonexistent. The managerial regime hoards wealth and power, gatekeeping opportunity through credentialism, exorbitant tuition, and crushing taxes.

55% of Canadians have post-secondary education, and yet most have nothing to show for it. The regime is not run by titans of intelligence or visionaries. It’s run by ideologues — loyal to their cause, not to competence or merit.


The final insult: demographics.

Over the next six years, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba will become majority non-Canadian. The 50% threshold will be breached, with profound consequences for local politics.

Ontario will hover just above 50%, while Quebec and the Maritime provinces will remain over 70% and 80% Canadian, respectively. This is not a death sentence, but it is a profound transformation for Western Canada, which has historically been more propositional and less identitarian than the East.


This is where we are.

Our sovereignty is compromised. Our identity is eroded. But we are not yet defeated. What happens next depends entirely on us.

December 6, 2024

Victoria’s Canada through the eyes of British visitors

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Michael Ledger-Lomas considers what earlier British visitors to Canada after Confederation wrote about their experiences:

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling from the biography Rudyard Kipling by John Palmer, 1895.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

… The re-election of Donald Trump, who has already daydreamed about turning Canada into his 51st state, might even rekindle Tory patriotism. After all, their Victorian ancestors created the dominion of Canada in 1867 to keep British North America from the clutches of the United States.

A longer view shows that Canada has allured but also vexed British observers ever since its creation. The Edwardian era produced an especially rich crop of writings on Canada. In 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, the first train from Montreal pulled into Vancouver. This completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had persuaded the Crown colony of British Columbia to join in the new federation. In expanding Canada, the CPR also made it easier for British people to see the country. Having crossed from Liverpool to Montreal on a fast liner, they could visit most of its major cities, which were found on or near the railway.

Literary celebrities did so in enviable conditions. The CPR’s bosses loaned the poet Rudyard Kipling his own carriage in 1907, so he could travel in comfort and at his own speed. His impressions, which appeared in newspapers and then as Letters to the Family (1908), make for particularly resonant reading today. Although a man of strong prejudices, he had seen the country up close, rather than merely retweeting allegations about it, and was prepared to be surprised as well as disappointed by it.

Kipling’s contemporaries travelled with heavier and very different ideological baggage than we carry today. It was not wokery that worried them, but irreligion and greed, two poisons that had crept north from America. When the clergyman Hensley Henson steamed into Vancouver, in July 1909, he was horrified to see its beaches plastered with “vulgar advertisements”. The further [East] he travelled, the worse things became. The Anglican clergy were “weaklings” who made no dent on a materialistic society. Winnipeg was given over to “graft”. Young people in Ontario spoke like gum-chewing Yankees. Quebeckers were despoiling their province by setting up hydroelectric dams on its waterfalls.

Kipling did not share Henson’s churchy desire to scold his Canadian hosts. He was a cheerful freethinker who considered materialism a necessary part of nation-building. Canada had “big skies, and the big chances”: he admired its railway workers and lumberjacks for their insouciant and sometimes drunken swagger. Boom towns like Winnipeg excited him: he loved to see office blocks rise and streets flare with natural gas lamps; he lost considerable sums speculating on Vancouver real estate.

What worried him was rather Canada’s fading strategic commitment to the Empire. The modern Right understands Canada as a battleground for the values of “the West”. Kipling, who had married an American and lived for some years in Vermont, naturally believed in and did much to formulate the fervent if vague sense that English-speaking peoples share a civilisation. Yet this did not weaken his overriding concern for the political cohesion of the British Empire. Canada’s failure to join as enthusiastically in Britain’s recent war against the rebellious Dutch Boers of South Africa as he would have liked weighed on him — so much so that he kept calling the prairie the “veldt”. Kipling regarded the scepticism of Liberals and Socialists at home about whether the Empire offered value for money as a “blight”: now this “rot” seemed to be spreading like Bubonic plague, “with every steamer” to Canada.

The way to draw the dominion back to the motherland was to fill it with English settlers who shared his distaste for domestic Socialism. The dilution of English Canada worried Kipling. He allowed the Francophone Catholics of Quebec their differences — he found their basilicas romantic — but the policy of settling the prairies with hardy Slavs from the Habsburg and Russian Empires appalled him. These “beady-eyed, muddy-skinned, aproned women, with handkerchiefs on their heads and Oriental bundles in their hands” could never assimilate to English Canada. Nor did he care that many were fleeing oppression: people who renounce their country have “broken the rules of the game”.

November 21, 2024

QotD: The 1965 Immigration Act

Caldwell’s account is indispensable — especially for liberals — in understanding how those resentments grew until they finally exploded under Barack Obama. The Tea Party was the first real movement of this sort; the collapse of immigration reform proposals under George W. Bush and then under Obama revealed how powerful these feelings were; Trump managed to wrap them all up into a populist fervor that was distributed geographically enough to give him a win in the Electoral College. Liberals, increasingly ensconced in their own economic and social bubble, were shocked.

Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.

But how do we get out of this trap? That’s where the depression sinks in. Neither Caldwell nor Klein see a way back to a common weal and a common good. Ezra offers some technical corrections — ending the Electoral College, the filibuster, and winner-takes-all voting. And they might help, although their potential unintended consequences should be carefully considered. Then he recommends meditation to control our own primal instincts — a role that Christianity traditionally held. (I don’t disagree with Ezra on the benefits of meditation, but it’s hardly a game-changer in America in 2020.) Caldwell proposes something far more drastic: a repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, you read that right. The proposal’s perversity matches its impossibility — and it’s buried in one sentence on the penultimate page of the book.

So much of Caldwell’s polemical history is fresh air; but the bleakness of its reactionary mood reveals how tribal Caldwell has become. He can barely eke out a few sentences reluctantly acknowledging some of the good things that the last 50 years have brought — in the lives of many women, in the prospects for African-Americans, in the dignity of homosexuals. He never acknowledges that Obama actually stood a chance of healing racial divides, if the GOP hadn’t demonized him from the start. And as an old friend of Chris’s, I know him to be a more gracious and humane person than this polemic might, at times, suggest. But that such a good man has gotten caught up in polarization and tribalism and such a brilliant man sees no hope for a peaceful resolution merely reveals how deep our problem is.

I have a smidgen more optimism. I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.

Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?

Andrew Sullivan, “America Needs A Miracle”, New York, 2020-01-31.

November 18, 2024

“The Great Canadian Lie is the claim that we’ve ‘always been multicultural'”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Cancon, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Fortissax thinks that the rest of Canada has lessons to be learned from Quebec:

If you are a Canadian born at any point in the Post-WWII era, you have been subjected to varying degrees of liberal “Cultural Mosaic” propaganda. This narrative exploits the historic presence of three British Isles ethnic groups (which had already been intermixing for millennia) and the predominantly Norman French settlers to justify the unprecedented mass migration of people from the Third World into Canada. This process only began in earnest in the 1990s before accelerating rapidly in the 2010s.

The Great Canadian Lie is the claim that we’ve “always been multicultural”, as though the extremely small and inconsequential presence of “Black Loyalists” or the historically hostile Indigenous groups (making up only 1% of the population at Canada’s founding in 1867) played any serious role in shaping the Canadian nation, its identity, institutions, or culture. Inspired by Dr. Ricardo Duchesne’s book Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (2017), which chronicled the emergence of two ethnic groups uniquely born of the New World, I delved into the 2021 Census data collected by the Canadian government to explore the ethnic breakdown of White Canadians in greater detail

The evidence is clear. In 2021, just four years ago, 72.7% of the entire Canadian population was not just White, but Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian, representing an overwhelming presence compared to visible minorities and other White ethnic groups, such as the small populations of Germans and Ukrainians.

In the space last night, I highlighted this historical fact and explained to the audience the ethnogenesis of the Anglo-Canadian and its significance. While we all recognize that the Québécois are a homogeneous group descended predominantly from Norman French settlers — such as the Filles du Roi and Samuel de Champlain’s 1608 expedition, which established Quebec City with a single-minded purpose — the Anglo-Canadian story also deserves similar recognition for its role in shaping Canada’s identity.

But what is less known is that Anglo-Canadians are just as ethnically homogeneous as the Québécois, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. Anglo-Canadian identity emerged from Loyalist Americans in the 1750s, beginning with the New England Planters in Nova Scotia — “continentals” with a culture distinct from both England and the emergent Americans. After the American Revolutionary War, they marched north with indomitable purpose, like Aeneas and the Trojans, to rebuild their Dominion. Author Carl Berger, in his influential work The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, demonstrates that the descendants of Loyalists were the one ethnic group that nurtured “an indigenous British Canadian feeling.” The following passage from Berger’s work is worth citing:

    The centennial arrival of the loyalists in Ontario coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the City of Toronto and, during a week filled with various exhibitions, July 3 was set aside as “Loyalist Day”. On the morning of that day the platform erected at the Horticultural Pavilion was crowded with civic and ecclesiastical dignitaries and on one wall hung the old flag presented in 1813 to the York Militia by the ladies of the county. Between stirring orations on the significance of the loyalist legacy, injunctions to remain faithful to their principles, and tirades against the ancient foe, patriotic anthems were sung and nationalist poetry recited. “Rule Britannia” and “If England to Herself Be True” were rendered “in splendid style” and evoked “great enthusiasm”. “A Loyalist Song”, “Loyalist Days”, and “The Maple Leaf Forever”, were all beautifully sung

The 60,000 Loyalist Americans, who arrived in two significant waves, were soon bolstered by mass settlement from the British Isles. However, British settlers assimilated into the Loyalist American culture rather than imposing a British identity on the new Canadians. The first major wave of British settlers after the Loyalists primarily consisted of the Irish. Before Confederation in 1867, approximately 850,000 Irish immigrants settled in Canada. Between 1790 and 1815, an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 settlers, mainly from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, also made their way to Canada.

Another large-scale migration occurred between 1815 and 1867, bringing approximately 1 million settlers from Britain to Canada, specifically to Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. New Brunswick was carved out from the larger province of Nova Scotia to make room for the influx of Loyalists. During this time, settlers from England, Scotland, and Ireland intermingled and assimilated into the growing Anglo-Canadian culture. Scottish immigrants, who constituted 10–15% of this wave, primarily spoke Gaelic upon arrival but adopted English as they integrated.

All settlers from the British Isles spoke English (small numbers spoke Gaelic in case of Scots), were ethnically and culturally similar, and had much more in common with each other than with their continental European counterparts.

Settlement would slow down in the years immediately preceding Confederation in 1867 but surged again during the period between 1896 and 1914, with an estimated 1.25 million settlers yet again from Britain moving to Canada as part of internal migration within the British Empire. These settlers predominantly also [went] to Ontario and the Maritimes, further forging the Anglo-Canadian identity.

A common misconception among Canadians is that Canada “was a colony” of Britain, subordinate to, or a “vassal state”. This is wrong. Canadians were the British, in North America. There were no restrictions on what Canadians could or could not do in their own Dominion. From the first wave of Loyalists onward, Canadians were regularly involved in politics and governance, actively participating in shaping the nation.

Like the ethnogenesis of the English, which saw Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians converge into a new people and ethnicity (the Anglo-Saxons), Anglo-Canadians are a combination of 1.9 million English, 850,000 Irish (from both Northern and Southern Ireland), and 200,000 Scots, converging with 60,000 Loyalist Americans from the 13 Colonies. These distinct yet similar ethnic groups no longer exist as separate peoples in Canada. Anglo-Canadians are the fusion of the entire British Isles. The Arms of Canada, the favourite symbol of Canadian nationalists today, represents this new ethnic group with the inclusion of the French:

Arms of England, Scotland, Ireland and France in that order.

It’s no coincidence that, once rediscovered, the Arms of Canada exploded in popularity as the emblem of Canadian nationalists. Unlike more controversial symbols that appeal to pan-White racial unity, such as the Sonnenrad or Celtic cross, the Arms of Canada resonate as a distinctly Canadian icon, deeply rooted in the nation’s true heritage and history — a heritage that cannot be bought, sold, or traded away. This is an immutable bloodline stretching into the ancient past. If culture is downstream from race, and deeper still, ethnicity, then Canadian culture, values, and identity are fundamentally tied not just its race, but its ethnic composition. The ethnos defines the ethos. Canadians are not as receptive to the abstract idea of White nationalism for the same reason Europeans aren’t — because they possess a cohesive ethnic identity, unlike most White Americans.

November 12, 2024

Canada in the news … for all the wrong reasons

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper explains why your non-Canadian friends may be finding their opinions on the dysfunctional Dominion getting more and more sour in recent years:

… within just the last few years, multiple foreign outlets have profiled Canada for the singular purpose of asking what happened to it, and worrying if Canada’s ills will soon be their own. What’s more, these articles are not limited to a single topic; so much is going sideways in Canada right now that everything from our assisted-suicide regime to our economy to our internet legislation is attracting overseas notice like never before.

Below, a cursory guide to some of them. If you’re noticing that your non-Canadian friends suddenly have a darker picture of your home country than they used to, here’s a clue as to why.

“Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream”

Ever since the 2019 federal election, The Economist‘s coverage of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has usually followed a general theme of noting that the bloom is off the rose of his photogenic ascendancy to power in 2015. But in a trio of articles published last month, the publication laid into the Canadian leader as an icon of what not to do.

Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream, published on Oct. 14. Canada’s Trudeau trap, published on Oct. 17. And then, just for good measure, Justin Trudeau is paying for solar panels in the cold, dark Arctic.

[…]

“Canada Is Disintegrating”

The Telegraph in the U.K. ran an entire series of essays last week on the topic of Canada taking it to the limit on progressive laws covering everything from drugs to national identity.

[…]

“Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech”

The June tabling of the Online Harms Act prompted a wave of foreign coverage unlike few pieces of Canadian legislation. Although virtually every non-U.S. country has legislated controls on extreme speech, the Online Harms Act went noticeably farther than its peer countries in two respects: It prescribes a life sentence for the speech crime of “advocating or promoting genocide”, and it authorizes pre-emptive custody for anyone suspected of committing hate speech in future.

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