Quotulatiousness

September 17, 2026

You don’t hate the relic media nearly as much as they deserve

Filed under: History, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The relic media in Canada has — thanks to generous government subsidies — become a maple-flavoured version of the North Korean news media, but even in the United States where there’s still a somewhat competitive market, most media outlets are delighted to act as unpaid propagandists … and have been that way for generations:

Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for lying about Stalin’s Ukraine famine while millions starved. His employer, the New York Times, never returned that prize. The institutional rot ran deeper than one reporter.

In 1936, Times Moscow correspondent Harold Denny watched the first of Stalin’s Great Purge trials and reported the proceedings as credible. The defendants, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev among them, confessed to plotting murder and sabotage. Denny saw no obvious coercion and wrote accordingly. The NKVD had spent weeks breaking these men through sleep deprivation, threats against their families, and relentless psychological torture until they would say anything in open court.

Every confession was fabricated. Every defendant was executed anyway. Stalin murdered roughly 750,000 people during the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938, and the Times gave the operation a veneer of legitimacy at its most critical moment.

Central planners require a monopoly on information to survive. When the newspaper of record in the most powerful capitalist country on earth launders your show trials as fair proceedings, you buy yourself years of Western political goodwill. Stalin purchased that goodwill with useful idiots who confused proximity to power with insight.

You pay for this dynamic today every time an institution that failed catastrophically keeps its credentials, its prizes, and its authority to declare what counts as credible journalism.

Duranty would have been proud of Time magazine had he been alive today.

September 16, 2026

The new front in the British “flag war” – Welsh castles

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

You may have heard that at least one municipal government in England is trying to ban private citizens flying both the Union flag and the St. George’s Cross, yet actively encouraging the use of other national or political flags. On Substack, Paul Embery shows just how far the anti-British/anti-English activists are willing to go … in this case all the way to Wales (where, yes, there’s already some local anti-English sentiment to start with):

Pakistani flags fly over medieval walls in Cardiff.
Photo from X via Paul Embery

SOMETIMES it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Britain’s political elites are engaged in some sort of private game to see just how far they can test the patience of the native population before it snaps.

A people who were, and still are, remarkably tolerant in all sorts of ways, including towards those from minority backgrounds and cultures, seem daily to have their good faith exploited.

Only someone who had been living under a rock for the past couple of decades could have failed to notice the gulf that has emerged between our political institutions and everyday folk living outside of our fashionable cities and university towns.

That gulf – which is widening still – explains why a palpable sense of polarisation exists across many parts of the country today.

The latest attempt to stir the pot comes courtesy of Cardiff council, which recently decided to fly the flag of Pakistan from the city’s castle – one of the Welsh nation’s most historic and iconic sites. The flag was apparently hoisted in celebration of Pakistan’s independence day and stayed there over two days (a similar thing happened in 2024 — see image).

Needless to say, a row swiftly broke out, with Reform voices locally and nationally attacking the decision and in return facing accusations from their political opponents – who seemed to close ranks around the issue very tightly – that they were seeking to incite hatred and division.

Recent history tells us that anyone who expresses even mild disapproval about this type of virtuous ingratiation of foreign nationalities and cultures by our public bodies is likely to face taunts of being some kind of embittered xenophobe or reactionary. And, usually, the condemnation will be accompanied by a lecture trumpeting the merits of living in a diverse and multicultural society.

But those who harbour misgivings surely have a point. Because such acts do rank as a kind of provocation. It’s one thing seeking to foster good relations with other nations and cultures – such an approach is eminently sensible – but it’s another thing entirely indulging those nations and cultures to such a degree that many indigenous citizens begin to feel their own country is losing its historical identity and turning into something resembling a supersized version of the Olympic village. And that is where many Britons feel their country is now.

That Pakistan is a member of the Commonwealth did not appear to be the prompt for Cardiff Council’s decision, for no councillor seems to have cited that justification in defence of it. Moreover, the colours of non-Commonwealth nations, such as Poland, have also been displayed over the castle in recent times.

“Oh, it’s only a flag, and it’s just for two days”, the citizens-of-nowhere will argue. Except that it isn’t only a flag, and it isn’t just two days. What we have seen over the past couple of decades is a subtle but concerted effort on the part of Britain’s elite class to embed the ideology of cosmopolitan universalism across all areas of our public life.

These people are globalists in every sense. They see our country as a shop, not a home.

They believe in permissive migration policies, free trade libertarianism and technocratic supranationalism – all things to which large chunks of the population are hostile.

Update: I’ve heard that it helps to actually include the URL …

Update the second, 17 September: 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.

September 15, 2026

“I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose free will”

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

For some reason, the idea that humans don’t really have free will is very popular among progressives, even if they know individually that they have free will they believe most of the rest of humanity somehow doesn’t:

A simplified free will taxonomy
Image by Richardbrucebaxter via Wikimedia Commons.

A fashionable view of human behavior holds that because everything has a cause, no one is truly responsible for their actions.

In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment”, he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in Free Will (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep and then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.

Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.

The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.

Stuart Doyle offers a useful analogy that challenges this claim. Suppose we ask whether an apple is red. The determinist looks closer. He realizes the apple is nothing but atoms. Because no individual atom is red, he concludes the apple can’t really be red. The error is obvious. Color exists at the scale of the apple, not at the scale of an atom.

Free will works the same way. A choice exists at the scale of a person thinking, weighing and deciding. Looking at the molecules underneath and finding no choice there doesn’t prove that choice is an illusion.

A Fall election seems quite likely

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

One of the advantages of a Westminster-style parliamentary system is that election dates are not fixed, so that the Prime Minister can take advantage of perceived opportunities to win majorities when they arise. It must be very tempting to Mark Carney to call an election as soon as he can, as the Elbozos are still waving their arms and chanting his praises for “standing up to the Bad Orange Man”. His latest notion of trying to add Canada to the European Union as some sort of “associate member” is also popular among people who think that Canada should be more like Europe (the Venn diagram of Elbozos and Europhiles is almost a perfect circle). On X, Jay Currie stares into the abyss of yet another Liberal majority government with a renewed electoral mandate:

The Prime Minister of all the Canadas is prepping for his Davos 2.0 speech to the European Parliament on the 17th when, apparently, he is going to propose that Canada become some sort of associate member of the EU. God help us.

The developed world can be thought of as two camps: the progressives and, for want of a better term the nationalists (could be traditionalists but that is only one strain within the nationalist camp). The supra nationalist institutions, EU, UN etc are progressive to their core.

Progressives see borders as barriers to progress, believe diversity is strength, see international action as the only way to defeat the horror of “climate change”, want international controls on speech, technology and public health.

For progressives individual rights, the rule of law, property are all barriers to the greatest good for the greatest number. Citizenship is an antique concept best left in the 20th century.

Most importantly progressives see the state, rules and regulations, a constantly refreshed “New World Order” and managed decline as both beneficial and inevitable. Arc of History and all.

Nationalists begin with the tiniest unit in society, the individual, and take that unit seriously. What rights does an individual have? If you start there you automatically circumscribe the power of the state. You also set the state’s direction.

Taking individual rights seriously creates a state in which individuals matter, there their voluntary associations beginning with families, matter. “The greater good” is no more than a suggestion when it comes to protecting individual rights.

The Europe of the EU came out of the ashes of a world in which individuals were subjects rather than citizens (with the notable and sporadic exception of post Revolutionary France) and the concept of individual rights was fragile at best.

The progressive intent of the EU was to treat “Europeans” as interchangeable economic units whose value was locked to group identity and which must be prepared to share the burdens imposed for the greater good.

Nationalism was seen as regressive as was patriotism and the insistence that individuals had rights which over rode the “common good”. After all, the horrors of WWI and II were the products of patriotic nationalism.

The progressive European project worked quite well for the first twenty or so years when Marshall plan aid funded the rebuilding of Europe and membership in the EU was relatively restricted. Expansion and mass immigration strained the Community.

Part of the reason the EU worked quite well in the early years was that its goals were relatively modest, a trading bloc with harmonized economic regulation left individual countries to work out their social, legal and rights structures.

As with any progressive institution the modest goals of the early years were gradually replaced with “ambition”. The 1985 Schengen Agreement eliminated hard borders within the EU. The European Convention on Human Rights harmonized the rights of Europeans.

Part of the progressive ambition was the creation of a hitherto unknown entity known as “the European” superficially similar in concept to “the American”. Questions of nationality could be submerged as this new entity stepped into the world.

For the progressive camp the “European” was a giant step forward into a post national future. As indeed it was for a tiny minority of bureaucrats, academics, journalists, financiers and other members of a self appointed cognitive elite.

People who objected to this grand homogenization of the nations of Europe were obviously frightened of the inevitable future because, well, they were not well educated and, entre nous, not too bright.

For the “Europeans” the great cause of the 21st century was laid out in Rio in 1993 when a conference convened by Canadian Maurice Strong sounded the alarm about “global warming” currently rebranded “climate change”.

Now there was a global threat demanding a supra-national response where the “Europeans” could assume a leadership role by…well, by shipping all of their heavy industry offshore and building very expensive windmills and mandating electric cars.

To no one’s very great surprise the Europeans have managed to de-industrialize and regulate themselves to the point of actual poverty. Fortunately, it was all for the global greater good so the Europeans could congratulate themselves.

Not content with climate virtue, the Europeans (though not the regressive nationalist yobs) took it upon themselves to welcome millions of migrants. An act of humanity and also shrewd as the Europeans had given up having children.

Of course, the idea had been trial-ballooned recently to get Carney-friendly headlines ready in advance:

September 14, 2026

QotD: “We have Homo Sovieticus in America”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Institutions tend to only find data they want to find, so the City of Los Angeles last counted street deaths among the homeless — in their description, “Deaths of Unhoused People” — from 2023. There were 900. Sample detail: “Black people were 31% of deaths. Black people are only 8% of the City’s general population, but are 33% of the City’s unhoused population.”

The last numbers from Los Angeles County as a whole were for 2024, when 2,208 homeless people died on the streets. County officials celebrated, because that number was a sharp reduction, and a reflection of the success of programs like overdose intervention teams stationed around public parks.

Remember those numbers, and let’s talk about something else for a moment before we come back to them.

The Soviet writer Aleksandr Zinoviev told a joke that speaks fluent Californian: “In some institution a routine meeting was in progress. There were two points on the agenda: 1) the construction of a barn; 2) the creation of an abundance of consumer goods under communism. As they didn’t have enough planks to build the barn, they moved on at once to the second question.”

Maybe that joke doesn’t land if you don’t live in Los Angeles or Seattle, but from here it’s flawless. Take a quick look at the campaign page for María Elena Durazo, a state senator who just won a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Infrastructure and fire departments are in bad shape in the place where elected officials think that government exists to provide “economic justice” that restructures communities. When government exists to pay your rent, 911 response times soar.

They can’t fix a street, so they move on at once to managing all of society.

Here’s what Senator Durazo boasts about on her “Meet Maria” page: “Arrested over 13 times for leading non-violent Civil Rights and Worker Rights protests”. It’s the line that appears below “State Senator” on her list of accomplishments. Gentry socialists have high-status-marker arrest credentials, without the burden of low-status prosecution and jail terms.

Zinoviev gave us the term “Homo Sovieticus”, describing the human creature that shaped itself around the postures and predilections of Soviet culture. Humorless, a sanctimonious scold, a deeply selfish schemer while professing adoration for collectivism, comfortable reciting official slogans without feeling the need to believe them or examine them, reflexively conformist, not worried about truth. (X) has been advanced as party doctrine, so (X) is correct, and anyone suggesting (Not-X) is highly suspect. The official account is always correct.

We live among these people. We have Homo Sovieticus in America.

Chris Bray, “Homo Cosmopolitus Won’t Count the Costs”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-06-10.

September 6, 2026

Scientific American used to be a respected science publication

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

A few years ago, it became clear that Scientific American had been captured by the woke gender warriors, but as ESR points out, the publication had been somewhat in the hands of propagandists for much longer than that:

I was once a Scientific American subscriber. I loved that magazine; reading it was one of the highlights of my month. I canceled, and wept for what the magazine was becoming, when they published a theme issue that was a transparent political hit job.

Sounds like current news? No. That was 40 years ago. The hit job was on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan was in the White House.

And I … I couldn’t figure out why nobody was saying the obvious in public. That SciAm had been sock-puppeted by a Soviet influence operation desperate to keep the US from exploiting its technological advantage.

Ideological capture of the scientific establishment is not a new problem. As much as I hate the Communists behind it, I’m even angrier with all the scientists who averted their eyes and never pushed back while the capture was going on. Our civilization gave them a position of high status, privilege, and trust. A priori I don’t think we were wrong to do that — until they failed in the duty that went with that trust.

It’s difficult for me to express how personally painful I found this. I revered research scientists as a child and young man — I could not imagine any higher calling than to be one myself. Until they betrayed civilization, and in the process betrayed me.

So, this isn’t a new problem. What’s new is that the post-2014 woke insanity has made it too obvious to miss.

It’s time for a dissolution of the monasteries. The culture of science, to the extent it is transmitted forward, must learn a harsh and terrible lesson about the consequences of allowing scientific neutrality to be abandoned for a mess of politics.

September 5, 2026

The high-water mark of Cancel Culture

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

This Noahpinion piece is from last year, but I hadn’t seen it before and I think it outlines fairly accurately why “we” allowed Cancel Culture to temporarily take over social media and cause so much personal damage to disfavoured individuals. It gave the mob the power to identify their own Emmanuel Goldsteins and drive them from the public sphere:

The Arrest of Robespierre, The Night of the 9th to 10th Thermidor, Year II, 27th July 1794
Colour engraving by Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert (1765 – ca.1835) via Wikimedia Commons.

I think about this when I think about cancel culture.

Back in 2018, Bari Weiss got dogpiled on Twitter for an anodyne liberal tweet. Weiss congratulated Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu on pulling off a difficult move, quoting a line from the musical Hamilton about immigrants being great:

Weiss was viciously attacked for this tweet by thousands of people who called her racist over the course of several days. Why? Because Mirai Nagasu isn’t actually an immigrant — she was born in the U.S. According to Weiss’ many attackers, Weiss’ statement implied that nonwhite people are perpetual foreigners.

That was, of course, complete hogwash. Nagasu’s parents are immigrants; the use of the term “second-generation immigrants” to describe the children of immigrants is utterly standard terminology in academic sociology. And by quoting a line from Hamilton in praise of a second-generation immigrant athlete competing on behalf of the U.S., Weiss was clearly advocating in favor of (nonwhite) immigration as something that makes America stronger — a very standard liberal viewpoint.

Whether this particular pile-on had long-term negative consequences for Weiss’ life isn’t clear, but she encountered an increasingly hostile climate at the New York Times, the paper where she worked, and eventually was forced to quit. It would have been reasonable for people observing that pile-on — and similar attacks directed at Weiss over the years — to conclude that speaking up is dangerous and that Twitter mobs hold a lot of real power.

The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb — an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago — reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.

Why was cancel culture both so powerful and so popular for those few years? The most obvious reason is that it worked. If you were a progressive in 2018 who really believed that calling a second-generation American an “immigrant” was racist, then you could often effectively strike at that person by raising a hue and cry about them on Twitter. Companies were afraid of boycotts, of course. But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger; corporate managers would often cave out of pure fear of online negativity.

Another reason was that cancel culture was a quick route to online clout. As Eugene Wei wrote in his famous blog post “Status as a Service (StaaS)“, social media offers most people the opportunity to get much more social status than they have any hope of getting in their daily lives, if they happen to get lucky and go viral and become an influencer.

But to get that clout, you have to stand out. Attacking the same old progressive targets — Donald Trump, Republican senators, conservative influencers — is a low-yield activity, because the field is too competitive. Everyone attacks those people. But finding more novel targets for mob attack — like an NYT writer who calls a second-generation American an “immigrant” — can be a high-yield activity. It’s basically outrage entrepreneurship.

Of course, this means that there was an incentive for progressive purity spirals and tent-shrinking. If you’re a progressive looking for new people to denounce, the most tempting targets are probably center-left liberals who have heretofore been safe from cancellation. Hating Donald Trump is old news. But hating Matt Yglesias? That could get you some real attention!

And so the ranks of the online cancel-mobs were probably also swollen by people who participated in the mobs out of fear that if they didn’t, they too would be canceled. This gave rise to a phenomenon I call ponzi screaming — berating the person immediately to your right on the political spectrum, out of fear that if you don’t berate them, people further to your left will berate you. You have people like the progressive online shouter and failed Congressional candidate Will Stancil berating Nate Silver even as he gets frequently dogpiled and berated by leftists.

Between outrage entrepreneurship, purity contests, and ponzi screaming, late-2010s progressive cancel culture started to look like a farcical imitation of the French Terror or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The stakes were obviously much lower — losing your job is a lot less bad than losing your head — but many of the social dynamics and behavior patterns were recognizably similar.

September 4, 2026

Loyalist Canada to Liberal Canada, a political devolution

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

On Substack Notes, John Carter discusses the old, stable Canada that the Liberals have spent sixty years trying to destroy, with great success, sadly.

For all intents and purposes, post-1965 Liberal Canada is a completely different country from the Loyalist Canada that it erased. Different flag, different basis for moral legitimacy, different constitution even.

Liberal Canada loves to wear poppies on Remembrance Day, but this is stolen valour. Liberal Canada has never won a single war. Loyalist Canada won every war it fought in.

Liberal Canada built no great works. Most of the infrastructure of Canada was constructed before Liberal Canada. The Trans Canada Highway, the Trans Canada Railroad, the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, the Toronto subway, the Montreal Metro — all were built or initiated by Loyalist Canada. Liberal Canada completed the projects that began under Loyalist Canada, but initiated none of its own, and at best can be said to maintain the infrastructure it inherited … badly. Liberal Canada cannot even build a pipeline to bring its oil to market. Liberal Canada cannot even refine its own oil.

Loyalist Canada built out an organizational infrastructure of Crown Corporations which were once the envy of the world. Liberal Canada dismantled them, giving us toll roads owned by foreigners.

Loyalist Canada built all of this infrastructure, and won all of those wars, without incurring a national debt. The national debt was accrued entirely by Liberal Canada, and is entirely a function of social welfare programs it uses to turn Canadians into domesticated clients of Liberal Party patronage, and indentured servants of the banks.

Then of course there are the demographics. Loyalist Canada was a white Canada, a British and French Canada, and a fecund Canada, with one of the world’s highest birth rates. Liberal Canada is a barren Canada, with one of the world’s lowest birth rates, and it has presided over the systematic replacement of the Canadian people with Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Muslims, to whom it moreover extends preference for social services, university admissions, and employment. Liberal Canada makes Canadians second class citizens in the land their ancestors built.

Liberal Canada is a parasitic entity that is rapidly killing its host. It is an exhausted Brezhnevian sclerocracy that destroys ambition because even the most modest of ambitions are a threat to the soft men, the mild bureaucrats and glassy-eyed ideologues who subsist on the arbitrage of national decline. Liberal Canada is weak, and so it demands that its subjects be even weaker, as this is the only way for weak men to rule.

Liberal Canada is not the real Canada, and Canadians are beginning to wake up from this long nightmare of mismanagement and institutionalized treason, and to remember who they are.

September 3, 2026

That problematic arch-conservative New-Dealer … Norman Rockwell?

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Chris Bray was in Stockbridge Massachusetts recently and discovered that the notorious arch-conservative artist Norman Rockwell … supported the New Deal and FDR … which is unquestionably extreme-right, yet somehow “got woke” in the 1960s:

Stockbridge is in the (astonishingly pretty) Berkshires, where you can’t sell a latte or a $14 egg and cheese sandwich without a trans pride flag and a sticker in the window boldly supporting a woman’s right to choose and a “No Kings in America” sign and on and and on and on.

I’m an outsider, so they won’t show me the manual. But it’s a lot of virtue, signaled with a great deal of self-consciousness, and also there are a ton of German SUVs with New York license plates. Status status status. We stand with immigrants / new Mercedes.

Rockwell lived and painted in Stockbridge, and that’s … that’s … (ambiguous facial expression). He painted images that demonstrated a bone-deep fondness for America and Americans, especially small-town Americans, so he was a huge far-right figure, OBVIOUSLY, and also a major white supremacist, but maybe kind of accidentally a big Klan figure?

You can find this stuff everywhere: Rockwell’s name was “a symbol of an idealized, conservative, white American past”. Click on that link: It’s an essay that says Rockwell is known for an idealized conservative past, and it’s illustrated with a 1943 painting that celebrated FDR’s declaration that Freedom From Want is a basic freedom that that all Americans should enjoy. So, to wrap a bow around this amazing cultural artifact, Rockwell’s idealized conservative past was a celebration of the New Deal president’s declaration that government should assure material comfort for everyone. See, huge right-winger.

[…]

But Rockwell painted a massive quantity of routine shitlibbery alongside his depictions of small-town America as a place he didn’t despise, and, I’m repeating myself, several of his most famous paintings express his affection for that huge far-right figure Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a registered Republican who painted Democrats and Democrat political themes with great warmth, and also liked Ike, and then went on to paint important depictions of the Civil Rights Movement. So he’s … he’s … a huge Trumper who didn’t hate black people? Which lawn sign should we display about this? The past has to be sorted into the categories of right now, in ways that should feel comfortable to an NPR personality: This Thucydides person, was he a Trumper?

The just absolutely amazing leftist discourse about Rockwell is that he changed: He used to be a brutal Republican Nazi like ORANGE MAN, but then he turned into a good person. These essays tend to have the subtlety of a claw hammer to the face. Go read this example at the reliably boneheaded Vox, which describes Rockwell’s “late-life political transformation” and says that the “tumultuous ’60s would convert Rockwell into an overt social liberal”. He turned from right to left! He became good! See, he had an “awakening!”

The reason all of this confuses them is that Rockwell was a social type that no longer exists: a liberal Republican who thought that America had flaws that needed fixing, but who also at the same time loved the country and loved its people. He was sort of center-left on some stuff and center-right on some stuff, and culturally attuned to a nation that he viewed fondly. He liked FDR and the Four Freedoms and he personally liked Eisenhower, who had him over for dinner.

August 30, 2026

The unspoken dividing line between “BCE” and “CE”

Filed under: History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m not a trained historian, so I don’t know if it’s a guild requirement for modern historians to ostentatiously avoid using traditional “BC” and “AD” to denote historical dates or if it’s just another sop to the easily offended like so many other things:

An Olmec head, By Marshall Astor (Life on the Edge), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19349056

Although I work primarily as a computer programmer, my college degree is in History. Over the years, I have retained a high level of interest in history, both recent and ancient.

A few months ago I listened to a Great Courses presentation about the Olmecs — one of the lesser known Central American civilizations — given by Dr. Ed Barnhart. The course lived up to its name and taught much about the history and society, as well as the giant heads, of the Olmecs. However, one thing bothered me about Dr. Barnhart’s presentation.

Dr. Barnhart generally uses CE and BCE for dates. CE stands for “common era” and BCE stands for “before common era”. Other than that fact, CE perfectly coincides with the previous AD and BCE perfectly coincides with BC.

Perhaps Dr. Barnhart should not be singled out. He is not alone in the use of these terms. In fact, the majority of historical presentations these days employ CE and BCE. And it may be that using these terms is not a personal decision; rather, it may be that a department-wide or even university-wide convention.

However, in my view, using CE and BCE instead of AD and BC is not okay. As an (amateur) historian, I believe that it’s bad for history. And as a Christian, I find it a bit offensive. I will probably never have the opportunity to tell Dr. Barnhart why he should not use CE/BCE, but if I did, here’s what I would tell him:

1) The prime commitment of a historian should be to history. A historian should be careful that the information presented is the most accurate, the most complete, and most contextually grounded. CE/BCE fails to be most accurate because it takes an obviously true historical fact — that the currently used Julian/Gregorian calendar is based on the birth of Christ — and obscures that fact. It is not the most complete because there is no way on its own to understand that CE/BCE means to present the same system as AD/BC. To truly understand the system, the AD/BC system would need to be explained. The AD/BC system can stand on its own, but the CE/BCE can only be understood along with AD/BC.

And it lacks context because the terms “common era” and “before common era” give no indication as to what exactly is the demarcation between the two eras. Since CE/BCE gives no referent, a student could reasonably conclude that the dating system is entirely arbitrary. For these reasons, using CE/BCE leaves students or listeners knowing less than they should and perhaps even having a wrong understanding of the dating system. AD/BC preserves important historical information. CE/BCE does not. On the basis of that alone, CE/BCE should not be used by historians who want to be as accurate and complete as possible.

2) Using AD/BC does not require anyone to profess Christianity. Some might say that AD/BC unfairly burdens non-Christians, but the terms Anno Domini and Before Christ are clearly not confessional statements. There is no serious historical dispute that Jesus Christ existed in approximately the time and place given in the Scriptures, and AD/BC merely recognizes that this is the basis for the year numbering system. Anno Domini, or year of the Lord, doesn’t require the user to say “my Lord” or otherwise confess Christianity, just to recognize that the calendar was created by people who did confess Christianity. That is an important fact, not something to be hidden.

The fact is that every calendar starts dating from something, generally from an important event. Some examples are:

  • Roman dating: years counted from the traditional founding of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, conventionally placed in 753 BC.
  • Hebrew calendar: years are traditionally counted from a calculated date for the creation of the world.
  • Islamic calendar: years are counted from the Hijra, Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina in AD 622.
  • French Republican calendar: years were counted from the establishment of the French Republic in AD 1792.

To use a particular calendar says nothing about one’s religious beliefs.

August 24, 2026

It’s no wonder that people have lost trust in formerly prestigious institutions

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

Lorenzo Warby on the two cases that are currently front-and-centre with the terminally online left, one a recently deceased academic grifter and another a confessed multiple murderer (of her own children):

We are currently observing attempts to turn the late Jason Arday — a fabulist who produced nothing of intellectual merit — and Lindsay Clancy, a woman who murdered her three children, into moral heroes. The former is allegedly a martyr for the cause of anti-racism and care for the neurodivergent/autistic, the latter for motherhood — or at least postpartum depression and psychosis. Both are construed as victims.

There is a real push to put the truly awful into Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. It’s almost as if there are some issues with feminisation. On the other hand, a woman being an open supporter of Lindsay Clancy is an excellent negative signal for men.

Just when you think progressivist purity spirals can’t get any worse, they do. Thus, we not only get the above hagiographical elevations of the grotesquely unworthy, we also see the physical mutilations of trans-surgery used to rehabilitate female genital mutilation.

But, of course, any such surprise is having far too contemporary a focus. Left-progressivism has a long history of elevating some of history’s most appalling monsters, most tyrannical mass murderers — Lenin, Stalin, Mao — as heroes of world-history and human liberation.

The use and abuse of moral mascots

The worse a group or individual behaves, the more progressives like them. If a group is noted for high levels of violence or various social dysfunctions, left-progressives adopt them as moral mascots.

The concept of such mascots comes from economist Thomas Sowell. Mascots are people or individuals that “the Anointed” — those who see themselves as at forefront of human liberation — adopt to be extolled and defended. This is connected to Thomas Sowell’s analysis of Constrained and Unconstrained political visions.

The Constrained Vision says there are no complete solutions, there are just trade-offs, all the way down. Human nature is one of those constraints. Biologist E.O. Wilson‘s famous observation about Communism — great idea, wrong species — is a pithy expression of the Constrained Vision.

In the Constrained Vision, history is an enormous memory well where we learn about ourselves. This is because the humans who made history are just like us. Their experience, their triumphs and failures, even their mundanities, are lessons for us.

History is contingent, it has no particular direction. The Constrained Vision finds it easy to take people’s choices as having authority because there is no direction of historical travel to which they must conform.

The Unconstrained Vision denies that human nature is a constraint in that way, so it’s possible to create a society of transformative human liberation. History is not a source of lessons, but a record of failures to achieve that liberation — a record of corruption and sin.

Moreover, history has a proper direction — towards transformative human liberation or another, related telos. Hence, choices that support that direction are legitimate, those that go against it are not. The politics of the Unconstrained Vision turns elections into legitimating rituals: citizens’ votes are blocked from overturning any of the policies the Anointed have decided represent history’s proper direction.

The Anointed evince what writer Wesley Yang labels the non-electoral politics of institutional capture. If you want to see that in its most complete form among the Western democracies, PM Tony Blair’s debauching of Britain’s constitutional order through quangoes, human rights legislation that empowered judges over elected ministers, and devolving decision-making to the EU — thereby massively increasing the degree to which elections became legitimating rituals that change remarkably little — is the current gold standard case. However, all Western democracies face similar pressures, albeit to considerably differing degrees.

The commitment of The Anointed to this vision of human liberation gives them such a sense of trumping moral authority that they see themselves as owning morality. They have the right-to-decide what is moral and then to impose their decisions on everyone else.

August 22, 2026

The WEF – first up against the wall come the revolution

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski considers just how the lizard people of the World Economic Forum came to be “The People Who Decided They Should Run Everything”:

Every year in January, the most important people in the world travel to Davos, Switzerland — a ski resort — to discuss the problems facing humanity. They arrive on private jets. They stay in five-star hotels. They are protected by five thousand soldiers and police. They eat very well. They talk about inequality, climate change, and the need for ordinary people to consume less. Then they fly home on private jets.

This is not satire. This is the schedule.

1. Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 – a German professor who decided that the solution to the world’s problems was to get the people who ran the world’s largest corporations into a room with the people who ran the world’s governments, and have them agree on things before anyone elected them to agree on things. If you control the conversation before the democratic process begins, you control the outcome without being subject to it. Davos is where the agenda is set. Everything after is implementation.

2. The Young Global Leaders program is the masterpiece. Founded in 2004, with its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow, running since 1993. Together the programs have formed: Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and the health ministers who designed most of the Western world’s COVID response. The pipeline runs continuously. The list is published on the WEF website. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an alumni directory.

3. The program works because it operates before power, not after. By the time a Young Global Leader becomes a prime minister or finance minister, they have already spent years in the same rooms, sharing the same assumptions, networking with the same people. They don’t need to be told what to do. They already know – because they were formed together, in Davos, before anyone gave them the job. The Fabian Society permeates institutions over generations. The WEF does it in a long weekend, with better catering.

4. The Great Reset — announced in 2020 with timing that should give everyone pause — is the program stated plainly. “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” Build Back Better. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The language is always the language of inevitability: this is happening, the question is only how to manage it. The managed future, designed by the people in the ski resort, for the people who were not invited.

5. The irony is structural. The people most loudly “concerned about inequality” meet in one of the most expensive places on earth. Those most “concerned about climate change” arrive by private jet. Those most “concerned about democracy” design systems insulating them from democratic accountability. The gap between the speech and the life is visible from orbit. They don’t notice it. Or they notice and calculate, correctly, that nobody who matters will say so.

6. What Davos actually produces is “consensus” – the consensus of people who have implicitly agreed before arriving, because people who disagree don’t get invited. Climate policy, AI regulation, tax harmonization, digital currency – these are not debated at Davos. They are shaped there. The debate happens later, when implementation is already underway.

7. The Young Global Leaders are the tell. A program that identifies, selects, and forms the next generation of leaders before they become leaders is not a networking event. It is a formation pipeline. The Jesuits understood that if you form a person before they have power, you own what they do with the power. The WEF understood the same thing and built it into a global institution.

The question is simple:

Who decided Klaus Schwab should select the world’s next generation of leaders?

Nobody.

He just started doing it.

And the people who run things let him – because increasingly, the people who run things were people he had already formed.

Did you choose them?

August 20, 2026

The Frankfurt School – The most destructive intellectual project of the 20th Century

Filed under: Books, Education, Europe, Germany, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

People tend to underestimate how influential intellectual movements can be, as they rarely get outside attention until they’re deeply entrenched in the university system. The Frankfurt School‘s damage record is unmatched by any other intellectual movement of the era:

Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.

The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.

The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.

1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.

2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.

3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it. This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.

4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name”. Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.

5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.

6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.

7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.

The answer is not another theory. It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.

The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.

Prove it wrong.

Tell the truth, have courage, and build.

“It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand”

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

On his Substack, Andrew Doyle discusses the fine art of writing libellous things about someone without quite giving enough legally actionable material for the victim to have a chance to retaliate successfully:

Simon Edge on GB News.
Screencap from Andrew Doyle

How does one libel an opponent and get away with it? I’ve lost count of the number of people online who’ve made false accusations against me. Sometimes I’m a fascist, other times a communist. Sometimes I’m a homophobe, other times a degenerate sodomite. Some have branded me a “racist” for supporting Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society. White supremacists have denounced me as a traitor for my opposition to racism.

It’s all noise, of course, and best filtered out. These aren’t serious people, and no serious person would believe their smears. However, last week an author called Simon Edge, well-known in gender-critical circles, published a blog post about me that I can only describe as defamatory. He’s very lucky that I’ve no appetite for litigation, but I think it’s worth discussing the nature of his smearing technique because it’s become so common among activists of the more mendacious ilk.

It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand. Perhaps we should call it prestidefamation. Here’s how it works. You take a series of unremarkable facts, out-of-context quotations and tenuous associations, arrange them in a suggestive manner, omit any contrary evidence, invite the reader to draw the worst possible conclusion and then congratulate them for drawing it.

Edge has done precisely this. I have a long and well-documented record of opposing fascism and the far right. I’ve written books and articles about it, spoken about it endlessly on television, radio and podcasts. My latest book The End of Woke makes the case against all forms of authoritarianism, and opens with an epigraph explicitly attacking Nazi ideology. Yet Edge has managed to write an article insinuating that I support Nazis. It would be like writing a piece about Oscar Wilde’s robust and unwavering heterosexuality.

Here’s how he did it. Recently, it was announced on X that Oldspeak Books, which bills itself as “Britain’s only centre-right bookshop”, has closed its doors. The manager posted a message on social media to explain.

    Over time, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a welcoming environment due to the constant hostility I experienced. The uncertainty around which customers were genuine, made it hard for me to greet everyone warmly, and my customer service suffered.

This looked like a clear case of cancel culture to me and, since Oldspeak had been kind enough to stock my books, I reposted her message with a comment to the effect that it was a shame that she had been pressurised into closing her shop. This was, according to Edge, my first foray into the murky world of fascist apologism. Who knew it could be so easy?

August 16, 2026

Understanding Canadian politics

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

To an outsider, the ins and outs of Canadian politics must seem quite illogical — and for lots of good reasons — but L. Wayne Mathison offers an explanation that may help:

I think the “constraints” framework explains a surprising amount of Canadian politics.

Canada increasingly governs as though good intentions can overrule physical and economic limits.

We want more housing, but often ignore land-use rules, permitting delays, skilled-trade shortages, infrastructure capacity and construction costs.

We want better health care, but governments can promise “universal access” far more easily than they can produce doctors, nurses, operating rooms, diagnostic machines and hours in the day.

We want rapid population growth, while pretending housing, roads, schools and hospitals will expand at the same speed.

We want reliable electricity while making major generation and transmission projects harder to build.

We want higher wages and stronger public services while giving far less attention to productivity, capital investment and the businesses that ultimately generate the income being taxed.

This is where I think the constrained versus unconstrained distinction is useful.

Politics often treats shortages as failures of compassion or policy design. But sometimes the problem is much simpler: you cannot legislate resources into existence.

I learned that farming. You could have the best plan in the world, but weather, machinery, labour, soil, interest rates and time still had the final vote. Reality didn’t care how sincere you were.

Government faces the same rule.

This doesn’t mean government is useless, and it doesn’t mean every left-wing idea ignores constraints or every conservative understands them. Plenty don’t. But Canadian policy would improve dramatically if every proposal had to answer one basic question:

What are the real-world bottlenecks, and what happens when we hit them?

You can redistribute money. You can rewrite regulations. You can announce targets.

You cannot redistribute houses that haven’t been built, doctors who don’t exist, electricity that hasn’t been generated or productivity that hasn’t been created.

Eventually the physical world collects its bill.

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