Between the foreignness and the sheer, overwhelming size of the topic, it might seem impossible to conduct an adequate survey of the history, vocabulary, and vibe of eating, Chinese-style, for Western readers. But that’s why we have Fuchsia Dunlop. She’s an Englishwoman, but she trained as a chef at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine (the first Westerner ever to do so). She’s written some of the best English-language cookbooks for Chinese food, and now she’s written this book: her attempt to communicate the totality of the subject she loves and which she’s spent her life studying. But the topic is just too damn big to take an encyclopedic or even a systematic approach, and so she wisely doesn’t try. Instead she writes about the weirdest and tastiest and most emblematic meals she’s had, and ties each one back to the main topic. So the book lives up to its name. Like a banquet, it doesn’t try to give you a thorough academic knowledge of anything, but rather a feast for the senses and a feel for what a cuisine is like.
What is it like? Well, Dunlop barely manages to cover this in a 400-page book, so I hesitate even to try, but let me hit a few of the high points. First, diversity. China is a continent masquerading as a country, both in population and in geographic extent, so its cuisine is comparably diverse. Most cooking traditions have one or two basic starches, China has four or five.1 China extends through every imaginable biome, from rainforest to tundra, desert to marshlands, and much of the genius of Chinese food lies in combining the delicious bounties offered up by this kaleidoscope in interesting or unexpected ways.
One way to think of Chinese eating is that much of it is a sort of “internal” fusion cuisine. Because China was ruled from very early on by a centralized bureaucracy with a fanaticism for river transport, the process of culinary remixing has been going on for much longer than it has in most places. The Roman Empire could have been like this, but the shores of the Mediterranean all have pretty similar climates, so there were fewer ingredients to start the process with. Already very early in Chinese history, before the 7th century, we hear of the imperial city being supplied with:
oranges and pomelos from the warm South, […] the summer garlic of southern Shanxi, the deer tongues of northern Gansu, the Venus clams of the Shandong coast, the “sugar crabs” of the Yangtze River, the sea horses of Chaozhou in Guangdong, the white carp marinated in wine lees from northern Anhui, the dried flesh of a “white flower snake” [a kind of pit viper] from southern Hubei, melon pickled in rice mash from southern Shanxi and eastern Hubei, dried ginger from Zhejiang, loquats and cherries from southern Shanxi, persimmons from central Henan, and “thorny limes” from the Yangtze Valley.
If we think of chefs as artists, the Chinese ones have since ancient times had the advantage of an outrageously diverse set of paints. But these ingredients aren’t combined willy-nilly, without respect for their time or place of origin. The Chinese practically invented the concept of terroir, and their organicist conception of the universe in which everything is connected to everything else implied strict rules about which foods were to be eaten when, both for maximum deliciousness and to ensure cosmic harmony.
In the first month of spring, [the emperor] was to eat wheat and mutton; in summer, pulses and fowl; in autumn, hemp seeds and dog meat; in winter, millet and suckling pig. An emperor’s failure to observe the laws of the seasons would not only cause disease, but provoke crop failure and other disasters.
The obsessions with freshness and seasonality come to their culmination in the one area where Chinese cuisine stands head and shoulders above all others: green vegetables. In the West, “eating your greens” is a punishment, or at best a chore, and it’s easy to see why. In much of the world vegetables are bred for yield and transportability, kept in refrigerators for weeks, and then boiled until no trace of flavor remains. Dunlop and I have one thing in common: when we’re not in China, of all the delights of Chinese cooking it’s the green vegetables that we miss the most.
When I bring American friends to a real Chinese restaurant, sometimes they’re shocked that the vegetable dishes cost the same amount as the main courses. Why does a side dish cost so much? But no Chinese person would ever think of a vegetable course as a “side” dish, they’re part of the main attraction, and more often than not they’re the stars of the show. In the West, you can now get decent baak choy, but this is just one of the dozens and dozens of leafy greens that the Chinese regularly consume, many of them practically impossible to find outside Asia.
My own favorite is the sublime choy sum. I remember once getting off a transoceanic flight, starving and exhausted, and being offered a bowl of it over plain white rice. The greens had been scalded for a few seconds with boiling water, then tossed around a pan for no more than a minute — just long enough that the leaves were so tender they seemed to dissolve in your mouth, but the stems still held snap and crunch. The seasoning was subtle — maybe a few cloves of garlic, some salt, a splash of wine or vinegar. Just the right amount to bring out the deep, earthy flavors of the vegetable, to somehow make them brighter and more forward, but not to overpower them.2 It was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. I think I’ll still remember it when I am old.
Did you notice that in the previous paragraph I spent almost as much time describing the texture of the food as its flavor? That’s no coincidence. Of course the Chinese care about flavor, everybody does (except the British, ha ha), but relative to many other culinary traditions the Chinese put a disproportionate emphasis on the texture of their food as well. I’ll once again draw on a bastardized version of the Whorf hypothesis: English is a big language with a lot of borrowings, so we have a correspondingly large number of words for food textures. Imagine explaining to a foreigner the difference between “crunchy” and “crisp”, or between “soft” and “mushy”. That is already more semiotic resolution than most languages have when it comes to the mouthfeel of their food, but Chinese takes it to a whole ‘nother level.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Invitation to a Banquet by Fuchsia Dunlop”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-05.
- One of them, potatoes, has a particularly fraught history. Potatoes started seriously spreading in China right around the time of the mass famines that accompanied the collapse of the Ming dynasty. Accordingly, they got a reputation of being food for poor people. They’ve never really managed to overcome this association, and are generally shunned by the Chinese, especially in high-end cuisine, despite several government campaigns to encourage people to eat them since they’re nutritious and easy to grow in arid conditions.
- There’s a pattern in Chinese gastronomy where extremely intense, over-the-top flavors are a bit low-status, and flavors so pure and subtle they verge on bland are what the snooty people go for. This is true across regions (the in-your-face food of Sichuan is less valued than the cuisine of the Cantonese South, or the cooking traditions of Zhejiang in the East), but it’s also true within regions (in Sichuan, the food of Chongqing is much spicier than the food of Chengdu, and correspondingly lower status).
March 5, 2026
QotD: Chinese cooking
February 16, 2026
“Multiculturalism” should really be called “anti-cultural slop” for it destroys real culture in favour of bland genericism
At Without Diminishment, Geoff Russ traces the rise of the “global hub” among western cultures and identifies why we shouldn’t strive to drown distinct local cultures under a tide of “could be anywhere” multicultural slop:
London’s vibrantly diverse bus riders … or is it Toronto … or Sydney … or Montreal?
Multiculturalism is the false prophet of celebrating difference, presented as the ultimate engine for “diversity”.
In practice, it is a factory of global homogenisation, and a solvent that erases local cultures. Cities like Sydney, Toronto, and London now compete to be the top “global hub”, which is no unique identity at all.
There is no preservation of character under the hegemony of the global hub, only its erasure. The officially multicultural city is uniform across continents, like clones of each other in all but the most superficial ways. It sounds contradictory on the surface, but makes perfect sense once it is understood that multiculturalism as a policy and identity is inherently anti-cultural.
The multicultural city has nearly identical urban design, and its bureaucrats and professionals weaponise the same moral vocabulary, deploying terms like “inclusivity” and “openness“. It has all the charm of an airport lounge, justified with the same slogans, decorated with the same grey glass-and-steel architecture, and guided by the same self-reinforcing sensibilities.
It makes people docile, and rewards them with sensory appeasement, like supposedly exotic cuisine. A fusion rice bowl is the consolation for the disappearance of the environment you grew up in.
In Canada, it first came to the Anglo cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Now it has broken linguistic and cultural containment into Quebec. For decades, Montreal was the metropolis of the Québécois. Now, as Kevin Paquette outlined last month, the city has changed. It mirrors the anti-culture that took over Toronto, and has no use for the legacy of those who built it.
Paquette described how Montreal has become a “filter” that promotes an internationalist identity that renders it alien to Quebec’s exurban regions. Bloc Québécois (BQ) leader Yves-François Blanchet has warned that “two Quebecs” have emerged, which are disconnected and alienated from each other.
Jean-François Lisée has gone further, and written of the emergence of an “anti-Québécois identity” in an increasingly diverse Montreal. In public schools, students openly mock the Québécois, and English is more commonly spoken than French in the hallways.
Lisée writes that an alternate, anti-Quebec dynamic now exists among some newcomers. In this dynamic, attachment and assimilation into the Québécois identity become contemptible.
This is the essence of multiculturalism when treated as an end in itself. “Inclusion” is the hollowing out of the obligation to belong, and the transformation of identity into a lifestyle choice.
Not even Quebec City is immune. It was long a living, breathing exception to Canadian multiculturalism, with a dominant Québécois culture and ethos. However, the mayor, Bruno Marchand, has embarked on a mission to destroy what makes it distinct.
The following sentence is from a glowing feature in the Globe and Mail last week: “Mr. Marchand says his hometown’s traditional pure laine image is changing, and it’s a good thing”.
Quebec City’s inherited way of life is being targeted so that it can become just one more global hub. The city’s established symbols, traditions, and habits stand in the way. It takes remarkable ideological and moral heavy lifting to dismiss provincial identities as unworthy, and as something that must inevitably be replaced.
The city still carries deep meaning for francophones across the country.
“I’ve never lived there, or in the province of Quebec, and yet it speaks to me profoundly,” said one resident of Ontario I spoke to. “This is where my ancestors landed 400 years ago and it still bears witness to them.”
What was the point of Quebec’s 400-year effort to survive if it becomes a mirror image of what has happened to the rest of Canada?
Ontario, and the rest of Anglo-Canada, have long been conditioned to regard its own inheritance as unworthy of loyalty or respect.
Anglo-Canada is bound up in the history of the British Empire, the most fashionable whipping boy of leftist academics and activists. Due to the institutional power of these malcontents, it naturally follows that Canada’s historic and cultural self is treated as an embarrassment, whose memory is a problem that must be solved, or rather dissolved.
Update, 17 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 15, 2026
“The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation”
At Always the Horizon, Copernican discusses the progressive mindset and its complete inability to cope with barbarians (literal and figurative):
In light of recent events, it is important to recognize that a rules-based system can exist only as long as there exists someone to enforce the rules. For a long time, White Westerners have been brow-beaten with an imagined consensus morality where those who are historically hierarchically powerful are also inherently evil. “Those misogynist White rednecks”, etc. That was, according to the rules, the acceptable position to hold.
The rules are enforced by consuming den-mothers who have built around themselves fortresses of bureaucracy and perceived cultural alignment. You have to follow the rules, or you’re a bad person.
Historically, Christianity managed these ideals through Europe and the Holy Roman Empire, where they were considered a moral standard. Enforced through the social order of the time. Having previously attacked Christianity in the late 20th century, the modern Left has proceeded to annihilate that moral grounding. Replacing it with a vague sense of moral relativism and platitudes:
“We think these behaviors and rules are good because everyone agrees, and everyone agrees because we’ve made them as these behaviors and rules are good.”
The tautology of liberal thought. Moral relativism with appeal-to-majority and appeal-to-consensus stacked atop one another. Recent events have demonstrated that even classically liberal political positions cannot be maintained without a strong underlying social and moral framework. Lacking that, liberalism (again, as recently demonstrated) defaults to meaningless tautologies and a feminine urge to “not harm” people who in many circumstances damn well need to be harmed.
The result of this social decay is, of course, a default to basics.
The Barbarians Veto
Your village or apartment block has been put to flame. Your son is dead, your wife and daughter are being hauled off to god knows where, and a giant of a man with a bloody axe stands before you. Knowing that this is probably your last chance to do anything, you puff up your chest and pronounce: “YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PERSON”.
The man looks at you like you’re retarded, and then messily separates your prefrontal cortex and cerebellum. The Barbarian doesn’t give a shit what you consider a “good person” to be. He couldn’t care less. What he knows is that the only thing separating the two of you is that he is strong and you are weak. The reason why it is he standing with a bloodied axe and not you, is simply a matter of prowess and luck. If you were strong, you would be doing the same thing to him.
Do unto others before they do unto you. Do it fast. Do it first. And do it effectively.
The political Left has built its entire philosophical core on minimizing harm and playing the role of victim. The Left is thus completely blind to the barbarians veto. The Left believes there’s some inherent nobility in having your home burnt to the ground and your family murdered. That’s why they pursue with suicidal ideation the opportunity to die for their psychotic religion. Better yet, they zealously pursue the opportunity to get other people to die for their psychotic religion. Leftism is a cult that requires blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of its most zealous supporters.
They fear the strength of the Barbarian, uncompromising, not willing to sacrifice himself, but entirely willing to sacrifice hordes of his unthinking enemies. He does not see himself as a “good person”, but the barbarian sees himself as a “surviving person”. He survives by killing his enemies. His bloodline survives by impregnating his women, whether they want it or not. The Left has no answer to the barbarian, but to submit to his will, and then demand you do so as well.
That’s why they love murderers, cartels, and foreigners, but demand that their own men and sons die bloodily in self-sacrifice to their own cultural enemies. The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation.
Update, 16 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 12, 2026
QotD: The death of satire
Enfield was doing what all court jesters should do: delivering uncomfortable truths to those in power. The jester’s often painful or embarrassing jibes can be taken in good faith and acted upon, ignored, or worse. The idea is to convey what everyone outside the court is thinking and how the ordinary person perceives those with power and influence. While Enfield’s work of this era certainly merits a more focused analysis, here I’d like to zoom in on one sketch based on a favourite Enfield target, the show Dragons’ Den.
Enfield excoriates the ludicrously pompous panel of wealthy, high-status business owners and their seeming right to supreme arrogance justified simply by their wealth. In one skit, Enfield and Paul Whitehouse arrive to pitch an idea as bumbling English entrepreneurs trying to get the “Dragons” to invest in their concept called “I can’t believe it’s not custard”. The Dragons, also played by Enfield and Whitehouse, sneer and spit venom at the Englishmen and their stupid idea, swiftly sending them away with no investment whatsoever.
The two white men later return, adorned in black-face and Jamaican accents with a pitch called “Me kyan believe it nat custard” and the Dragons fall at their feet, showering them with money. They then begin to compete with each other in sycophantically grovelling, fearful that the least enthusiastic of them will be deemed racist.
The sketch hits like a thunderbolt because Enfield holds up a mirror to a particular class of people, saying, “This is what you are!” We, as the common folk, take great delight in this lampooning because we know it to be a painful, somewhat grotesque truth. In an ocean of noise, it is a clear, bright signal that something is not right.
It is both a commentary on multiculturalism and a critique of those with power and influence. Yet, for some reason, this sketch lands harder than, say, a Spitting Image sketch in the 1980s targeting Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. There is a sense that an agreed-upon lie is being teased out into the glare of daylight and unceremoniously prodded and kicked about. The morality of the pretentious Dragons is a sham, and as such, their status is deflated before us.
Enfield revealed, in that single clip, the inherent fragility of the managerial classes dedicated to propagating via “virtue signalling” the values of the multicultural state. The millionaires of the Dragons’ Den panel adopt the attitudes and worldview of brutal free-market meritocrats, with the only subject of interest to them being whether or not a product or service is worthy of investment. Enfield implied that this worldview was a lie, a charade, and that they were no more outside of the central multicultural metanarrative than a Guardian journalist. The Dragons’ Den panel, and therefore neoliberalism, was not an alternative or competitor, but rather subordinate to the politically correct dogma of the age.
From the perspective of Britain’s liberal elite, Enfield committed a multitude of sins against them and their values, which probably explains why, after his show was shuffled off to BBC 2 to die, they never allowed themselves to be confronted with such lampooning ever again. The external frame from which people can gaze back into the general narrative would be kept permanently locked out.
Yet, this also marked a transition from a Blairite neoliberalism, in which the justification for mass immigration was to infuse British society with fresh energy and dynamism, into a more stagnant form wherein the upholding of the multicultural order became its own justification.
Morgoth, “How Multiculturalism Consumes Everything”, Morgoth’s Review, 2025-10-04.
January 2, 2026
“You had to be unacceptably racist in 1993 to predict where South Africa would be in thirty years”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Wesley Yang posted the comment in the headline. Will Tanner responded:
You did not, in fact. You just had to be paying attention
By 1993, South Africa was the only First World country left in Africa
America and the UN chased Belgium out of the Congo, and it collapsed into decades of civil war and famine
Mugabe destroyed Rhodesia after we aided the Soviets in helping him win. Angola and Mozambique became hells after Salazar died, the Carnation Revolution happened, and they were given up. Kenya and Sierre Leone all showed the hellish state of things that came with decolonization in the name of “democracy”
South Africa was the last man standing. It had a nuclear program. It had a space program. It had clean, reliable water and electricity. It had a thriving industrial sector. Crime was problematic, but not out of control
Now all of that was gone, for the same reason the Congo is a mess and Zimbabwe went from being the breadbasket of Africa to a famine-ridden mess: decolonization and equity
Anyone who paid attention could have predicted that. Maintaining First World life requires a First World mindset; that dies when handed over to race communists who are happy to backslide into the Stone Age if doing so means “equality” exists
And so South Africa went from First World to Third
And John Carter responded in turn:
When you stand back and look at this from ten thousand feet, a very dark pattern emerges.
In the aftermath of WWII, the newly established globalist institutions were used to give moral and financial support to decolonization movements, thereby chasing European countries out of what became the third world.
A governance structure that had successfully brought order, prosperity, and civilization to much of the planet was dismantled, leaving behind a chaotic mess of war and poverty.
Those same globalist organizations then embarked on a program of “foreign aid” that dramatically increased the size of that immiserated third world population (without actually improving conditions for them).
At the same time, their agents were busy at work within the governments of the former colonial powers, changing their immigration policies to allow immigration from more or less anywhere. Countries began adopting “multiculturalism” in the name of fighting “racism” … A newly developed postwar concept, which the media and education arms of the globalist project indoctrinated the youth to consider the worst of all possible sins.
Once the ideological and legal ground had been prepared in the former colonial powers, migration via legal and irregular pathways commenced, facilitated by — of course — the very same set of globalist NGOs that chased Europe out of the colonies.
Somehow, this new form of colonization is a good thing. Somehow, the European peoples enjoy none of the rights of “national self-determination” accorded to “indigenous” peoples which had been invoked to end colonialism.
As the populations of the third world were exploding thanks to the foreign aid being provided by globalist organizations, fertility in the first world fell off a cliff. The pill, abortion, feminism drawing women into universities and careers and therefore away from marriage and child-bearing, no-fault divorce destroying the family, and a gender war incited to new levels of bitter intensity every year which estranged the sexes, all served to reduce the white birth rate.
White fertility crashed just as the population bomb that had been set in the third world exploded, with the gates left open by carefully constructed legal frameworks that made immigration very easy and deportation very, very hard.
Update, 3 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
November 25, 2025
Canada’s “post-national” project was foisted on us by the elites, not ordinary Canadians
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Fortissax responds to a recent article published in the National Post, where Geoff Russ describes Liberal nationalism as “a cringey failure” and calls for young members of the “new right” to work toward a new idea of Canada:
Geoff Russ’ specific claim that “millions of old stock Canadians cheered for it” is wrong. He takes a decades-long elite project, driven over the heads of the public, and pins it on the very people it was done to.
There was never a clear democratic moment when ethnic Canadians calmly voted to abolish old Canada and embrace a postnational, multicultural order. What happened was a long campaign run from the top.
After 1945, cabinet ministers, mandarins and policy people rebuilt Canadian identity around liberal internationalism and continental integration. The older understanding of Canada as a British and French country with its own civilisation was treated as something shameful to be buried. Schools, television, churches, courts, universities and the federal bureaucracy repeated the same script: “progress” meant loosening ties to the founding peoples and aligning with UN norms and North American liberal opinion.
This was not some anonymous drift. C.D. Howe and the postwar planners normalised a centralised, technocratic state tied to American capital. Mackenzie King and Louis St Laurent locked in continental and institutional commitments that weakened any independent British and French national idea. Jack Pickersgill used immigration as a tool of social engineering and admitted that public opinion was hostile, so policy had to move quietly from above.
Lester Pearson chaired the Biculturalism Commission while preparing the shift from “two founding races” to a vague multicultural formula, and his government set up the flag change that deliberately severed visual continuity with the old country.
Pierre Trudeau went further, announcing in 1971 that Canada would have no official culture and that no ethnic group would take precedence, which was a polite way of saying the historic British and French peoples would be stripped of formal primacy in their own state.
The public did not demand this. It had to be dragged and managed. Gallup and other polling in the postwar decades consistently showed majorities hostile to high immigration levels. The 1974 Green Paper and the extensive public hearings that followed produced sharp criticism of mass intake and of the cultural and economic disruption it would bring.
Ottawa thanked everyone for their input and then moved ahead with the 1976 Immigration Act, which entrenched a liberal, permanent immigration framework anyway. When Canadians were finally asked, they said no. Their answer was ignored.
At the same time, ordinary people lost any real leverage over core questions. Immigration policy was transformed without a referendum. Official multiculturalism was declared from above. The Charter and rights culture shifted effective authority from Parliament and local communities into the hands of courts and legal elites.
The flag changed, and symbols and curricula that reflected old Canada were rewritten or stripped away. Any attempt to defend the historic nation was smeared as crankish or hateful. To take this history and summarise it as “millions of old stock Canadians cheered for it” is like blaming a tenant for “choosing” demolition because he did not throw himself under the bulldozer.
The message is that old stock Canadians must now live with this order forever; that their own elites may have driven the revolution, but the public did not resist hard enough, so dispossession is deserved; and that any attempt by the founding peoples to assert a legitimate claim to continuity in their own country is some kind of moral offence.
November 20, 2025
QotD: What happened to the “Lucky Country” when the luck ran out?
Without thinking too deeply about it, I sensed we had inherited some of the best British qualities: we understood that a batsman should walk when he knew he was out, regardless of the umpire’s decision; and that the best hangover cure began with a cup of tea.
We ridiculed our friends because there was no greater compliment than offensive humour, but didn’t overdo it because brevity was the soul of our wit. (Google it, Abdul.)
Then I discovered that the British colony in Australia was founded 12 years after Americans declared that all men (not just American ones) are created equal, and with certain inalienable rights, and realised that their belief in liberty, too, was part of our precious heritage.
By developing in lockstep with them and marching to every subsequent war alongside them, we had been imbued with Americans’ rugged individualism, but cleverly managed to avoid their gullibility for life’s more superficial panaceas.
For a while, we even gave the Americans a run for their money in the pursuit-of-happiness caper. Our island continent had more room, stranger animals and nicer cities, and we had a bigger middle class, which confirmed to us that egalitarianism, the bedrock of our culture, worked.
Then, in 1983, the crew aboard the Australia II yacht showed the New York elite that their unlimited money was no match for our gritty ingenuity.
What a time to be alive! How brilliant were we! We were six-foot-four and full of muscle, and we thought it would last forever.
That it hasn’t is partly our fault. We constantly called ourselves The Lucky Country, conveniently forgetting that Donald Horne coined the name as a warning, that one day the luck would run out. That’s what luck is: it changes.
We revelled in our prosperity and mocked the idea, fundamental to our founders, that prosperity is a two-way deal.
And we lazily imported “vibrancy” instead of building on the sophisticated western civilisation, going back to Socrates and Aristotle, we were unbelievably fortunate to inherit.
But for all our complacency, at least we never deliberately sought our own demise, which, it is now clear, is what our own government is doing with grim determination and sinister skill.
As a free and prosperous nation with unlimited resources, Australia should have the pick of the richest, cleverest, most urbane migrants in the entire world. Instead, it has opened the door to millions of low-skilled peasants from Third World countries who aren’t even slightly interested in assimilating, if they don’t outright hate our culture and want to subjugate us.
There is more to this than Labor merely symbiotically importing freeloaders whose votes can be bought with unaffordable largesse. […]
As the brilliant Adam Creighton said on X last week, referring to our demographic transformation: “The Australia of your youth won’t remotely exist in 20 years. It will still have nice weather, at least”.
Our cultural suicide aside, this record intake of migrants reduces our already inadequate amount of available housing.
By how much? The Australian Bureau of Statistics isn’t saying. Its biennial Survey of Income and Housing was due out about now, but will not be released at all because of “data collection issues”.
In other words, ABS staff were unable to survey the people most affected by unprecedented levels of immigration because those people kept shifting between city laneways and homeless shelters.
Fred Pawle, “All They Can Manage is Decline”, Fred Pawle, 2025-07-21.
October 10, 2025
A POSWID analysis of the contention that “Canada is broken”
It’s my strong opinion that Canada is indeed “broken”, and much but not all the blame for that goes to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and increasingly to current PM Mark Carney. It hasn’t all been the direct action or deliberate inaction of the Liberal party and their bureaucratic minions in the civil service, but their fingerprints are on a lot of the damage. Eberhard Englebrecht analyzes Canada using POSWID framing and concludes that “the Purpose Of Canada is What It Does”:
Now, one of the core criticisms made of POSWID by its opponents is that it leans heavily on a consequentialist interpretation of events, completely discarding the roles human intention, error, and agency play in how things transpire.
However, these critiques only hold validity if you take POSWID and make it your singular mode of analysis — something that I don’t encourage, nor intend on doing myself. Rather, POSWID should be understood and used as a specific tool with a specific purpose — that is, to peel back the noxious platitudes, gaslighting, and wishful thinking that envelop our politics, and hinder our ability to view our present situation with clarity and honesty.
And, unfortunately for the citizenry of Canada, Canadian politics is — and has been for some time — a domain chock full of the misguided idealism and obfuscation that POSWID seeks to erase.
It is why many Canadians — despite their country having experienced a precipitous decline in both general prosperity and the integrity of the common social fabric — remain willfully blind to such an absurd degree.
POSWID, as I will be applying it, can tackle many of the polite pleasantries and mindless incantations that have become embedded in Canada’s “consensus” of acceptable political discourse, exposing them as misaligned with reality. This will take one of two forms: the first is to demonstrate that a common belief in the trope in question has led to results contrary to the intentions of those who originally pushed the trope; the second is that the trope was always purely abstract and aspirational, never described reality, and any attempts to align reality with said trope have failed miserably.
Many of these tropes are sacred cows of Canada’s political establishment — ideas that they would insist define “what it means to be Canadian” or are things that “we all believe”. Going against them, or merely questioning their validity or suitability, would be considered “UnCanadian”. These tropes have, in many cases, dictated the direction of Canadian society since the 1960s and created the foundations for the paradigms that currently define Canadian politics. Therefore, the deconstruction of these tropes constitutes the deconstruction of these paradigms — something that would have cascading ramifications for our country.
It is worth noting, however, that my intention in writing this piece is not to make granular policy prescriptions. My job is merely to provide a clear-eyed account of how three of the values and policy programmes of Canada’s chattering class (you could substitute “chattering class” with “professional-managerial class” or “Laurentian Elite”) are out of step with how this country actually exists — a reality felt and experienced at an intuitive level by many, but rarely articulated in public.
September 29, 2025
Powderkeg Britain
The ever-expanding anti-immigration protests in Britain are an unmissable flashing red alert to the British government … which seems determined to ignore it and continue to plough ahead with their MOAR immigrants policies despite the anger of the public. Spaceman Spiff characterizes it as a revolt:
Multi-ethnic and multicultural societies do not function in the way homogenous nations do. People of radically different origins, culture and beliefs often trigger conflict as incompatible aptitudes, temperaments and worldviews operate within a shared territory.
Artificial situations like this do not naturally harmonize, despite the rhetoric. Instead, competition for resources emerges. Power sharing between rival groups is fantasy. Life is winner takes all.
This can be disconcerting as reality asserts itself and the cost of large-scale migration becomes obvious.
Some in Britain already understand the dangers we now face at home. Others are waking up and looking for answers as their world declines. They are the ones who will grasp at anything to reset society.
Racists and hatemongers
Critics of mass immigration in Britain are often branded as racists and hatemongers.
We see blanket condemnation from establishment figures for even mild observations about the effects of this deeply unpopular policy.
The noticers of reality are derided as far-right extremists even when they are evidently normal people exhausted with unwanted demographic change.
The approved media and political spokespersons insist those who make observations have become radicalized by extremist writers and thinkers. Little more needs to be added. The labels do much of the work; Nazi, fascist, racist.
It doesn’t matter that many who are critical of mass immigration are not extremists calling for violence. They are just normal people who notice what is happening.
One of the unfortunate things the noticers recognize is mixing distinct cultures inside a single geographical area might be dangerous. They sometimes read material based on government statistics that tells them mass immigration infers almost no benefits on the host nation while extracting potentially catastrophic costs.
To ordinary people that sounds like something worth discussing to determine if it is true.
Normal people are revolting
Western countries have endured unexpected demographic shifts in recent years.
The only acceptable view is this is always a net positive. We are told group differences do not exist except in the minds of racists. Foreigners are already very like us and any deviation from our norms are superficial or unworthy of comment.
It is therefore all the more shocking when this is proven wrong. From dress and manners to dietary habits, to the treatment of women and children, the world beyond our borders is quite alien when seen up close.
London’s vibrantly diverse bus riders
All this alienness was once elsewhere with oceans to protect us. Now it is here in our midst.
This is becoming obvious and is at odds with all we have been told. What we see does not match the harmonious melting pot we were sold.
Inevitably this encourages people to seek out information.
July 12, 2025
G.K. Chesterton on the dangers of cultural surrender
Andrew Doyle on Chesterton’s novel The Flying Inn (1914) which warned against the risks of unfettered immigration and what came to be known as “multiculturalism”:
The creed of multiculturalism has made it difficult to discuss the impact of unfettered immigration. The far right have always opposed it on the basis of racial prejudice and ethno-jingoism. Yet there are authentically liberal concerns to be raised about the problem of political Islam and how all discussions are stifled through accusations of “Islamophobia”. What happens when an essentially anti-democratic ideology is allowed to flourish within a society that otherwise depends upon democratic norms?
To help illuminate the troubles of our time, and in particular the perverted form of liberalism that ensures its own undoing, we might return to G. K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn (1914), a whimsical novel about a future Islamic England. With today’s proliferation of sharia courts and the government’s determination to criminalise blasphemy against Islam by legislative stealth, one might call Chesterton’s novel prescient.
The key figure is Lord Ivywood, a politician who becomes enamoured of Misysra Ammon, an Islamic cleric who styles himself as the “Prophet of the Moon”. Ivywood is an exemplar of the zealotry of the progressive reformer, a prototype of the virtue-signaller, one who “did not care for dogs” but “cared for the Cause of Dogs”. He first introduces Ammon at a private event at the “Society of Simple Souls”, where he is able to preach his creed to the gullible bons vivants of the upper middle-class. The collective thrill of the crowd is pure orientalism, and they are easily mesmerised by Ivywood’s panegyrics.
Inevitably, Ivywood’s submission to Islam is framed in syncretic terms; not so much surrender as a beautiful fusion. “The East and the West are one”, Ivywood says. “The East is no longer East nor the West West; for a small isthmus has been broken, and the Atlantic and Pacific are a single sea.” Islam, he claims, is the “religion of progress”, a phrase that anticipates today’s oft-echoed slogan of Islam as the “religion of peace”.
This kind of doublespeak is ubiquitous among those activists who routinely strive to force the square peg of Islamic doctrine into the round hole of woke politics. This is exemplified by articles such as “Prophet Muhammed was an intersectional feminist” in Muslim Girl magazine, a piece that includes the inane claim that the founder of the religion “wanted to generate as much inclusivity as possible”. In similarly convoluted terms, Ammon in The Flying Inn argues that there is nothing more feminist than a harem. “What is the common objection our worthy enemies make against our polygamy?” he asks. “That it is disdainful of the womanhood. But how can this be so, my friends, when it allows the womanhood to be present in so large numbers?”
Today’s readers will recognise Chesterton’s depiction of the tendency of liberal politicians to kowtow to the demands of Islamic clerics in a bid to avoid causing offence. At one point, Ivywood explains that he has tabled the “Ballot Paper Amendment Act” in parliament to allow citizens to vote with a mark resembling a crescent rather than the traditional cross.
If we are to give Moslem Britain representative government, we must not make the mistake we made about the Hindoos and military organization — which led to the Mutiny. We must not ask them to make a cross on their ballot papers; for though it seems a small thing, it may offend them. So I brought in a little bill to make it optional between the old-fashioned cross and an upward curved mark that might stand for a crescent — and as it’s rather easier to make, I believe it will be generally adopted.
The main plot of The Flying Inn revolves around the innkeeper Humphrey Pump and the Irish sailor Captain Patrick Dalroy, who take it upon themselves to sell alcohol in spite of the new Islamic prohibitions in England. They find a loophole in the law that permits them to conduct their business so long as they first erect an official inn sign. And so we follow the pair as they dash from location to location, with their barrel of rum and a wheel of cheese on a donkey’s back, planting their portable sign wherever refreshment is needed.
May 14, 2025
We welcome (almost) all refugees
Mark Steyn notes the odd situation of rabid pro-refugee organizations suddenly finding that there are some refugees they don’t want to come to the United States after all:
We are told, relentlessly, that “diversity is our strength”. But it’s a delicate balance, isn’t it? After Biden’s untold millions of drug mules and sex fiends, just fifty-nine whites from South Africa could completely destroy all the multiculti harmony:
I confess to mixed feelings about those scenes myself. When I was a kid, the Boers had a reputation, unlovely as they might be in certain aspects, as the toughest buggers on the planet. In Britain and Canada, it was not uncommon to hear fellows, depressed at how their own countries were going, talk breezily about emigrating to South Africa. Yet in the end they folded in nothing flat — and the country’s new masters don’t want them and they have to find somewhere to go. Gee, it’s almost like that might be a lesson of more general application in the year ahead.
So it’s interesting to see the American left tiptoe all the way up to making the real purpose of “diversity” explicit: We’re in favour of open borders … except for whites. Rather than sully their hands with fifty-nine Afrikaners, the Episcopal Church has declared it’s willing to forego the moolah from the federal “refugee resettlement” racket. The spousal-abusing MS-13 gangbanger may be the quintessential “Maryland man”, but these white guys never can be.
Watching hoity-toity upper-class whites like NBC’s Andrea Mitchell finger-wagging from the anchor chair about their anti-whiteness is instructive. They assume that they will never have to face the consequences of their virtue-signalling. But the chasm between Eliteworld and Reality yawns wider with every day, and it will one day consume most of the west’s high-status “progressives” too. There are limits to kingly power. That’s the lesson Canute tried to teach his courtiers when he took them to the water’s edge and commanded the tide to lay off his loafers. But King Canute would never have ordered his staff to tell the peasantry to eat crickets on a bed of cockroach coulis. Because that would be too ridiculous.
For that we had to wait until Justin Trudeau, sinking bazillions of dollars into bug farms as part of the masterplan: that’s not just a bug, it’s an indispensable feature. Because at the World Economic Forum all the clever guys decided that, in the interests of saving the world from “climate change”, our rulers had to do to our own farmers what the mob is doing to white South Africans: destroy their farms, kill all the cows and sheep, and ensure that nothing grazes there ever again.
There are few things sadder than a post-developed society. If you walk around South African towns at the end of the day, you will notice in high-rise buildings the absence of lights on the upper floors: the inability to maintain skyscrapers is one of the first signs of a society in decline. It starts at the heights and then sinks to the basement, whether those heights are Boeing or bug farms. If you’re in on the racket, you can still live high off the hog-simulating scorpions … for a while. But the people who make the running in the western world are mad, and their fever dreams are boundless.
February 28, 2025
Everyday Life in the Roman Empire – An Empire of Peoples
seangabb
Published 28 Aug 2024The Roman Empire had a geographical logic, but was an endlessly diverse patchwork of linguistic, ethnic and religious groups. In this lecture, Sean Gabb describes the diversity:
Geographical Logic – 00:00:00
Linguistic Diversity – 00:06:57
Italy – 00:12:46
Greece – 00:17:23
Greeks and Romans – 00:21:01
Egypt – 00:28:24
Greeks, Romans, Egyptians – 00:33:00
North Africa – 00:37:27
The Jews – 00:41:20
Greeks, Romans, Jews – 00:44:10
Gaul – 00:50:36
Britain – 00:52:26
Greeks, Romans, Britons – 00:54:58
The East – 00:59:22
Bibliography – 01:01:20
(more…)
January 9, 2025
“Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance”
The extent of active disinterest to ongoing criminal activity in British towns and cities over a period of several years passes belief. The fear of being accused of racism metastasized to the extent that the authorities may even have colluded with criminals to hide the crimes to preserve politicians’ and senior bureaucrats’ careers. It’s now broken through the conspiracy of silence to being actively discussed in British media and even on the floor of the House of Commons. Even the Prime Minister may have to answer for past actions (or inactions):
It’s very easy to judge the past, particularly when you’re on the “right side of history”. What supreme confidence it must take to assume that all previous generations had got it so wrong, and that humanity was simply waiting for you to turn up and set them straight.
And yet isn’t it curious that so many who like to judge the values and behaviour of people in the past are also rarely willing to turn that critical eye on other cultures that exist today? According to the principle of cultural relativism, all societies and ways of life are equal. So we must not assert that we are morally better to a culture that permits the genital mutilation of children or that denies women an education, but we may assume that we are highly superior to the Ancient Greeks.
This debate has become particularly relevant with the recent explosion of interest in the rape gangs scandal. A report by Professor Alexis Jay in 2022 determined that more than 1,400 young girls were raped and abused in the period between 1997 and 2013 by what became known as the “grooming gangs”, so called because of the manipulative tactics that were employed to gain the victims’ trust. These groups comprised mostly of men of Pakistani heritage, which led many authorities to overlook the severity of the crimes.
Consider this example from a speech delivered by Andrew Norfolk, reporter for the Times. When police discovered a 13-year-old girl, drunk and mostly naked in the company of seven Pakistani men, they arrested her and failed to question any of the adults.
Police have admitted that such failures to investigate were largely down to a desire to avoid allegations of racism. The Jay report noted that several members of local council staff “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”. Politicians and media commentators were more concerned with maintaining the fantasy that multiculturalism has been a success, rather than taking seriously their obligation to safeguard children. When Julie Bindel — the first journalist to investigate the grooming gangs — tried to publish her findings, she faced resistance ‘because some editors feared an accusation of racism’.
The Labour government has shown itself incapable of making amends. Jess Phillips has rejected a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham. And Keir Starmer has stated that anyone interested in a full-scale inquiry into these failings is jumping “on a bandwagon of the far right”.
This acute form of tone-deafness would, in any sound political climate, be cause for immediate resignation. While it is true that racists will be quick to weaponise the criminal behaviour of a minority, there is nothing remotely “far right” in taking an interest in the wellbeing of children and wishing to see those who abuse them held to account. But Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance.
Something may change with the release this week of crime league tables according to nationality. Up until now, there has been tremendous political resistance to releasing such statistics, with police in many European countries not recording such details at all in order to preserve the daydream of multiculturalism. And yet those that do keep such records have revealed a clear trend. Data from the Danish government, for instance, has shown that although non-Western immigrants constitute only 9% of the population, they account for 25% of convictions for violent crime. According to the Telegraph, in Sweden immigrants are “three times more likely to be registered as a suspect for assault than the native population – which grows to four times for robbery, and five times for rape”.
By happenstance, I posted this to social media the other day, which seems apposite:
January 6, 2025
The rape gangs in Britain were enabled and protected by “good people” who didn’t want to be accused of racism
Tom at The Last Ditch confesses his early complicity with the official culture of silence that protected and encouraged the exploitation of girls and young women in Britain for decades:
Everyone who ever participated in the leftist orthodoxy of identity-politics is to blame for the near-total impunity of the Muslim rape gangs in Britain. As I reported here, when I was a young solicitor in Nottingham, a police sergeant told me I was “part of the problem.” I had a choice between believing what he told me about “honour killings” in that city or preserving my good standing as an anti-racist liberal. I chose the latter. I feared my career prospects and social standing would be jeopardised (they would have been) if I accepted his honest account. I called a good man a racist (mentally equating him with the likes of Nick Griffin and recoiling in fear from the association) when he was just horrified (as any decent human should be) by young women being murdered.
In that moment, I very much was “part of the problem” and I am profoundly ashamed of that. It is fortunate that – unlike the politicians, local councillors, social-workers and police officers who should have brought the rape gangs or the “honour” killers to justice (or prevented both phenomena altogether) – I had no occasion ever to make any real life choices on the matter. I believe – faced with actual evidence – I would have made better ones, but the way I failed the good sergeant’s test that long-ago day in the early 1980s proves I would have wanted to look the other way, just as they actually did.
I am not still playing the stupid rainbows and unicorns game of cultural moral equivalence (still less the foul Critical Race Theory game of cultural moral hierarchy) when I make the point that the young white working class girls in our cities have not been the only victims of multiculturalism. Those murdered Muslim girls who (so the sergeant told me) had paraffin poured over them and were burned to death were victims too. It was racist to refuse to consider that their Muslim dads, uncles and brothers might murder them because of their primitive religious and cultural notions. It was racist for our authorities to treat Muslim men who gang-raped white girls differently than they would have treated others. It was racist to cover up these horrors in order to protect the myth – shamefully repeated just days ago in his annual Christmas message by His Majesty the King – that multiculturalism has been an overall benefit to Britain.
Some of us have been making these points as best we can for a long time. Many of us had given up, if we’re honest. It was clear that the official narrative that we were racists and that these stories were disinformation – a “moral panic” as Wikipedia puts it – was going to prevail. Until recently the key social media market of ideas – Twitter – was controlled by the Left and attempts to raise the issue were likely to be memory-holed by their private sector woke equivalent of Orwell’s MiniTru.
Miraculously, Elon Musk – a modern Edison, with plenty to occupy him besides our concerns about free speech – bought Twitter and (in one of history’s greatest acts of philanthropy) set it free at his own personal expense. He told advertisers who sought to maintain its old Newspeak regime to “go fuck themselves.” Miraculously he got involved in the issue not just in America (where the Constitution gives him some basis for hope) but in Britain too.
My British Constitution textbook at law school illustrated the supremacy of our Parliament by jokingly saying that it could – in law – make a man into a woman. Little did its authors know that dimwit politicians would later prove the educational point of their joke by making it real. Our constitution – as a result of centuries of struggle with the monarchy, which Parliament decisively won – can be summarised in just three words – “Parliament is supreme”
November 18, 2024
“The Great Canadian Lie is the claim that we’ve ‘always been multicultural'”
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.
