Quotulatiousness

August 5, 2026

Canada decides to treat online opinions as matters for police enforcement

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s never a good sign when my region features in a news story, like this post from Exiled Mountie, discussing Canada’s Bill C-9 and the way it encourages local police forces to treat lawful online speech as a matter for police involvement:

As I watch the reaction to Bill C-9 unfold in real time on social media, I cannot help but think that another important line has been crossed in Canada.

Most of us saw the writing on the wall months ago and tried to warn others by screaming it from the rooftops. But as with Covid, nobody listened, and we were probably called racists for doing so. So here we are, another important battle lost.

From a legal point of view, we are now becoming almost indistinguishable from the system in the UK, and that’s a frightening thought.

In the UK, police have recorded non-crime “hate” incidents against schoolchildren for classroom insults, despite no criminal offence having taken place. The system finally became so absurd that the British government recently announced that it would scrap the practice in order to stop police wasting their time on petty arguments. Just imagine the absurdity of this: police resources being tied up over petty squabbles in the schoolyard!

We have now entered a time where the government has extreme control of our speech.

So much so, that we’re even being warned that criticizing or boycotting a company based on moral or ethical reasons can be treated as a hate incident, even when police openly acknowledge that no criminal offence has occurred. From there, the matter can still be reported and subjected to further police investigation to determine if the elements of a hate crime are met.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twilight zone. We have arrived in the progressive future the Left has been pushing for so long, and it sucks.

The danger here is not only what will eventually result in charges. It is that police are inviting complaints and opening the door to police attention over expression that is not criminal at all.

Durham Police openly acknowledges that these so-called hate or bias incidents are not criminal offences. Yet it still encourages people to report them and even uses the lawful boycott of companies supporting the 2SLGBTQI+ community as an example.

August 3, 2026

The Ceuta invasion as a tipping point

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

On Substack, el gato malo suggests that the “refugee” invastion of Ceuta is a “bridge too far” for the EU:

peruvian strongman oscar benavides famously said “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”.

once, such a thing might have provided a succinct summation of the practice of privilege in its literal sense of “private law”. there were laws for the aristocrats and others for the commoners and still others for non-citizens and slaves.

such ideas date back to time out of mind before stone was placed upon stone in giza and stood as absolute expectation and norm in most of the world until quite recently (and pertain in many parts of the world even today). the idea that “all people should be equal under the law” was a radical alteration to social order, a repudiation of the divine right of kings and aristocrats and their monopolies on property and on violence. the literal idea that land could be owned by a commoner was an astonishing upheaval of established orders. it was also the freeing move that allowed for the west to rise and flourish and prosper, unlocking its vast human potential. one might think that people would be happy about this and cherish and protect this most foundational idea that serves as cornerstone to civilizations of liberty and plenty.

lol.

you must be new here.

[…]

spain looks to be in real danger of falling as a nation. they created a mass amnesty for illegal immigrants from places that do not believe in spain but only in tribe and who do not believe in rights but only in who may dominate whom. if one seeks to be a wrecker, it’s a brilliant incentive. pardon a million and give them access to your social safety networks and welfare payments which fund a lifestyle far in excess of where they came from (and the right to vote for more) and the next wave is already packing its bags to come. spread enough jam and you can attract infinity ants.

the US was well on its way to running this playbook (and likely has ~40 million illegals to show for it) before it was stopped. the astonishing bit was how easy it was to shut this off. you just cut off the incentives. no more free stuff, no more amnesty, no more “path to stay”, and no more “catch and release until our overwhelmed court system can have a hearing years from now”. it’s really that simple.

due process becomes rounding you up and sending you home, not giving you a nice place to live for the 3 years until your case is heard.

and it ALL comes down to prosecutors, courts, and agencies. immigration law became irrelevant not because the law changed but because enforcement did. the spectacle of american judges sneaking illegals out of courthouses to avoid their apprehension by ICE was really pretty astonishing. so too were the massive levels of entitlement fraud, literal government funded flights to needed voting districts, and the astonishing refusal to arrest or hold accountable any among them because “marginalized”. europe is worse.

the NGO bond villian insidious complex has been running the table on the west for 20 years.

and they are moving into overdrive now before the populist right forces they are giving reflexive rise to can take control.

[…]

the media is, predictably, either ignoring this or pretending it’s a humanitarian crisis of families and babies. it’s not. this is damn near all men.

and they are not behaving well.

some are claiming that many of these are criminals freed by morocco and bused to the border as a deliberate act. (this same tactic was used by central and south american regimes to dump their gangs in the US.) images of robbery, rape, and of murder are cropping up.

just what a town of 80k is supposed to do with 80k invaders and how they might be fed or sheltered or controlled remains an open question.

meanwhile, EU commission president ursula von doom has moved to action.

“we have sent a bureaucrat to monitor the situation. if this continues, they will tell people to ‘stop’. if that fails, they will say ‘stop’ again, perhaps in a firmer voice.”

to call this air and nonsense would be charitable. it’s an admission of helplessness. the EC relied upon a soft power it no longer possesses because it now faces people who believe only in hard power which the EC never had.

bluff called.

it’s over.

the EC was fine to govern the sort of citizens who yell at tourists for crossing an empty street against the light. it is wholly unsuited for this and like many an ill fated magician’s apprentice before them, they have now summoned that which they have no hope of controling and will eat them alive.

but here’s the part i really loved: “the images from ceuta are unacceptable”.

talk about saying the quiet part out loud. not the events. not the crisis. the images. even now, for her it’s all perception. you want to understand why they want to mandate ID to use the internet/social media and why they so desperately demand the right to censor it (once more using courts and agencies to enforce their whim)? this is why.

“for my friends, speech, for my enemies censorship and gulag”.

what they are doing cannot survive these images.

On Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes reacts to the progressives’ response to the Ceuta situation:

I often wonder about the open borders, “migrants welcome” people and I can’t square it.

I am traditionally a left leaning person from a mixed background who has travelled extensively.

To the current progressive mind this ought to make me automatically cheering on the levels of mass migration we are living with.

But it’s the opposite.

The well travelled “anywhere” cosmopolitans should surely be the most aware of cultural differences and that it’s precisely the concept that nations are “particular” and unique from one another, that makes travelling such a fascinating and sometimes challenging thing to do.

[…]

Travelling gave me a fresh and new appreciation of little things (that actually turned out to be important things) about Britain that I had taken for granted before.

The fact that these muppets think that any form of patriotism or nationalism leads to Hitler is absolutely moronic.

And of course they celebrate it everywhere else. It’s just us who are the baddies for wanting to hold onto our traditions, customs and culture.

Why are we uniquely expected to live by different rules? Surely that in itself is kind of exceptionalist?

A progressive travelling in India wouldn’t think twice about a Mumbai taxi driver having an Indian flag hanging on his rearview mirror.

Or a Thai guesthouse having a shrine to the Thai royal family.

When you travel, people are proud of their countries and towns. They want to show you around. They tell you their country is the best proudly.

Of course, I will be here all day pointing out progressive double standards.

But this one is a biggy!

Update, 4 August: 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.

August 2, 2026

The hubristic disaster of good intentions in Llantwit Major

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

On Substack, Mark Collett recounts the sad tale of good intentions leading to very unwelcome results in a little Welsh town that was determined to welcome in foreign refugees:

“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

This phrase does not have a single, definitive creator but it is instead a modern English phrasing of an ancient Greek concept that evolved over thousands of years. The core meaning of the phrase comes from the classical Greek concept of Atë, which is an infatuation or moral blindness sent by the gods to punish human hubris. The earliest recorded variation appears in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (c. 441 BC), where a chorus remarks that evil eventually seems good to a man whose mind a god is leading to ruin. Sophocles noted even then that it was an old and famous maxim – possibly existing for hundreds of years before he used the term. However, the phrase finally took its exact, modern-day form in 19th-century American literature with the Reverend William Anderson Scott publishing the phrase exactly as it is written today in his book Daniel, a Model for Young Men, which was published in 1854, he called it a “heathen proverb”.

[…]

There is probably no better modern application for this “heathen proverb” than as a means to describe white liberals. These champions of social justice are so desperate to endorse a progressive ideology and to embrace people from other racial and cultural groups, that it often leads to their downfall. So convinced are white liberals not only of the nobility of their cause, but they are also totally sure that when their beliefs and theories are applied in the real world that they will result in the establishment of a rainbow utopia in which all people will live in blissful harmony. This is why the truth to these people is like garlic to a vampire. As such, no amount of facts, figures or even real-world examples of the potential pitfalls that could result from enacting the policies they support can dissuade the white liberal from their political path. And often, the hubris of white liberals can lead to their downfall, and sometimes, this affects more than a lone individual, sometimes, this hubris leads to the downfall of an entire community.

Photo from Mark Collett

And on the South Coast of Wales, in a small seaside town named Llantwit Major, it could be said that the residents became the living embodiment of this “heathen proverb”, that they went “mad” – however this madness was definitely not the work of the gods. The madness that had taken over the minds of the people of Llantwit Major was a form of suicidal hubris that sprang forth from their misplaced beliefs in tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism. And it was their faith in these beliefs that caused them to embrace their own demise in a desperate attempt to prove how progressive and open minded they were. This is the story of a small Welsh town of less than 10,000 people who willingly and enthusiastically welcomed a swamping number of migrants into their community and how their overwhelming arrogance resulted in a migrant camp being built in the very centre of their tiny, and previously homogenous, Welsh community.

But this wasn’t just a case of blind virtue signalling – it was possibly the most glaring example of liberal hubris on a group level that has been witnessed in recent years. The residents of Llantwit were warned of their impending fate, but not only did they ignore these warnings, but they besmirched and attacked those who they should have heeded. When it was announced that migrants would be headed to Llantwit, many nationalists were eager to help the town’s residents, and plans were made to arrange a demonstration in the area in order to assist the locals in pushing back against the proposals. But the hubris of the townsfolk caused them to reject this generous offer of help, and instead, those who wished to warn local residents of the dangers posed by such a scheme were met with resistance. This local resistance was so strong that the BBC ran a glowing article praising the people of Llantwit titled: “Patriotic Alternative: The town fighting the far-right with Welsh cakes”.

July 30, 2026

Intramural conflict in the progressive “big tent”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies some of the major fault lines among the temporary coalition-of-convenience on “the left”:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The modern woke worldview keeps colliding with reality because it sorts people into fixed moral categories: oppressed people are presumed good, while designated oppressors are presumed guilty. Once that framework takes hold, facts become secondary.

That is why some progressives can condemn “Christian nationalism” before breakfast, then struggle to name radical Islam when an Islamist attacks the very people they claim to defend.

The contradiction is obvious. Radical Islam is deeply hostile to homosexuality, women’s equality, free expression and secular liberalism. Pretending otherwise does not make anyone tolerant. It makes society dishonest and vulnerable.

This does not mean every Muslim is dangerous, nor does it justify collective blame. It means an ideology should be judged by what it teaches, what its extremists do, and whether its institutions openly confront the problem. The same standard should apply to every religion and political movement.

The woke response is usually predictable: redirect attention toward the far right, blame Western society, or accuse anyone raising the issue of hatred.

That protects the ideology, but it does nothing to protect ordinary people. Compassion without boundaries becomes negligence.

A healthy society needs openness, but openness is not the absence of judgment. Immigration, asylum and multiculturalism require enforceable limits, cultural confidence and a clear expectation that newcomers accept the laws and basic freedoms of the country receiving them.

You cannot build social trust by demanding that citizens ignore obvious conflicts. You cannot defend gay people while excusing movements that despise them. You cannot defend women while tolerating misogyny from politically protected groups.

Reality does not care which side has the approved slogans. Eventually, contradictions collect a human cost.

July 29, 2026

The American Deep State’s biggest experimental laboratory

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

On Substack, John Carter links to the latest of kulak’s fascinating-and-unsettling Anarchonomicon posts with this introduction:

Kulak’s thesis here is that English Canada generally, and Toronto specifically, is ground zero for a lot of the more insane gay race communism trends because America has been using Canada as a testing ground for psychological operations since the 1950s.

That sounds kind of nuts but he makes a plausible case. Since Canada is technically a foreign country, intelligence agencies don’t face the same limitations they do at home. Since Canada is almost culturally identical to the US, what works in Canada will generally work domestically (and all the GAE psyops are ultimately aimed at America’s domestic tax cattle).

Kulak also brings the receipts here, showing how things like MeToo and GamerGate seem to have been prefigured by similar movements in Canada a couple years before.

One thing he misses is land acknowledgements, which began spreading in Canada in 2013 or so, and have since started appearing at American and Australian universities. I don’t know for sure that they started in Canada, all I can say is that it was Canada where I first noticed them, and where they have become ubiquitous.

Multiculturalism is another Canadian export, developed here in the 60s and rapidly introduced all over the Western world. The prime ministers who introduced it were American puppets, and the ideology itself has a very broadly American “nation of immigrants” feel to it.

Anyhow, you motherfuckers, two can play this game.

On the land acknowledgements, the first time I encountered it was at my son’s university graduation ceremony, but his university had a big First Nations specialization so it didn’t seem too outlandish at the time. Since then, of course, pretty much every event in urban Canada seems to feature a land acknowledgement and they don’t appear to be optional any more.

Anyway, on to kulak’s post on “The Battle for the Mind of North America”:

The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey

Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up … several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.

The “Rape” refers to Rapeseed, the primary ingredient in Canola Oil, the unhealthy seed-oil. (they named it “Canada Oil” because “Rape Oil” might make people hesitate)

But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.

and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:

America.

Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans … no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about its own populace.

For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.

It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, legalized sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, demilitarized Canadian education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training) … and oh ya a new flag.

The Canadian flag, adopted in 1964 … which the very year should be a “red flag”. Is in fact, an American flag. It is the symbol of America’s diplomatic and espionage victories over the British Empire and its final conquest of Canada.

Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did) … was ripped out in the course of a decade … quite intentionally and by design.

Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.

To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart … I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.)

And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable … the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.

The mottoes on the posters: “Obey/ the Law/ Follow/ Duty”, “One God/ One King/ One Flag/ One Fleet”, “Love God and Honour the King”

This was immediately ripped out by State Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.

How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the three institutions of Church, Militia Armoury, and the old-style High School ruthlessly enforcing standards … More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country … How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?

How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of its population’s very eyes … without resistance and without protest?

Well that’s the problem that was solved here.

Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.

Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society” … These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).

However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.

Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.

“Monument to Multiculturalism”. Toronto. Erected 1985. (The “Monument” can be interpreted two ways … the man and doves working together to build a unified world … or the man is unwittingly cooperating in his own caging and enslavement)

Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.

Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.

July 26, 2026

QotD: Progressives know they’re on the “right side of history”

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

You want to know why the Left is so awful? They have no sense of history. Total ignorance would be sufficient, but the Left, as always, really goes the extra mile (so long as “going the extra mile” entails “patting yourself on the back”) — they think they have an exquisite knowledge of history. This is partly a holdover from Karl Marx, who thought his sub-Hegelian junk philosophy was not just a science, but THE Science — The Science of History. More than that, they’re certain that History is moral, that it has “sides”, and they’re on The Right Side of History.

Whatever happens, then, happens either exactly as they foretold — even if they never bothered to actually prophesy, or to even think about it at all until just this second — or is a temporary victory by the forces of evil, a temporarily successful holding action against the inevitable Triumph of Progress.

It’s a fascinating chicken-and-egg conundrum: Did the Left take to Marxism because they’re so invincibly self-righteous, or does their sanctimoniousness come from their dedication to Marxism? It doesn’t really matter, because the practical effect is the same either way: Their consciences are completely short-circuited. They can do the most awful stuff with a smile on their faces, because “awful” is relative, comrade – as you’d know if you had the proper proletarian consciousness; if you understood things from History’s perspective, as they do.

Severian, “Escriva Ch.8: Examination of Conscience”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-26.

July 25, 2026

Modern careers – the permanent protest class

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

Although L. Wayne Mathison mentions this as a Canadian phenomenon, I believe it’s endemic to the Anglosphere and probably all of the former “first world” democracies:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

After watching this, my takeaway is simple: Canada has developed a small, permanent protest class that moves from cause to cause, looking for confrontation, attention and social-media status.

These people are not trying to persuade anyone. They want to control the space, silence opponents and punish anyone who records what they are doing. The cause changes. The tactics do not.

There are extremists on both sides, but the organized activist left has become especially comfortable deciding who is allowed to speak, report or even stand in a public place. Too often, well-funded NGOs and unions provide the money, organization, legitimacy and political cover that keep this protest machine running.

Politicians, journalists and institutions then excuse the behaviour because they sympathize with the slogan on the sign.

A democracy cannot survive on selective free speech. Protest is a right. Intimidation, harassment and mob rule are not.

July 18, 2026

QotD: Britain’s National Trust wants to eliminate the “outdated mansion experience”

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Think of the National Trust, and what probably comes to mind is an image of a middle-aged, middle-class couple pottering round a neo-classical pile built at vast expense by a spendthrift earl in the 18th century, and then surrendered to the Nation in lieu of inheritance tax sometime in the late 1940s. After all, its purpose is surely to preserve historically significant houses and gardens for the enjoyment and education of the general public.

Well, it seems not. Seek out the National Trust’s Strategy to 2025, and the first words you read are: “Our 21st-century ambition is to meet the needs of an environment under pressure, and the challenges and expectations of a fast-moving world … Underpinning this is our renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion and playing our part to create a fair, equal society, free from discrimination.”

In their “10-year Vision”, written in the same hideous identikit jargon, they talk about a “revolutionary” move away from the “outdated mansion experience”. The Trust provides little evidence that stately homes are becoming less popular; reading between the lines the main problem that the Vision’s authors seem to have with the English country house is that it is old and traditional and popular with comfortably-off white people.

I don’t particularly want to get stuck into the National Trust. But they do provide a particularly interesting example of a problem afflicting institutions in modern Britain, namely the relentless politicisation of parts of life which should represent an escape from politics.

Niall Gooch, “What is the point of the National Trust?”, UnHerd, 2020-10-19.

July 16, 2026

“Banned” book library in a Portuguese bookshop

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

Most people are at least a bit uncomfortable with censorship, at least when the censors get into the swing of things and start banning ordinary books and authors. I had to check Wikipedia to find out who Dua Lipa might be as I hadn’t heard of her before, so the name popping up in headlines about her bold anti-censorship actions didn’t tell me much. I think I’m safe in assuming that Ms. Lipa is fully read-in on all the fashionable concerns of the celebrity set, so it’ll be easy to predict the works her library will feature:

The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of “banned” books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.

For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).

Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. “The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection” would make a funny meme — as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey — but it would likely not be much of a career boost.

And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.

Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc.), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).

Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: “The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices.”

What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.

This is most notable in the “Voice” section, which, we’re told, “amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented”.

Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the woke era of radical Leftism, aggressive conformity and cancel culture.

Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism — a hostile force attacking it from the outside.

And as the “banned” book library is in Portugal, I’m including Larry Correia’s comments on the issue (he still counts as “Portuguese”, right?)

Since I’m still getting barked at by pearl clutching weirdos about my comment yesterday about “banned books” everybody with a functioning brain knows that just because parents don’t want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing liberal authors to stock public school libraries with torture porn, and the book is still legally available literally everywhere else books are sold, means that book is not “banned”.

And most “banned” book displays are just left wing virtue signaling for marketing purposes. Like most liberal causes its a fake ass moralizing narrative disconnected from reality where they get to play the victim and the rest of us are bullies.

Manhattan publishing LOVES when the school board in Somnambulant Iowa says they don’t want to spend their limited budget buying copies of The Illustrated Guide To Fisting for Trans Middle Schoolers, because that’s great marketing and all the blue haired weirdos are now religiously mandated to go buy a copy to stick it to the chuds.

Libs tried their best to get writers like me booted out of everything, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before you see any of us showing up on any of these banned books displays, and we all know it.

Stephen King was lying his ass off about how that particular novella collection was all about “friendship” or WTF ever he claimed. The friendship story has prison rape as a subplot, but the real issue was the story about an escaped Nazi war criminal teaching an American teenager about the joys of rape, torture, and murder.

As you can imagine some parents get hesitant about giving stuff like that to their kids … just like Stephen King himself did when he banned his own school shooting book, Rage. But it was okay when he did it.

If a school board said they didn’t want to buy one of my books because they thought it was too violent for kids, I’d say, okay, cool. Not being a dishonest histrionic dork, I recognize that’s their choice, and not being in that one collection does not in any way make my book “banned”.

The book in question is still available in every store, can be ordered online, and is in most public library systems. No law is broken if you possess it or share it. But to a liberal NOT buying their shit with tax dollars to give to children (even if their parents think it is inappropriate) is the gravest sin imaginable and you are all basically nazis.

Well, except for Graham Platner obviously. Stephen King says he’s alright.

This is why so many of the kids are not “alright”

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

An interesting discussion at the social media site formerly known as Twitter, as Devon Eriksen responds to a comment from Stephen Fleming:

But don’t you understand?

There was a way. There was always a way.

We had it within our grasp, because we had already grasped it. The childhoods that you and your daughter had were available because you and your daughter had them.

All that the Boomers, and their parents, the eldest of the post WW2 generations, had to do was …

Nothing.

Just live in the paradise that their ancestors won for them, and make the minimum, the bare minimum, of effort that would have been required to actually sustain it.

That’s all.

Just keep things the way they were.

But they couldn’t handle that. Their fathers and grandfathers, the heroes that won WW2, made them jealous.

They wanted to be heroes, too.

So, for the sake of their own egos, they had to become Social Justice Warriors. They had to be Champions of Progress and Change.

They had to see the world they inherited as a pile of problems to be solved, rather than a pile of solutions to be cherished and preserved.

So they could feel like they were doing something important.

Almost all of the elder generations, even the ones who call themselves conservative and vote republican, are, in truth, socialist liberal progressives. Because they looked at paradise, and wanted to fix it instead of protect it.

That’s why the “republican” option was Reagan, the gun-ban guy, the social-welfare guy, the kiss-up-to-the-commies guy, the amnesty-for-foreign-invaders guy.

Reagan, the Hollywood liberal, the Obama of the 80s, instead of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan.

Teens can’t have a summer job because elders had to be Third-World Compassion Heroes, and give us Hart-Cellar and eleventy-billion barbarians who don’t care about civilization, but will work cheap.

Teens can’t have a car because elders had to be Climate Emergency Heroes and give us emissions control laws and Cash for Clunkers.

Teens can’t have safe schools to learn at, because elders had to Anti-Racist Heroes and made it illegal to exclude violent thugs from our school districts. Just because those thugs generally come color-coded for your convenience.

Teens can’t have safe public spaces to hang out in, because elders had to be Compassion for the Underclass Heroes, and release violent savages into society, again and again, with a lecture and a slap on the wrist.

Teens can’t have a healthy economy to inherit, because elders had to be Equality Heroes and make sure every corporation that actually did anything useful was punished for not being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive enough to suit the ideal universe that exists only in their heads.

Teens can’t have dates, because elders had to be Anti-Sexist Heroes, and let feminists spend forty years diminishing the social value of men, until you had to a be a billionaire rockstar adventurer to avoid being an unsexy loser by default.

Teens can’t even be fit, healthy, and pretty, because elders had to be Sex Equality Heroes, and move women into the corporate workforce in droves, leaving children to be fed by corporate industrial slop factories.

Teens can’t have sane, well-adjusted, unspoiled girlfriends and wives, because elders had to be Champions of Sexual Freedom, and normalize unlimited female promiscuity, all in exchange for the largely unfulfilled promise of a little unshaven free-love yeti snatch.

And worst, of all, the crowning irony, the final dead hamster in the water pipe, is that all of this would be fixable, perhaps in three to five election cycles …

Except.

Except the elders don’t understand that any of this of this is happening.

They haven’t had a child in the household since 1997. They haven’t looked for an entry-level job since 1973. They haven’t gone on a date since 1981. They haven’t been laid off … ever.

They are safe with their paid-off houses and their investments and their pensions from 45 years at the same company and their social security and their medical plans.

It’s affecting the youngest generations first and worst. While the elders sit on their cruise ship, surveying the short with binoculars, wondering who all these ragged distressed looking people standing on the shore are.

And why they are holding signs that say “HELP”, “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT”, and “YOU STOLE THE LIFE I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE”.

Then they shrug, conclude that these must be the whiny losers, and everyone further inland is probably just fine, and everything is fine, because they fixed everything and they are all heroes, and the Summer of Love was the end of the Problematic Era of History and the beginning of the Great Enlightenment.

And when I am 74 years old, and the elders are all safely tucked into their cemetery plots, I will be torn apart by an angry mob for having white hair, and therefore being “one of them”.

And the mob will not care that I didn’t get to cast a vote until 1992, for the Man Who Predicted All Of This.

He called it the “giant sucking sound”.

Which is apt because it’s why everything sucks now.

July 14, 2026

QotD: Subaltern Studies

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Thinking more about the Stupid Smart Guy, I took a quick peek at Salon.com, because nobody is dumber than a Salon writer … and no one thinks he’s smarter. Fully acknowledging it’s sufficient to say “Dunning-Krugerrand: The Website” and move on, nonetheless I persisted, and I came up with a theory I want to run by y’all: The Left are externalizers.

You can come at this in a few different ways. In the History biz, a big buzzword used to be “agency”. Not as in “three letter”, but as in “ability to meaningfully affect your environment”. One has “agency” insofar as one is able to get one’s way. It’s a big deal in the ivory tower, because if the grand sweep of History since the Middle Ages tells us anything, it’s that White guys tend to get their way, while brown guys do not. There are entire continents (and Subcontinents) full of millions of people, run by a handful of honkies.

Obviously that’s very very bad for them … but very very good for you if you want tenure, providing you can find some way to prove that the honkies weren’t really in charge. Subaltern Studies, for instance, is a field where, at its worst, literally anything a brown person does, or doesn’t do, is an example of “agency”, because it’s an example of “resistance” — doing exactly what Whitey says is really sticking it to Whitey, because extremely dense polysyllabic theory-laden reasons.

The stated goal of all this being, to give “agency” to the subaltern. But that’s the funny thing: While explaining at enormous length why “doing exactly what Whitey says” is somehow “resistance”, these folks were in fact acknowledging the massive agency — no quotation marks — of the British. They said “Jump, frog!” and seven hundred fifty million people asked “How high?” There’s only so much jargon can do to disguise that basic power dynamic, which is why “Subaltern Studies” isn’t the hot new thing anymore.

Severian, “Externalizing”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-14.

July 13, 2026

Teddy Roosevelt versus the “Robber Barons” of the Gilded Age

Filed under: Business, Government, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Coolidge Review, Burton W. Folsom, Jr. outlines the way President Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressives tried to rein in the wealthy industrialists who had helped create the Gilded Age:

Theodore Roosevelt looks on with glee as his commerce secretary puts the screws to trusts.
(Puck magazine, Alamy Stock Photo, via The Coolidge Review)

The early twentieth century marked the height of the progressive movement, which sought to check the power of free markets and business. To understand what progressives did in the early 1900s, we need to understand what happened in the late 1800s, the period often called the Gilded Age.

After the Civil War, the United States experienced spectacular economic growth. The industries leading the way included railroads, oil, and steel. This expansion made the United States a global economic power. The profits of those businesses enriched the wealthiest — and the average American. That’s in part because bigger, more efficient businesses can offer cheaper prices. Between 1870 and 1880, for example, railroad freight prices fell by half. By 1890, they had fallen by half again. And by 1900, they had been cut nearly in half once more.

Similar advances occurred in many other industries. In the Gilded Age the United States saw perhaps the greatest burst of invention and economic development any country has ever experienced.

[…]

Progressives relied on three tools to restrain business.

The first was the Sherman Antitrust Act. Passed in 1890, this law was used sparingly for a decade. Government enforcement proved difficult in part because the act’s language was vague: the Sherman Act outlawed any contract or “combination” in “restraint of trade or commerce”. In 1895 the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the law narrowly. In a case involving a sugar-refining business, the Court held that the Sherman Act did not apply to manufacturing. Theodore Roosevelt later wrote in his autobiography that the ruling produced “governmental impotence”.

But soon after entering the White House in 1901, Roosevelt seized on the Sherman Act to engage in “trust busting”. He directed the Justice Department to dissolve the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company that Hill had created. This time, the Supreme Court upheld the government’s intervention. Referring to the 1895 ruling, Roosevelt crowed, “This decision I caused to be annulled by the court that had rendered it”, giving the federal government the power “to deal effectively with the trusts”. Roosevelt’s Justice Department soon targeted Standard Oil, which was eventually broken into thirty-four separate companies.

The second tool progressives used against business was the Interstate Commerce Commission. Although railroad rates had declined dramatically for decades, progressives objected to the way those rates were structured. Railroads tended to give the largest discounts to customers that transported the most goods. The railroads still profited from these volume discounts, and smaller customers still paid much lower rates than they had earlier. But progressives argued that it was unjust for smaller shippers to pay higher rates than larger businesses.

In his 1905 annual message to Congress, President Roosevelt demanded legislation to put “a complete stop to rebates in every shape and form”. The 1906 Hepburn Act accomplished that goal. The law was expanded to give the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to inspect railroads’ financial records, eliminate targeted rebates, and set “just and reasonable” rates. In other words, the federal government now had significant pricing power over railroads, America’s largest business sector.

The progressives’ third tool was the federal income tax. In 1909 Congress approved the resolution for a constitutional amendment to establish an income tax. The Sixteenth Amendment took effect in 1913, after three-quarters of the states had ratified it. That was the year Coolidge was elected president of the Massachusetts State Senate.

From the beginning, the tax system was progressive, imposing higher rates on larger incomes. In 1913 most Americans paid no federal income taxes, while the top marginal rate — for income exceeding the equivalent of $16 million in 2026 dollars — was only 7 percent. But within five years, tax rates had soared, with the top bracket paying 77 percent.

A Fair Reading of The Camp of the Saints

Filed under: Books, France, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Feral Historian
Published 10 Jul 2026

Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints has gone from obscurity to infamy in recent years, drawing condemnation for its highly … unflattering depiction of third-worlders. Much of this condemnation comes from people who haven’t read it, or gave it only a shallow and cursory read. But if we let the book speak for itself it can be quite insightful at times, and the true target of its scorn becomes brutally evident.

Rather than use politically-charged b-roll, it’s all hiking shots this time. Mostly to cover some edits. This is a great one for those who listen to these on the commute. Or the commode as the case may be.

00:00 Intro
01:03 The Story
14:22 Escalation Curve
17:38 Hamadura and “Whiteness”
22:05 Culture and Ethnicity
26:33 Why so Serious?
30:09 The End of a World
34:14 Your Virtual Right-Wing Uncle
35:48 A “Martian” Perspective

🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
🔹 and Merch! | feral-shop.fourthwall.com
🔹 Oh, and book 2 of Stellar Drift is out. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GTVXK4CN

July 10, 2026

The EU’s stratégie “antiracisme”

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

The media has been pushing the narrative of a huge rising tide of racism and white supremacy, even as those ideas had been steadily losing influence and popularity. European and western governments generally have been doing their part to keep racism alive by importing as many unassimilable young men of military age and setting them loose upon the native population. Something’s got to give:

It has been proven. The narrative of systemic racism and “white supremacy” was completely fabricated by the media and activists since 2010. It’s undeniable.

Ask yourself this: have you ever come across, among your friends, your family, or your colleagues, someone who calls themselves a white supremacist and wants to “restore the purity of the white race”?

No. It doesn’t exist. It might have been a marginal fantasy in the past. Today, it’s a media construct to justify division and ideology.

The post I made that Elon Musk reposted yesterday proves it perfectly.

This European strategy isn’t going to “fight racism”. It’s going to create the perfect breeding ground for grooming gangs to spread everywhere in Europe, including France.

Reminder: in the UK, thousands of underage girls were raped, drugged, and sexually exploited by networks (often Pakistani) in Rotherham, Rochdale, and elsewhere. The cops, social services, and elected officials let the most horrific abuses slide for years … because they were afraid of being labeled racists. They chose to sacrifice young girls rather than “stigmatize” a community.

This is exactly the mechanism that Brussels is now rolling out across the board:

– Denial of anti-white racism
– Definition of “structural racism” without perpetrators or intent (so everyone is suspect by default)
– 3.6 billion euros in public money to anti-racist NGOs
– Training for civil servants to detect “racial bias” everywhere

Result: police officers and agents paralyzed by the fear of being called racists. They’ll hesitate even more to act in certain neighborhoods or against certain groups.

In France, this ideology has already been carried by associations like Touche pas à mon pote and others of the same ilk. Instead of promoting integration and unity, they’ve created division by exploiting minorities for political ends.

Antiracism as it’s practiced today is racism. It divides people by skin color, protects real problems, and criminalizes those who dare to name the facts.

What needs to be done: stop dividing. Stop multiplying associations that exploit minorities to sow discord. Go back to true equality: judge actions, not origins. Protect victims without ideological taboos.

If this strategy passes, we won’t have “small” problems.

We’ll have grooming gangs on steroids across all of Europe.

That’s the price of this madness.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

QotD: Modern conspiracy theories

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

Probably the most important part of the modern conspiracy theory is that it must flatter the person obsessed with it. For the conspiracy buff, the thrill is in feeling that they have figured it all out. Those super-intelligent people working in the shadows were not smart enough to outwit the conspiracy hunter. Everyone else falls for the official story, but the conspiracy theorist knows the real truth. Paradoxically, the conspiracy theory makes the world a much simpler and safer place for them.

The best example right now is the Left’s obsession with white supremacy. They cannot accept that their vision of Utopia is not very popular. That’s the first step in a conspiracy theory, the rejection of the most plausible reason. That allows them to spin wild tales of secret Nazis and spectral supremacists. Rather than confront reality, which is frightening and disconcerting, they have created a series of conspiracy theories to explain why the world is not as they imagine it.

This is why conspiracy theories are a useful metric to gauge social trust. When order begins to break down, people naturally look for reasons. That opens the door to speculation and then conspiracy theories. This, in turn, erodes social trust, which is the foundation upon which every ruling class rests. As that foundation falters, the ruling class looks for reasons. Since blaming themselves is always off the table, they naturally begin to speculate, which opens the door to conspiracy theories.

The Z Man, “Conspiratorial Rule”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-01.

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