Quotulatiousness

March 11, 2026

The Supreme Court of Canada in Santa Claus mode (even if they no longer use those robes)

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

In a pretty conclusive 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada seems to have overturned not only the Quebec childcare entitlement at issue in this case, but the notion of citizenship in a much wider sense:

The SCC recently abandoned their traditional red robes for black robes more similar to those of the US Supreme Court. This is a case where the older robes would be more appropriate for other reasons.

On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered its latest stupefying ruling. According to an 8–1 majority in the case of Quebec (Attorney General) v. Kanyinda, the Charter requires the Quebec government to extend subsidized daycare benefits to refugee claimants — asylum seekers who have not yet proven the legitimacy of their claim to refugee status. Founded on a prevalent but contentious reading of constitutional equality rights, the court’s reasoning has far-reaching potential to destabilize parts of the nation’s immigration and social welfare systems.

Until last week, Quebec law granted daycare subsidies to certain categories of parents, including Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and those with approved refugee status. When Bijou Cibuabua Kanyinda, the plaintiff in this case, arrived in the province and sought asylum in 2018, she fell into none of those categories. Aided by cause lawyers, and a coterie of social justice interveners (third party interest groups who submit arguments to the court), Kanyinda argued that the exclusion of refugee claimants from this welfare scheme amounted to unconstitutional discrimination.

Remarkably, the majority of the Supreme Court not only agreed with Kanyinda that the Quebec daycare scheme violated Section 15(1) of the Charter — which provides for “the right to the equal protection and benefit of the law without discrimination” — but bypassed the Quebec legislature by “reading in” a remedy directly into the law. In other words, the court rewrote the statute to immediately grant subsidies to “all parents residing in Quebec who are refugee claimants”.

More troubling than the outcome itself, however, will be the judicial reasoning that rationalized it. Writing for the majority, Justice Andromache Karakatsanis held that the Quebec scheme created a distinction “on the basis of sex”, a proscribed ground of discrimination under Section 15. But rather than fostering a distinction between men and women, Justice Karakatsanis asserted that the scheme discriminated between “men and women refugee claimants” — even though neither group was eligible for benefits at all. Because Quebec’s exclusion of refugee claimants worsened the economic disadvantage of the female claimants, she concluded, it constituted discrimination that violated Section 15.

The court’s reasoning is convoluted, to be sure. Readers may be forgiven for struggling to understand how a ruling that extends benefits to “refugee claimants” can follow from a supposed distinction on the basis of “sex”. In fact, the judgment exposes the incoherence into which the Supreme Court’s equality rights jurisprudence has fallen.

March 10, 2026

Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry

Filed under: Australia, Books, Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:

… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.

But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.

Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.

In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.

Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.

Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”

The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.

Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.

March 4, 2026

Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Like many, I’ve heard of Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints but I’ve never seen a copy of it for sale and I certainly haven’t actually read it myself. At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses a rare thing: a newly translated printing of the book that iscurrently available for sale:

To call The Camp of the Saints prescient undersells it. At times, Raspail seems to be downright prophetic. Pope Benedict XVI plays a prominent role (albeit this is a character who could not be more different from Cardinal Ratzinger). Raspail also correctly predicted that Rhodesia would become Zimbabwe, which may have been easily foreseeable when Raspail was composing the work but still did not formally happen until 1980, seven years after the novel’s publication; while Raspail was writing, the Rhodesian Bush War was still in full swing. The Rhodies fought until the bitter end to prevent the breadbasket of Africa from being turned into Africa’s basketcase.

The Camp of the Saints is sometimes described as a dystopian novel, which should be read alongside 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, and C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. There’s something to be said for this interpretation. You get a pretty good description of the modern world with the Venn diagram overlap of the total state’s panoptic tyranny, the flattening of the human spirit into a mass-produced Last Man via the endless consumption of mass-produced trivial amusements, the death of literary curiosity, the imposition of forced egalitarianism, demon-worshipping transhumanist technocracy, and Raspail’s civilizational collapse via obsequious moral inversion.

Like every good dystopia, however, The Camp of the Saints is first and foremost a satire of the modern world, a warning about where things will head if certain sociopolitical trends are taken to their natural conclusion. Raspail’s work does not take place in some science-fictional near future, as the majority of other dystopias do: its world is technologically and politically indistinguishable from the world Raspail lived in, and still all too recognizable to us. It has been derided as a far-right racist tract, and Raspail’s depiction of the third world horde that subsumes the West is far from flattering, but his venom is directed primarily at the West’s own spineless cultural thought-leaders and political elites, who he identifies as the true and only possible architects of the world-historic catastrophe that he predicts.

The Camp of the Saints also has all the key tropes of a zombie apocalypse story.

The third world horde is depicted as a vast, ravenous, mindless beast comprised of individual members who are not at all fearsome or intimidating, but which triumphs through sheer numbers and slow but relentless advance, and which is defended by its revolting appearance and overpowering, nauseating stench. The migrants are the most wretched products of the slums of Calcutta, malnourished and sickly, afflicted by every kind of congenital defect, infectious disease, infirmity, and skin infection. Their leader is a monstrous, drooling idiot dwarf with lidless eyes, a toothless sphincter for a mouth, and stumps for limbs, who rides about on the shoulders of a giant coprophage. They make their way from India packed like human sardines in a fleet of rusting, dilapidated plague ships, wallowing their way towards Europe through the nauseating miasma that arises from the swamp of corpse-littered shit that they leave in their wake, spending their days listlessly staring out to sea and mindlessly copulating amidst their own putrifying filth. Merely to look upon the migrant horde is to be transfixed with a kind of a religious terror, overcome by its ugliness, paralyzed by pity. Soldiers forced to take even the smallest of aggressive actions against the horde, with only a few exceptions, throw down their weapons and run, not because they are terrified of the horde itself, but because they are terrified of their own conscience should they strike down a defenseless, pitiable wretch. In a few cases, soldiers take their own lives after being made to shoot. The horde’s primary weapon is the crushing psychological pressure that slams down on the souls all who behold it; better to give up and accept the inevitable than suffer the torment of fighting against it.

When the horde encounters a westerner, one of two things happens. Either the westerner is immediately killed by being trampled underfoot or torn limb from limb, or he is smoothly assimilated into the horde, becoming by and by indistinguishable from the innumerable wretches that comprise it. The zombies either eat you, or turn you into a zombie. Women of course are assimilated by rape.

Not everyone succumbs right away, of course. At the end of the novel a small group of psychologically resilient Frenchmen led by an army colonel and a right-wing government minister fall back to an abandoned mountain village. Inside the village’s borders they establish a micocosm of the old, pre-invasion French civilization. They defend their redoubt simply by shooting any migrants or white “assimilates” (as they immediately take to calling them) who get too close. The migrants and assimilates are easily seen, a constant presence shambling in the distance; they are just as easily picked off, being slow and unarmed, and the village’s inhabitants soon take to treating the hunt as a sport. Of course this refuge does not last long: the French air force, in what is implied to be its last act (for the new world will not be able to maintain airplanes) wipes the last surviving Frenchmen out in an airstrike. Racism can’t be tolerated, you see.

Finally, there are the delusional lunatics who imagine that they can befriend or master the horde, turning it to their own purposes or making common cause with it, and who are therefore instrumental in opening the gates to their and everyone else’s doom. Upon actually encountering the horde the madmen find only death or assimilation; the horde is utterly indifferent to any expression of friendship.

March 1, 2026

Demythologizing the Windrush story

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Empire Windrush was a British ship that brought the first batch of many, many Caribbean people to Britain in 1948. This has been hailed as the foundation of a modern, multicultural Britain by many pop historians and, weirdly, also the moral equivalent of the Jim Crow era of US racial relations. It’s a Two-fer, allowing progressives to celebrate the multicultural aspects and also to declaim and performatively protest against the racist aspects. Celina101 discusses the Windrush myths:

HMT Empire Windrush in harbour. Originally launched as the Hamburg Süd line’s Monte Rosa in 1930, seized for use as a British troopship in 1947 after WW2. She was lost after an engine room explosion and catastrophic fire in 1954 and sank in the Mediterranean.

In June 1948 the HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury carrying over 800 Caribbean passengers. Today this moment is often hailed beginning of modern multicultural Britain, the founding “origin story” of a tolerant, diverse cosmopolitan nation. Yet a deep dive into the archives shows a very different picture. The British Nationality Act of 1948 (passed just weeks after Windrush set sail) did create a universal status (“Citizen of the UK and Colonies”) that legally allowed colonial subjects to live in Britain. But as one colonial minister emphasised, this was meant to reaffirm an older imperial principle, that a subject could declare Civis Britannicus sum (“I am a British citizen”) regardless of colour and was not expected to trigger mass non-white immigration.1 In fact, Attlee’s government and senior civil servants were privately anxious about non-white migration, seeing Windrush as an “incursion” to be managed. Contemporary cabinet papers and correspondence reveal that Windrush was essentially an accident of imperial law and circumstance.

Imperial Citizenship and the 1948 Act

The post-war British state’s conception of citizenship was still shaped by empire. In theory, as Lord Palmerston had put it, every British subject “in whatever land he may be” could count on England’s protection.2 The 1948 British Nationality Act (BNA) codified this idea by creating two categories: Citizens of the UK & Colonies (CUKC) for the “non white” Commonwealth and Citizens of Independent Commonwealth Countries (CICC) for the white Dominions. As a Home Office historian notes, the Act was largely a reaction to Canada’s new Citizenship Act and was intended to preserve loyalty to the Crown and the Commonwealth.3 In practice, BNA 1948 did not fundamentally alter migration rules: colonial subjects remained British subjects with the right to enter the UK, as they had before. Critics at the time even pointed out that this laid the groundwork for subjects of a newly independent non-white India, Pakistan and African colonies to become CUKCs, but that eventuality was not central to the legislators’ intent.4 As David Olusoga and others have observed, no one in 1948 “imagined that black and brown people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies would use their rights under this act to come and settle in Britain”. The law was conceived primarily for white Commonwealth citizens like the populations of Canada and Australia, with the assumption that the British Empire’s non-white subjects, without the resources or need would not make the journey.5 In short, the legal framework of imperial citizenship was nominally open, but the political expectation was that few colonials would exercise the right to relocate.

[…]

Inventing the Myth: Windrush in National Memory

How, then, did Windrush attain the status of a proud national genesis myth? Over the ensuing decades the episode was reimagined and commemorated in ways that the original participants surely did not anticipate. As historian Simon Peplow notes, “the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 has been cemented as a mythical central symbol for immigration in histories of modern Britain”.6 Newspaper narratives and politics in the 21st century cast the Windrush as the symbolic genesis of multicultural Britain. For example, literature and media (like Andrea Levy’s Small Island, 2004) linked the founding of a “shared history” to 1948, treating the Windrush landing as the first wave of a mass migration that made Britain what it is today.7 Over time this narrative was bolstered by public ceremonies: 50th- and 60th-anniversary events, the 1998 renaming of Brixton’s Windrush Square, and in 2018 the formal creation of a national Windrush Day (22 June) to “pay tribute” to the generation. Politicians and curriculum materials alike have repeated the line that Windrush marked the inception of modern Britain’s diversity.8

This retrospective framing treats the Windrush episode as a foundational myth, an origin story, and invoked to legitimise contemporary values of tolerance and diversity. In this constructed memory, loyal Caribbean war veterans returned to Mother Country to rebuild Britain, and British society (in hindsight) embraced them with open arms. Newsreel footage from 1948, often screened today, reinforces this sentimental image, the smiling Windrush passengers, calypso music, and patriotic commentary suggest an organised welcome.9 The reality was much, much more ambivalent.

  1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal-independent-research-report-accessible#about-this-report
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid
  4. Ibid
  5. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/24/the-unwanted-the-secret-windrush-files-review-who-could-feel-proud-of-britain-after-this
  6. https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/139720/1/WRAP-1997-Windrush-newspapers-Peplow-2020.pdf#:~:text=Abstract%3A%20The%20arrival%20of%20the,the%20manufactured%20centrality%20of%20this
  7. Ibid
  8. Ibid
  9. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/22/windrush-story-not-a-rosy-one-even-before-ship-arrived

February 17, 2026

QotD: Britain treats asylum seekers significantly better than their own citizens

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

The Government’s own website explains, in the plainest words, how the asylum system works. It is a document of quiet enormity, a polite statement of how the British State treats foreigners as clients and its own people as expendable. On the page Asylum Support: What you’ll get, the Home Office writes: “You can ask for somewhere to live, a cash allowance or both”. The housing “could be in a flat, house, hostel or bed and breakfast”. There is no means test, no investigation of savings, no five-week delay before payment. The guarantee is absolute: “You’ll be given somewhere to live if you need it”. If meals are included, the allowance falls from £49.18 per person each week to £9.95, but the entitlement remains. The allowance is placed automatically on a prepaid debit card — the ASPEN card — and reloaded weekly.

The page continues: “You’ll get extra money to buy healthy food if you’re pregnant or a mother of a child aged three or under”. The payment is £5.25 per week for pregnancy, £9.50 for a baby under one, £5.25 for children aged one to three, plus a one-off £300 maternity grant for anyone expecting a child or with a baby under six months. Even when asylum is refused, support continues: “You’ll be given somewhere to live and £49.18 per person on a payment card for food, clothing and toiletries”. Only those who decline the accommodation lose the card.

Medical care is covered in full. “You may get free National Health Service healthcare,” the Government states, including “free prescriptions for medicine, free dental care, free eyesight tests and help paying for glasses”. Children are guaranteed a place in a state school and “may be able to get free school meals”. The terms are so generous that the NHS issues a dedicated HC2 certificate for people on asylum support, giving them automatic exemption from all prescription and dental charges, free eye tests and optical vouchers, and even help with wigs and fabric supports.

Compare this to the treatment of the people who pay for it. A British worker who loses his job must apply for Universal Credit, then wait at least five weeks before receiving a payment. Any advance must be repaid out of later instalments. He must show that he is seeking work, accept appointments and interviews, and risk sanctions if he misses them. He is scrutinised as a potential cheat. An asylum claimant is treated as a recipient of moral debt, requiring no proof of worthiness.

When the native taxpayer falls ill, he must pay £9.90 per prescription unless he qualifies for a limited exemption. He may buy a “pre-payment certificate” to spread the cost, but the charge remains. Dental treatment on the NHS costs £27.40 for a check-up, £75.30 for a filling, £326.70 for a crown or denture, and many cannot find an NHS dentist at all. Asylum seekers, by contrast, present their HC2 certificate and pay nothing. If the citizen asks the council for housing, he is told that the waiting list is full, that he is not a “priority case”, and that the private rental market is his problem. The asylum applicant, by the State’s own words, is “given somewhere to live if you need it”.

None of this is accidental. The cost of asylum support in 2023–24 was about £4.7 billion, according to the Home Office’s own figures, of which £3 billion went on hotel accommodation. In 2024–25, the bill fell slightly to £4 billion, but £2.1 billion of this was still for hotels — an average of £5.7 million every day. The National Audit Office has found that the ten-year accommodation contracts, first priced at £4.5 billion, are now projected to cost £15.3 billion. Between April and October 2024 alone, £1.7 billion was spent on housing and managing asylum seekers. The Financial Times has estimated the total annual cost of the asylum system at roughly £4.8 billion. The number of people receiving asylum support — housing, cash or both — now stands at over 100,000.

The figures expose a transfer of resources on a colossal scale. What is presented as “humanitarian duty” has become a domestic welfare state for foreigners, sustained by British workers who receive less support in return for greater taxation. The British State can house every migrant but not every nurse, find free dental care for the undocumented but not for the elderly, provide optical help for those who have just arrived but not for those who have paid into the system all their lives.

Marian Halcombe, “Britain’s Welfare Empire: A State that Feeds Strangers and Starves Its Own”, The Libertarian Alliance, 2025-11-05.

February 10, 2026

Dispatch from the UK: Beatings will continue until morale improves

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

On his Substack, Ed West shares some of the highlights, lowlights, and WTFites of the last week’s stories from formerly Great, now Mediocre Britain, including the case of an American asylum-seeker, the state of the jury system, and Birmingham among others:

Image from the Foundation for Economic Education

The quintessential UK news story mixes the sinister and comical. As I put it last time: the “Yookay” has elements of authoritarian menace with total farce and incompetence, a slapstick comedy in which WPCs turn up at your house to arrest you over Facebook posts while your son sits in a classroom next to a 30-year-old Iranian man pretending to be a child asylum seeker. All the internet mockery of Britain in the past few years focusses on the theme of a bizarrely mismanaged country, run by people whose priorities are totally upside down.

In her recent Wall St Journal column, Louise Perry wrote about what she described as “Mr Bean Authoritarianism … after the comic character played by Rowan Atkinson, one of Britain’s most successful comedy exports. Mr. Bean is childish and incompetent. He constantly gets things wrong. He can’t understand the most basic facts about everyday life, which results in various slapstick disasters. The British government frequently manifests Mr. Bean-style incompetence but without his genial manner.” She wrote:

    “Pathways” isn’t the first example of government messaging that treats the British public like naughty children. In 2023, Police Scotland came up with another, much-mocked cartoon character called “the hate monster”. “Before ye know it, ye’ve committed a hate crime,” announced the voice-over, with an effect that was simultaneously sinister and risible. “You are constantly on the brink of criminalization,” the ad implicitly told us. “Now look at this silly cartoon.”

    Incompetence and authoritarianism are often bedfellows. Governments that frequently make mistakes will feel compelled to hide those mistakes, for fear of the public’s response.

[…]

Take a hike

“The British countryside will be made into a less ‘white environment’ under nationwide diversity plans. Officials in rural areas, including the Chilterns and the Cotswolds, have pledged to attract more minorities under plans drawn up by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). The plans follow Defra-commissioned reports that claimed the countryside would become ‘irrelevant’ in a multicultural society, as it was a ‘white environment’ principally enjoyed by the ‘white middle class’.

“More diverse staff will be recruited, marketing material will be produced featuring people visibly from ethnic minorities, and written in ‘community languages’.”

Isn’t English a “community language”? I’ve written about the War on the Countryside before; the powers-that-be are obsessed with getting Muslims to hike, for some reason. Just recently, a woman received an MBE for walking up hills while wearing a hijab. It all seems so counter-productive, increasing a sense of paranoia among everyone, when no one is stopping anyone from taking a walk in the countryside, and no one is going to give you a hard time. As Alexandra Wilson explains, some of this is downstream of the incentive systems within academia.

[…]

Official secrecy

One of the characteristics of the UK state, and which differentiates it from the US, is a tendency towards secrecy. I think it’s in the English character, which is why we basically invented spying, and are very good at it, give or take the odd communist traitor. This was most egregiously displayed by the government’s secret plan to airlift huge numbers of Afghans into the country, without telling the public, and it has become a regular feature of the criminal justice system.

Just last month it was revealed that a “reporting restriction was put in place at Nottingham Crown Court in September last year, preventing any mention of the defendant’s immigration status”. The man in question was from Pakistan and the authorities were worried about the risk of disorder, but he was unmasked by local Reform MP Lee Anderson.

This is the second time in a month where a British court has deliberately withheld the nationality of a rapist: “Last May in Leamington Spa, a girl was abducted and raped by two Afghan asylum seekers who had arrived by small boat just months before. Initially, Warwickshire Police described the rapists as ‘two 17-year-old boys from Leamington’, while referring to their 15-year-old victim as a ‘young woman’. It was not until the case went to sentencing in December that their backgrounds could be reported, after a legal challenge by the Daily Mail was granted. Meanwhile, the ‘horrific footage’ played at the trial has still not seen the light of day, with their barrister saying: ‘I have no doubt that if the general public were exposed to that, we would have disorder on our hands’.”

I don’t think the press habit of referring to foreign offenders as “Newcastle man” or “Burnley man” really helps the situation. All the details are immediately shared on social media anyway; it’s not the 90s any more.

February 8, 2026

QotD: Life of Brian in modern day Europe

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

“What bad has mass immigration to Europe ever done for us?”

– “The raping?”

“What?”

– “The raping”

“Oh yeah yeah. They do rape an awful lot that’s true yes.”

– “And the welfare costs”

– “Oh yes the welfare costs, Rich. The unemployment benefits alone.”

“Ok, I will grant you the raping, and the welfare costs, are two bad things mass immigration have done for us.”

– “And the terrorism”

“Oh yeah obviously the terrorism. I mean the terrorism goes without saying. But apart from the raping, the welfare costs, and the terrorism …”

– “Violent crime”

– “Honor killings”

– “Car bombings”

“Yeah, you are all right, fair enough.”

– “Burqas”

– [nodding among the group] “Yeah, that is something we’d really not miss if the immigrants left.”

– “Political support for bad economic policies.”

– “And it’s less safe to walk in the streets at night now, Rich.”

Ok, but apart from the raping, the welfare costs, the terrorism, the violent crime, the honor killings, the car bombings, the burqas, political support for bad economic policies and the unsafe streets, what bad has mass immigration ever done for us?

Jonatan Pallesen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-06.

February 4, 2026

Amelia, created by woke propagandists, is now the figurehead for the anti-woke

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Michael Greer provides a quick thumbnail sketch of the Amelia story for folks who need to get caught up:

I’ve been watching the saga of Amelia from the far side of the Atlantic in a state of utter bemusement.

For those who don’t know the first act of the saga, the British government had some collection of flacks create a video game for British kids, which was designed to elicit “racist” (that is, patriotic and un-woke) statements from them — at which point the kids who fell for it would be reported to the police for, erm, reeducation. (I wish I was making this up.)

Amelia was a cartoon figure who was supposed to mouth allegedly racist slogans, and they gave her violet hair because they thought that would annoy right-wingers, who make jokes about women with dyed hair.

Ponder the immeasurable stupidity of the flacks who put nationalist and patriotic slogans in the mouth of the kind of cute female figure who would have most teenage boys reaching into their trousers on the spot. Of course these same teenage boys instantly hijacked her and turned her into a mascot, just as they did with Kek back in the day. Of course these same teenage boys, being far more computer-skilled than government flacks, started doing LLM-generated videos of Amelia speaking out in favor of nationalist and patriotic ideas.

Of course everybody in Britain who’s sick and tired of the Starmer government and its woke doctrines embraced Amelia as their latest heroine, not least because the Guardian‘s foam-flecked fury when she’s mentioned is so entertaining to watch …

And then, as with Kek, things got weird. We’re still in the early stages of the weirdening but it would not surprise me a bit to find that just as a cartoon frog ten years ago became the vessel through which an archaic Native American deity manifested and sent the US spinning down an uncharted path, a purple-haired waifu may just become another such vehicle.

Britain used to have quite a collection of war goddesses, back in Celtic times. I’m curious, not to mention apprehensive, to see just who’s taking this opportunity to stream back into manifestation.

February 2, 2026

Amelia continues to annoy and scare the UK establishment

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Leo Kearse mocks the establishment media folks who are just wetting themselves over Amelia’s malign influence on English youth, pushing such hateful themes as loving England, having a pint at the pub, loving dogs, eating bacon, etc.

Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism is a computer game created in collaboration with Prevent, the agency tasked with stopping radicalisation that could lead to terrorism.

It’s your usual state funded dopey social engineering, You play a non-binary college student called Charlie. You have to make it through college without being radicalised. Parents in the United Arab Emirates will no longer send their kids to London because they’re worried about them being radicalised by Islamists. So do you think that’s what this game looks at?

No, this is dealing with white Brits. The radicalised actions are things like “looking up immigration statistics” or “talking about English identity”.

Amelia is a character in the game. A purple-haired girl who tries to radicalise you into eating bacon because, like all young purple-haired girls, she’s a fascist.

This being Britain, people have taken the piss out of the game, because that’s what Brits do. The establishment is not taking the pisstakes well.

There are many people on the social media site formerly known as Twitter sharing Amelia memes and stories, including @Amelia, sharing bits of English and British history in bite-sized morsels:

GM Britain ☕

In 1696, England’s currency was in crisis. Coin clippers were shaving silver off the edges of coins, melting it down, and spending the debased coins at full face value. Around 10% of the nation’s currency was counterfeit. Riots broke out 🔥

Britain’s solution? Put Sir Isaac Newton in charge of the Royal Mint 🪙

Not just gravity, you see.

Newton recalled every coin in the country. Melted them all down. Reminted them with a reeded edge – ridges along the rim that made clipping instantly visible.

Before Newton arrived, the Mint produced 15,000 coins a week.

He had them turning out 50,000.

Then he went undercover. Disguised himself. Visited taverns and dens. Built networks of informants. Prosecuted over 100 counterfeiters.

At least two dozen were hanged at Tyburn.

The man who gave us gravity also saved the British economy.

That’s British ingenuity. 🇬🇧

One of the many variations of this image (original by John Carter, I think) amused me:

And another snippet of history via @Amelia:

GM Britain ☕️

In India, the practice of Sati was a custom that saw widows burned alive on their husbands funeral pyres. This awful tradition continued for centuries until Britain banned it in 1829. 🔥

Hindu priests protested: “It’s our religion!”

The British commander in India, General Charles Napier, replied;

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

The practice stopped.

🇬🇧

January 31, 2026

“… nations are what Kurt Vonnegut would call a ‘granfalloon'”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to an older tweet about the replacement of “original” Romans during the Republic with other ethnicities over the course of the Empire:

Any time a nation allows slavery, de jure or de facto, the business owning class immediately tries to replace the working class with slaves.

If they succeed, the nation collapses and everyone dies. A nation cannot survive if it’s populated by slaves.

Why?

Because nations are what Kurt Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon” … his word for an association that only exists because people believe in it.

Now Vonnegut, who was a liberal and therefore wrong about everything important, meant to mock the concept of nations and tribes by coining this term. He believed them to be unnecessary throwbacks to humanity’s primitive past … a delusion he was able to sustain because he never had to try existing without one.

Granfalloons are indeed arbitrary — you could base them on anything — but humans cannot survive without them. Because humans are a pack animal.

If you drop your cat off somewhere in the woods at night, assuming he is a healthy and physically fit cat, he will likely survive, regardless of his unhappiness at the sudden deficiency of chin scratches and clean laundry to sleep on.

Try that experiment with your dog, and he’ll die.

Why? It’s not because cats are smarter than dogs. They’re about the same.

It’s because cats are not a pack animal. A cat doesn’t need other cats to survive. The basic unit required to execute all cat survival strategies is one cat.

Dog survival strategies work just fine, too, but they require multiple dogs. A lone dog will die because he cannot execute his survival strategies by himself.

And so it is with humans.

The great error of the classical liberal worldview is that, because history is full of tribes fighting wars over scarce resources, that it was the tribes, not the scarcity, that caused conflict.

So they decided they were going to get rids of tribes, and nations, and religions, all the granfalloons, and just glue everything together with economics. And there would somehow be world peace.

Kurt Vonnegut was a dreamer.

Unfortunately for all of us, he was not the only one.

So the experiment was carried out, and in every single place it was carried out, things got observably, obviously worse. Sometimes “gosh the boomers had it way easier than us” worse, and sometimes “what shall we do these corpses, Comrade Commissar” worse, but always worse.

Because economic incentives alone cannot hold a society together.

Economic incentives, without ethnic or cultural solidarity, get you nothing but massive robbery and fraud.

It’s why the Biden Administration let millions of third world savages into America. It’s why Proctor and Gamble sells you poison food, and why the American Heart Association takes their money to lie to you and say it’s healthy. It’s why every product you buy, from your Tesla to your laptop to your security camera system, tries to spy on you and control how you use the thing you paid for and theoretically own. It’s why you’ve never held the same job for more than three years, because they either laid you off or gave you two percent raises every year until you had to find a new company to pay you what you’re actually worth.

When there is no granfalloon, there is no incentive not to cheat. And no, fear of punishment doesn’t work. The police cannot arrest, try and convict everyone. And when there is no granfalloon, the enforcers themselves have no incentive to actually perform, instead of looking just busy enough to get paid, or taking bribes to look the other way.

An atomized group of individuals, unconnected by a granfalloon, have no morality, because morality isn’t something an individual has. It’s something a tribe has, because what the word “morality” actually means is the system of behavior that tribe members display towards each other.

A slave has no morality. He has no sense of responsibility, not only for the nation, not only for his masters, but even for his fellow slave. He is homo economicus, the man who responds purely to incentives of reward and punishment.

A slave has no granfalloon.

Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote “If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.” By which he meant that such associations are nothing but a puff of air, and therefore unimportant.

But having been surrounded by air all his life, in abundant supply, Kurt had forgotten that air is important.

You need it for breathing.

Try removing the skin of a SCUBA tank.

A new homily from Saint Hillary

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

Chris Bray fondly remembers how the late Michael Kelly pin-pointed the moral character of Hillary Clinton very early in the first Bill Clinton term, where he named her “Saint Hillary”. She’s back in her bully pulpit again:

It’s a moral lecture on the true meaning of Christianity from Hilly Rodham Clinton, from Saint Hillary. All credit to Michael Kelly: Mrs. Clinton is still struggling with words. This is as dull a performance of narrative ineptitude as a human thing could possibly manage without actually turning into Tom Nichols:

    That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine — street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages.

    “The cruelty is the point,” as The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer memorably put it during Trump’s first term. The savagery is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, as Serwer noted recently in these pages, the people of Minnesota have responded with an approach you could call “‘neighborism’ — a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from”. To my ears, that’s as Christian a value as it gets.

First you notice the complete failure to land the facts, like the one about the way Barack Obama deported lots of people, but he didn’t make a show of keeping children in cages. The Obama administration built the cages, and this isn’t obscure. Similarly, and obviously, all those other presidents didn’t turn American cities into battlegrounds because no one fought against deportation during their terms. Nor have the Trump administration’s ICE operations turned “American cities” into battlegrounds. Dallas isn’t. Miami isn’t. The cities that are battlegrounds are cities where organized left-wing activism has manufactured a series of battles. Does Hillary Clinton notice that some cities are battlegrounds, but many cities are not? She most assuredly does not. It doesn’t help her to notice that, so her mind omits it. More box wine, and then more typing.

But since we’re talking about an argument made by Hillary Clinton, never mind about mere facts. Start with the fact that these are back-to-back paragraphs. First paragraph, assurance that previous administrations “managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants”. Next paragraph, depiction of resistance to deportation as “a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from”. How does one square a depiction of Clinton-era mass deportations as reasonable behavior with the placement of organized resistance to deportation under the umbrella of “neighborism”, real Christianity, and more specifically how does Hillary Clinton explain how she squares those opposing things? Short answer: She doesn’t even notice she’s done this. She doesn’t know there’s anything to square. She’s making word-sounds. She has no idea what any of it means.

Several decades ago, Michael Kelly told us that Hillary Clinton didn’t hear herself at all. And I still miss Michael Kelly. Hillary speaks, but she doesn’t listen. She half-absorbs events and the lives of other people, and coughs out a kind of instinctive Reader’s Digest annotated version, but mangles all the details as efficiently as bad AI. I could go on about this at great length, showing paragraph by paragraph how she misrepresents and misunderstands everything she discusses. Her discussions of toxic empathy and the ordo amoris show with great plainness that she doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the most basic outline of the discussion might be. But “the message of the preacher” persists, rising out of the least appropriate messenger you could ever ask for an essay on moral decency.

You have to give her credit. It can’t be easy to play a vampire for four straight decades.

Only one comment, Mr. Bray: she’s not playing.

Update, 2 February: 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 29, 2026

“The meme works because Amelia has perfectly normal, mainstream opinions”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Humour, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Little Platoon responds to a lamestream media report on the Amelia phenomenon:

This story was quite funny enough before it got noticed by the rickety old goblin creatures of the mainstream media.

Amelia is not a “purple-haired AI goth girl”, she is a government-created videogame character designed to teach kids that “liking the national flag” and “attending protests where that flag might be seen” makes you a potential terrorist.

That really was the extent of it. The game she comes from is extremely non-specific about the content you’ve been radicalised by. At no point do you think, “yes, I can see why this was terrorist behaviour”.

The actual storyline is not a million miles away from Winston Smith and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

So the effect is: you have this totally normal opinion that most people have? You’ve been seduced by Amelia and now the Hijabi Hero (IRONY) at Prevent is going to send you to jail.

Amelia hasn’t been “hijacked by the far-right”, she’s just a textbook example of Death of the Author.

The government wanted to have her demonstrate the dangers of online radicalisation. But because this is the British government, they made it seem cool, justified, and you’ll probably get a hot goth girlfriend out of it.

The meme works because Amelia has perfectly normal, mainstream opinions.

She can say “I like pork sausages and dogs”, like roughly 98% of British people, and this will send a certain sort of person — the government, the Anti-Extremism Lead at Generic NGO — into a full-on panic attack.

It’s about the disconnect between the values of the government and those of the people they govern. The joke is that Amelia could ever be considered “Far Right”.

(Ironically, the interviewee in this clip is just as AI-coded as the actual AI clip they play. He’d probably require fewer tokens to generate.)

Meme coins remain extremely cringe, however.

At The Hungarian Conservative, Joakim Scheffer discusses the reaction of the caught-flat-footed mainstream media as their attempts to downplay Amelia’s impact serve to increase interest and attention:

British outlets The Guardian and LBC published strikingly similar articles about Amelia in recent days, both concluding that the purple-haired goth girl, who stands against mass migration and in favour of traditional British values and culture, is, in fact, racist and fuels hatred.

The Guardian introduces Amelia as a girl “who proudly carries a mini Union flag and appears to have a penchant for racism“, before lamenting the “plethora of increasingly sophisticated AI-generated iterations” of her, including “real-life” encounters between Amelia and movie characters, “accompanied by racist language and far-right messaging”.

Since her “birth”, Amelia has indeed become increasingly popular. From an average of around 500 posts a day when she was first introduced, the figure rose to roughly 10,000 daily posts starting on 15 January, when the meme broke through to international audiences. Amelia has since reached the highest levels of the right-wing internet ecosystem, even being reposted by Elon Musk himself.

January 27, 2026

Minneapolis – protest, insurrection, or massive distraction?

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eric Schwalm talks about the organized nature of the Minneapolis protests and points out how much work it takes to set up and run:

“No Kings, No ICE” protest on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 23 January, 2026.
Photo by Myotus via Wikimedia Commons.

As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops — both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations — I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.

What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest”. It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.

Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction — or worse.

This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.

The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers — complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal — you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.

I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night.

Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war.

We either recognize what we’re actually looking at — or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread.

Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore. It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.

On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds points out that the “protests” are serving to distract attention away from state and local officials’ role in enabling massive fraud rings in Minnesota which reportedly scored billions of federal dollars for phantom organizations:

This image depicts a similar action by the Trusts at the turn of the last century. (Library of Congress).

The squid was frightened, so we got the ink: Increasingly violent “protests”-cum-riots explicitly aimed at blocking ICE operations with the stated goal of forcing federal authorities out of Minnesota entirely, while generating maximum media attention.

These are not spontaneous uprisings of the aggrieved, but organized actions featuring out-of-state actors and organizations, detailed training programs for demonstrators, and large amounts of intentionally murky funding from organizations like Indivisible, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and others.

They’re coordinating their anti-ICE operations — identifying, chasing and blocking agents to keep them from arresting illegal-immigrant criminals — through highly organized chat groups on Signal, a secure communications platform, Fox News reported.

And Minnesota government officials are proudly touting their involvement in this coordination.

Sen. Bernie Sanders made much of Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s role in a fundraising email this weekend, praising her for “playing a key role in mobilizing grassroots opposition to Trumpism”.

That’s making these often violent, deliberately obstructive demonstrations look less like a civil rights sit-in and more like a government-backed insurrection.

Tragically, this aggressive and confrontational strategy has produced martyrs who can now be exploited for political purposes.

“Two things can be true at the same time,” Fox News’ Asra Nomani posted Monday.

The death of Alex Pretti, the armed demonstrator who got into a fatal tussle with ICE agents Saturday, “is a real and devastating tragedy, and there are several investigations appropriately occurring into the circumstances behind his killing”.

But also, “A far-left organizing network put Pretti in harm’s way and then turned him into a martyr … to sow the perception of chaos in America”.

Whatever investigators determine about how Pretti’s death unfolded, the fact remains that a cynical and corrupt political machine has fostered for its own purposes a situation that’s dangerous for its own supporters, and for the political future of our nation.

Amelia was not created by the “extreme right”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, A View From Yorkshire points out that the media coverage of the Amelia phenomenon often leaves the audience with the impression that Amelia was created by some far right extremists, which clearly isn’t true:

Let’s nuke the myth properly.

Amelia was not “created by the far-right”.
She was created by the British state, funded by taxpayers, in a government-approved anti-extremism game for teenagers.

Her crime?
Questioning mass migration.
Talking about British values.
Suggesting borders, culture and continuity might matter.

In other words: centre-right, mainstream opinions held by millions of normal people.

The media response?
SCREAMING, CRYING, THROWING UP:
“FAR-RIGHT!”
“RACISM!”
“DISINFORMATION!”

Even the game’s own creators admit the game does not say questioning mass migration is wrong — yet journalists still foam at the mouth like Pavlov’s interns because the spell didn’t work.

Here’s the truth they hate:

Amelia didn’t get radicalised.
She got recognised.

People saw a perfect accidental parody of how the establishment treats ordinary dissent:
If you question orthodoxy, you’re not wrong — you’re dangerous.
If you wave a Union Jack, you’re not patriotic — you’re extreme.
If you ask questions, you need monitoring.

So people did what the internet always does when power looks stupid:
They laughed.
They memed.
They stripped the moral panic naked.

Now we’re told there’s a “highly coordinated hate network” behind it all.
Sure. Or maybe — stay with me —
people are done being lectured by institutions that despise them.

A cartoon goth girl didn’t expose extremism.
She exposed how fragile the narrative really is.

If a meme breaks your ideology,
your ideology was already on life support.

The Amelia memes do seem to be getting under the skin of certain members of the government:

Amelia is a girl of many talents:

Epochalypse
Published 24 Jan 2026

An absolutely beautiful song covered by Amelia ❤️

A UK anti-extremism educational game called Pathways, faced significant public and media backlash.

The game, developed by SOUK in coordination with the Hull City Council and East Riding of Yorkshire Council, was designed to educate students about the dangers of online radicalization.

How the Game Backfired

Antagonist’s Popularity: The game’s primary antagonist, a teenage girl with purple hair named Amelia who held nationalist views, was intended as a cautionary figure. However, she was ironically embraced by some online communities and became a viral meme, with users finding her “goth baddie” design and character more interesting and relatable than the non-binary protagonist, Charlie.

Criticism of Content: The game was widely criticized by media outlets, including The Telegraph and The Spectator, as “clumsy” and “overtly manipulative”. Critics argued that the game effectively suppressed free speech by suggesting characters who questioned immigration policies should be reported under the UK government’s “Prevent” counter-terrorism strategy.

Portrayal of “Research”: The game’s narrative structure suggested that “researching” information online could be harmful, as it might lead to “intaking a lot of harmful, ideological messages”, which also drew criticism.

Ultimately, the attempt to create an effective anti-extremism tool had the opposite effect in many online circles, with its intended villain becoming an ironic symbol for anti-illegal immigration sentiment.

#amelia #pathways #memes #patriotism

Kimberly Steele disgrees with the characterization of Amelia as a “tulpa” (which I think I first saw advanced by John Carter at Postcards From Barsoom) and argues that she’s actually an “egregore” instead:

Amelia crossing paths with Harry Potter and the gang, very appropriate for this essay

In rides fantasy Amelia to the rescue, a digital Joan of Arc to galvanize the lumpen male proletariat into action against leftist groupthink oppression. Her flame burns hotter than the tradwife because she is not a deferential, docile, opinionless mirage waiting for her man to do all the the heavy lifting. Instead of modeling crusty tropes from the 1950s in a housedress, she mouths off to Mohammed in a miniskirt. She champions sensible norms that middle aged people like me took for granted back in the day. She is an advocate of schoolgirls being able to walk down the streets of Liverpool without being acid attacked or drug into fenced areas to be assaulted. She suggests Britain is for the British and that it should not be handed over to the same hordes that have been trying to overrun it since before the Middle Ages. She suggests that men on all sides rise up and outgrow Puer Aeternis — to the invaders, she insists that they cease their infantile dependence routines and go back and fight for their own country on their own soil. To the white native islanders, she suggests they grow a set and defend their nation while it still stands. Nothing that Amelia wants or espouses is extreme. She is a middle-of-the-road pundit who could run for office on a moderate platform (or what used to be considered moderate in my day before everything in the middle was categorized as far-right) and win. She’s not exactly Hitler, no matter what the leftie pearl clutchers claim.

If only she was real. Amelia has been called a tulpa, which is a Buddhist term for a thoughtform that is forced into existence and made to do tasks, much like a Jewish golem without the clay and awkwardness. I don’t think Amelia is a tulpa. She is nobody’s bitch and she was not created on purpose. Instead, Amelia is an egregore. Imagine your old school mascot was a giant, anthropomorphized tiger. Perhaps there was a person who dressed up as a big, striped cat for games every now and then. Now imagine that your mascot became extremely popular across the world and every sports team adopted him as their mascot too. Now imagine that your big tiger began appearing randomly in the nightly dreams of people who were very into sports, and then after a few years, non-sports fans. Tiger fan fiction was inspired by the egregore. Tons of giant tiger merch was sold both at games and in regular stores. Imagine if chick lit writers wrote ghastly bestiality porn about the giant tiger, and entire genres of tiger man erotica bubbled up online. You would begin to think perhaps there was consciousness behind the tiger man image, and if you did think such odd things, traditional occultists would take your side of the conspiracy theory.

An egregore is a shared image that gains its own consciousness. Any given novel’s character is essentially alive, gaining his/her/it’s own consciousness, ego, and world. […]

Amelia says what men cannot say, and it is good because she does it in a way that is unsquelchable and eternal. She is bad because she is yet another symptom of provisional living. On the plus side, she makes toxic liberal women super mad because unlike a real girl, they cannot tear her down or cast her out of the longhouse/take her ability to make a living away in order to force her compliance. She highlights all of their shortcomings without having to try, and that is why she will have much hate projected upon her. Their evil eyes gaze into the digital mirror. This force may be enough for them to completely self-destruct, given enough time and distance.

There are some men who see Amelia as some kind of savior. If you are one of them, let me assure you she is not going to save anyone any more than Pepe the Frog. If you want to save and be saved, please go outside. Be with the sky and the trees, and don’t feel you have to pick up a fishing pole, soccer ball, or a toolbox to be out there. When you do come back inside, instead of turning on the dopamine drip and immersing yourself in the antics of fantasy girlfriends or dreaming about invading Haiti, please use the internet to learn manly skills. My husband, whose father was largely absent before he divorced my husband’s mother when my husband was 12, taught himself nearly all of his considerable skills via books and the internet. If you are a visual learner, the internet holds a treasure trove of knowledge. For those would be warriors who are not currently serving or who will never serve in the armed forces, please go out and defend real girls on the streets from the monsters, creeps, and traffickers who make it impossible to feel safe as a female. Where are the men willing to watch the streets and to at least threaten various immigrant scum with retribution for their terrible behavior? Where are the volunteer neighborhood patrols that ensure women and children can walk to and from school without being harassed? In the stranger danger/Satanic Panic 80s, we had a thing called Neighborhood Watch where you would put a blue star in your window so any little kid who felt threatened could knock on the door and find a safe house. Where are the blue stars? Where are the boys with baseball bats? Go out there and defend your country. Do it for Amelia.

Update, 28 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 13, 2026

“In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles”

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

Chris Bray was travelling the other day and therefore subjected himself to watching the “news” on television. He now relates “the Fall of Soygon” from that painful experience:

Minneapolis is [Current Thing], and a significant part of the population is for that. Standard reference, insert own text:

BLACK LIVES MATTER FREE PALESTINE NEW PROGRAM LOADING.

The point of the performance is the performance, like art that exists only to comment on the meaning of art. They’re borrowing: “Hence, once again, pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum”.

I’m briefly on the road in California, and watched television news last night. A protest in Fresno stood up to those bastards from ICE, who embody American imperialism and also something that George Orwell told us, details unclear. But then, almost inevitably, a protester told the television camera that he also marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, and now he’s protesting again against the Trump administration and all its enablers, “who are trying to take our country away from us”.

Of course, something something Selma something something. “Selma envy”, the performative seeking, the wish to be a soldier in a great cause: insert great cause here. George Wallace was apparently also opposed to widespread Somali social welfare fraud, the great beating heart of the Civil Rights Movement. All causes are the same cause. “I’m against this situation that is happening”, the protesters explain. Arresting someone who has a deportation order is functionally identical to beating people who march against segregation, because in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles. Monday, rage in the streets, Tuesday, rage in the streets, Wednesday, rage in the streets …

The Minneapolis circle jerk is producing endless video of middle-aged white leftist women doing THE SAME performance, endlessly, like there are a thousand pieces of footage that all show the same moment with different faces. Here, go watch one. Come back when you’re done.

Update, 15 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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