Quotulatiousness

February 12, 2026

QotD: Books for children written for “the narrative” instead of for children

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

Children can spot books written by adults for other adults a mile away — when I read bedtime stories to my son, I always notice when he loses interest. And almost all products of the modern children’s entertainment industry are so freighted with issues and role models, and ingratiating attempts to be cool, that escape velocity cannot be reached.

C.S. Lewis, the master of escapist fiction, was prophetic in warning against such noxious paternalism from authors. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive”, he wrote. “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Let’s hope Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who has been tapped up to direct the next year’s Chronicles of Narnia series, is taking note.

In the meantime, we have the books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published 75 years ago today. When I read this to my son, it transfixed him in a way that all those morally improving Disney and Pixar movies could not — and in a way that I recognised too from my own childhood. The Narnia books are weird and archaic and they are far from comforting. But they leave unanswerable questions and imaginative territory to roam for a lifetime.

What would compel a child to climb into a claustrophobic wardrobe, full of moth-eaten coats and spiders, as apt a symbol as any for the human psyche? C.S. Lewis knew all too well. There are real and terrible things to escape from. And the land of magic, mystery and hope that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy arrived in would soon reveal that it too was blighted. By facing up to this, conquering its climate of terror, the child would become an adult. If they didn’t pass into the dark and through it, they would remain infantilised.

This partly explains the backlash against Lewis. Two years ago, it was reported that the Government’s counter-terrorism unit, Prevent, had classified his works along with some by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien as potentially leading to “radicalisation”: the kind of wormtongue deception worthy of the villains of Narnia or Middle Earth. It demonstrates that, at its best, fantasy can be the mirror that shows us who we are and what we’ve become. But then, there is a long history of people taking leave of their senses when it comes to Narnia. The books have been banned in the US for being both too Christian and not Christian enough. One critic ranked the books (with delicious venom) as worse than 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf. Being shot by all sides might indicate a writer is on the right track.

For his part, Lewis lambasted “those who do not wish children to be frightened […] Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” He knew of the existence of shadows from early in life. There is a spine-chilling passage in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, in which he recalls waking up one night with toothache when he was 10. He called out his mother’s name and she did not come. She was dying in another room. His father was never the same and sent Lewis off to a boarding school run by a deranged sadist. “With my mother’s death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”

As a result, Lewis developed a fear and mistrust of the adult world in those years — and it was well-placed. Scarcely more than a boy, Lewis was sent to the trenches. He was seriously injured in the Battle of Arras (he would have shrapnel, from a shell that obliterated a colleague, embedded permanently in his body) and, like Tolkien, he watched many of his friends die. “One cannot help wondering why,” he wrote to his father.

Darran Anderson, “Save Narnia from the woke witch”, UnHerd, 2025-10-15.

Update, 13 February: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

February 6, 2026

This is the right way to sell Western separatism to Eastern Liberal voters

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Paul Mitchell explains to Ontario and Quebec Liberals why they should be fully supportive of kicking Alberta (and maybe Saskatchewan) out of Confederation to ensure a 100% Liberal-dominated Canada in perpetuity:

Please share this for progressive Canadians back East …

Greetings progressive Easterners. I have noticed that some of you are quite upset and even enraged by the current quest of many Albertans to have Alberta leave Canada.

Now hear me out.

If you consider it, you’re taking this all wrong. Consider the progressive utopian paradise that Canada could be if “polluting”, “knuckle-dragging”, “bigoted”, “backward” conservative Alberta was gone! I mean, that is what you think about us, right? I see those descriptions of us every day on social media, so imagine how great it’ll be for y’all once we’re no longer holding back your progressive goals and dreams!

With Alberta gone (maybe with Saskatchewan too if you’re lucky) there will be no stopping your heart’s most desired policies from coming true. Without us there could be:

✅ unlimited diversity and immigration
✅ true Net Zero with heavy taxes for CO2 emissions
✅ collective rights over individual rights
✅ severe hate speech laws
✅ gun confiscation
✅ almost no more conservative politicians

All this and much more can be yours for the low price of zero dollars. Just let us Albertans ride off into the sunset and your dreams will become reality.

So, turn that frown upside down!

Contemplate your amazing future without Albertans bumming you out constantly. There’s no need to be upset about Alberta’s independence petition. You’re going to get what you said you always wanted: a country where progressives will be in charge, forever.

That is what you want, right?

Thanks for your kind attention, and future support for Alberta’s independence from Canada.

Fortunately for me, I have relatives in Alberta so I’d have a chance of being accepted as a refugee from remnant Canada …

February 4, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 1, 2026

Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter reacts to an Australian race-grievance grifter “Race Discrimination Commissioner” bloviating talking about Australia as “stolen land”:

The implicit meaning of this framing is that Anglos stole the land so it’s only fair for them to give hundreds of millions of Hindoids the opportunity to steal the land.

Revealed preference demonstrates this. If he believes the land is stolen, and he believes theft is morally wrong, then he would not accept a salary of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Australian government (this is blood money), and he wouldn’t live in Australia.

Since he doesn’t do either of those things, he either doesn’t believe what he’s saying, or he does but he doesn’t think theft is bad, in which case he’s simply trying to emotionally manipulate white Australians by using their own morality against them in order to guilt them into continuing to allow him and people like him to parasitize the Australian people.

He then elaborates:

It really cannot be emphasized enough how dishonest all of this is.

America stole land from the natives, purchased some African farm equipment, and has always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “open the borders and give us your country”.

Canada is built on stolen land, sent some kids to boarding school, and has also always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “Let my people in, saar”.

Australia, same narrative as Canada.

New Zealand, same as Australia.

Britain did an imperialism, therefore “your country belongs to us now, saar”.

France, same as England.

Spain, same as France.

Ireland never had an empire and hasn’t had slaves since the Viking Age, and indeed was itself colonized by England … therefore Ireland must accept unlimited migration in solidarity with other post-colonial countries.

Germany was too mean to Jews for a few years, therefore Germans must abolish themselves and give their country to North Africans.

The only peoples the Swedes ever conquered or enslaved were neighbouring Europeans, but Sweden might have sold some iron that might have gotten used on some slave ships a few centuries ago, therefore must open its borders to Bomalians and give them all the rape toys they can penetrate.

The justification differs, but the conclusion is always the same: open borders and ethnic replacement.

The uniformity of the repugnant conclusion indicates that these narratives are formed by reasoning back from that tendentious repugnance, with the arguments tailored to national conditions using whatever specific historical circumstances are handy, with the intent of emotionally manipulating native populations into laying down their arms, foregoing resistance, and placidly accepting the loss of their countries to the hundreds of millions of third-worlders intent on flooding every developed white country on the planet.

The people making these arguments don’t believe a word that they say. Their seething resentment for Europeans is entirely real, but this is almost entirely an inferiority complex, humiliation at having been so easily conquered and then taught to eat and wipe with something other than their hands. They don’t believe that slavery or conquest are wrong: if they did, they wouldn’t still practice slavery, and they wouldn’t be trying to conquer the West in the guise of beggars, by shamelessly playing to our pity and misplaced guilt. They say these things in order to trick you by playing on a conscience they don’t have themselves. It’s a sales tactic, and they’re selling you annihilation.

QotD: Don’t bother accusing progressives of hypocrisy … that’s a “category error”

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

We have to start, I think, by rejecting the Donatist heresy. As usual I’m framing this discussion in Catholic terms because it’s easier to mesh up the discussion with Escriva that way, but you don’t have to be a theologian to see that Clown World has given itself entirely over to a version of Donatism:

    Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.

Donatists Democrats are the real racists, amirite? In Clown World, hypocrisy is a category error:

    Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform. In moral psychology, it is the failure to follow one’s own expressed moral rules and principles. According to British political philosopher David Runciman, “Other kinds of hypocritical deception include claims to knowledge that one lacks, claims to a consistency that one cannot sustain, claims to a loyalty that one does not possess, claims to an identity that one does not hold”. American political journalist Michael Gerson says that political hypocrisy is “the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit”.

The underlying assumption here is that there exists a standard outside of oneself. What SJW believes that? If you want a learned citation for it, get our main man Marcus Aurelius back up in here: Of each particular thing ask, what is it in itself? What is its nature?1

SJWs are nihilists. Hypocrisy requires an external standard, and they don’t have one. All they have is their self — which they hate, and long to extinguish, along with everything else that reminds them of their hated, hateful self. Their every thought, word, and deed aims only at that — extinction — whether they recognize it or not.

In practice, then, SJW “hypocrisy” is a tool, a tactic — a really valuable one. They want to kick down some pillar of ambient civilization. And they’ve got all the time in the world to do it, because while they’re just getting on with it, their putative “opponents” are shrieking about hypocrisy! Often with some blather about “Chesterton’s Fence” or similar for good measure.

That’s Donatism, PoMo version. “If you’re going to tear down the fence, first you must explain how it got there, and what it was supposed to do, and then what you’ll be replacing it with.” No. Category error. They don’t care. They have never cared. The fence isn’t the point. Neither is the fence’s replacement, or whatever might be behind the fence, or anything else. They’ve never given any of that a second’s thought, because destruction is the point.

It’s the only point. Always. They have no other.

Thus we must reject Donatism. It doesn’t matter how flawed your “priest” is. The work is bigger than the man. The work transcends the man.

Severian, “The Way, Chapter 2: Guidance”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-01.

  1. A PoMo in joke. That’s not Aurelius, it’s Hannibal Lecter. But it’s an accurate paraphrase of Aurelius. Can you believe there was once a time when a bestselling thriller could make an allusion to Marcus Aurelius a small but important plot point? That time was 1988, for the record.

January 31, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it is with humans.

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

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

Kurt Vonnegut was a dreamer.

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

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

Because economic incentives alone cannot hold a society together.

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

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

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

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

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

A slave has no granfalloon.

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

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

You need it for breathing.

Try removing the skin of a SCUBA tank.

A new homily from Saint Hillary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update, 2 February: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

La trahison des comédiens (The treason of the comedians)

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

In the above-the-fold portion of this post, Andrew Doyle points out that it’s the comedians who should be leading the charge to ridicule the excesses of the powerful, yet they shrink from their cultural duties and avoid offending those who most need to be taunted:

Holly Valance is an unlikely satirist. Yet the pop singer’s latest track, “Kiss Kiss (XX) My Arse”, takes aim directly at the pretence that human beings can change sex, and that a man need only declare himself a woman for it to be true. Upon its release the song immediately reached the top of the iTunes bestsellers chart, only to be swiftly deleted by Apple Music. Valance had committed the cardinal sin of ridiculing the establishment.

The song is based on Valance’s 2002 number one hit “Kiss Kiss”, now reworked with new lyrics for Pauline Hanson’s animated satire A Super Progressive Movie. This is the song’s opening verse:

    They say that I’m a he but I’m a she,
    Cos I gotta V and not a D,
    And I don’t care what people say,
    I’ll never be a him or them or they.

Unsubtle? Perhaps. But let’s not forget that its target is the least subtle ideology that has ever been birthed. This is satirical mimesis; the essence of parody. For Apple Music to delete the track (only to reinstate it after multiple news outlets drew attention to the deletion) surely proves Hannah Arendt’s point that the “greatest enemy of authority” is “contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter”.

It is an indictment of the state of the comedy industry that pop singers are left to do the work of comedians. Television panel shows are now bland affairs thanks to the sheer lack of courage on display. The woke movement represents one of the most authoritarian, intolerant and illiberal developments in the recent western world. It demands conformity, peddles fantasy at the expense of truth, and punishes freethinkers. And yet most of today’s comedians are eager to prop it up rather than see it tumble.

They are called “regime comedians” for good reason. They have willingly turned themselves into cheerleaders for the powerful, bolstering those who have bullishly set the agenda, or – as the satirist Chris Morris once put it – “doing some kind of exotic display for the court”. It is a great shame that so many of Morris’s former collaborators now fall squarely into this category.

To put this cowardice into perspective, consider the example of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Just one year before he was gunned down by Islamic terrorists, the cartoonist and editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), was profiled in Le Monde. Was he not worried, the interviewer asked, about possible reprisals for drawing cartoons of Mohammed? For his answer, he paraphrased the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata: “I would rather die standing than live on my knees”.

If a man like Charb refused to back down from criticising an oppressive ideology – in spite of the death threats he received on a daily basis – why is it that so many of our comedians are too afraid to tackle the woke? These activists may talk tough online, but in real life they are about as intimidating as a sea sponge. While the impulse to preserve a mainstream career is understandable, it does suggest a lack of genuine vocation if that means ignoring the target that is most in need of skewering.

January 27, 2026

Minneapolis – protest, insurrection, or massive distraction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 26, 2026

QotD: Twitter isn’t life … it’s far more important than that

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

[Progressives] did it in two stages. First, they convinced us that process and outcome are the same thing … and when the chips are down, process is better than outcome. Everyone knows the old saying “Those who can’t do, teach”. It was originally coined to make fun of this tendency, but look how that worked out. At the conceptual level, the Left wins because they make moral arguments, but at the practical level, how do they win?

Because they talk. Constantly. They never, ever shut up. Most Leftists in my life — and in yours too, I guarantee — never do anything. We all know that the Left take zero interest in their communities. They don’t donate to charity. Let’s say one of those late April blizzards hits and their driveway is snowed in. While everyone else is breaking out the shovels one last time, the Leftist’s natural impulse is to jump on Twitter and start petitioning Congress for some giant, trillion-dollar snow removal bill. It has to have set-asides for Diversity quotas, of course, and isn’t the word “removal” triggering? And so forth, until the snow melts. Hey, problem solved!

I’m kidding, but I’m not joking. Leftists are process people par excellence. Even Stalin won that way, 99% of the time — even though he could have had the entire Politburo shot with a snap of his fingers, he got his way by grinding them down, meeting after meeting after endless meeting. Yes, eventually someone has to actually do something, but that someone isn’t going to be them; it’ll be some toady somewhere, who is only working as hard as he has to in order to get promoted up the totem pole, so that he’s the one in meeting after endless meeting, forever discussing, never doing.

This reaches its apotheosis (apocolocyntosis!) in Twitter, and do you see what I mean? For the Left, tweeting about something is exactly the same as, if not better than, actually doing anything about it. Look around: we’re about to get into WWIII because of this. And speaking of missiles flying, we’ve all remarked on the Left’s signature “fire and forget” policy approach. To them, words are magic — healthcare, for instance, is now Affordable. How can it not be? It says “Affordable Care Act“, right there in the title! Don’t start in with your facts and figures, please — it’s Affordable, damn it! What part of “Affordable Care Act” don’t you understand?

He who talks the loudest and longest, therefore, is the purest.

Combine that with the second step for maximum effect: Emotional incontinence. Just as talking is the same as (better than!) doing, so emotion equals competence. She who feeeeeeels the strongest about an issue wins. This, too, has been obvious for a long time, so much so that Jonah Goldberg, of all people, had a good bit on it back when he was still somewhat convincingly playing a conservative. He joked about how stupid it was to be preoccupied with caring in practical life. Who would you rather have cut that tumor out, your best buddy — who really, really, really cares — or a brain surgeon? Even an utterly dispassionate one, to whom you are nothing more than a slab of meat?

Again, and always: see Twitter. Maximum talk, maximum hysteria, always. I’m belaboring this because in our tabloid-culture society, the identification is complete: The all-talk hysteric is the brahmin; screaming about how much you care just IS morality. Never mind that your caring affects nothing in the best case scenario; worst case it ends up killing people (e.g. the Blue Checkmarks tweeting us into WWIII).

Severian, “Intro to The Way“, Founding Questions, 2022-04-17.

January 25, 2026

Mythologizing Australia’s “noble savages”

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

On Substack, Celina101 provides examples of Australian Aborigine behaviour vastly at odds with the progressive belief in the “noble savage” myths:

For decades a rosy and romanticised narrative has prevailed: pre-contact Aboriginal Australia was a utopian paradise, and British colonists the only villains. Yet, the historical record painstakingly chronicled by scholars like William D. Rubinstein and Keith Windschuttle, tells a far more complex, often brutal story. This article examines how politically charged revisionism has whitewashed practices such as infanticide, cannibalism and endemic violence in traditional Aboriginal societies. It also warns that distorting history for ideology does a disservice to all Australians, especially Anglo-Australians who have been bludgeoned over the head with it.

The Noble Savage in Modern Narrative

Many contemporary accounts frame Aboriginals as the ultimate “noble savages”, a peaceful, egalitarian people living in harmony with nature until the arrival of the cruel evil British colonists. Textbooks, media and some activists repeatedly emphasise colonial wrongs while glossing over pre-contact realities. But historians like William D. Rubinstein challenge this rosy picture. Rubinstein bluntly notes that, in contrast to other civilisations that underwent the Neolithic agricultural revolution, Aboriginal society “failed … to advance in nearly all significant areas of the economy and technology” for 65,000 years. In his words, pre-contact Aboriginal life was “65,000 years of murderous, barbaric savagery“. This harsh summary confronts the myth head-on: it implies that life before colonisation was not idyllic, but marked by entrenched violence and brutality.

The danger of the noble-savage myth, Rubinstein argues, is that it inverts history. By idealising and practically lying [about] Aboriginal society, modern narratives often cast settlers as uniquely evil. In one essay he warns that contemporary inquiries (like Victoria’s Yoorrook Commission) are “defined to ascribe all blame to the impact of colonialism, rather than the persisting deficiencies in traditional Aboriginal society“. Ignoring those “gross, often horrifying, shortcomings” in Aboriginal culture, Rubinstein says, can only produce “findings written in the ink of obfuscation and deception“. In short, to truly understand Australia’s past we must examine it dispassionately, acknowledging human failings on all sides, not just one.

Documented Brutalities in Pre-Contact Society

Early observers and anthropologists left abundant evidence that some pre-colonial Aboriginal practices were brutal by modern standards. The selective amnesia about these practices in progressive narratives is striking. For example, infanticide (the intentional killing of newborns) was a widespread means of population control in traditional Aboriginal tribes. University of Michigan anthropologist Aram Yengoyan estimated that infanticide “could have been as high as 40% to 50% of all births … In actuality [it] probably ranged from 15% to 30% of all births“. In practice, this meant large numbers of healthy babies, especially girls, were deliberately killed to cope with limited resources. Babies up to a few years old who fell ill or were deemed surplus were often strangled or left to die. This grim truth is rarely mentioned in schools or media today. According to Rubinstein, it was “ubiquitous” in Australia prior to Western influence.

Several anthropological accounts describe cannibalism of infants and small children in some regions. For instance, an 19th-century observer on the northern coast reported: “Cannibalism is practised by all natives on the north coast … Only children of tender age – up to about two years old, are considered fit subjects for food, and if they fall ill are often strangled by the old men, cooked, and eaten… Parents eat their own children … young and old, [all] partake of it.” (In this passage, even adults were implicated in rare cases: two lost Europeans were reportedly killed and eaten by a tribe in 1874.) Such accounts are shocking, yet they were recorded by colonial-era missionaries and explorers. Today’s activists tend to dismiss or deny them entirely.

January 20, 2026

Those awful AWFLs

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

On Substack, Rohan Ghostwind responds to a recent New York Times opinion from Michelle Goldberg pretending not to understand why “the right” is against Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFLs):

Michelle Goldberg recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times called “The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women”

Specifically, she talks about the rising contempt for the AWFL: Affluent white female liberal.

The first part of the opinion piece is a play-by-play of the Renee Good situation, pointing out that the right is freaking out about roving bands of Karens.

The part I find interesting is in the final paragraph:

    It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like “White Fragility” seriously. So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy.

Here’s the interesting part: throughout the course of her opinion piece, she touches on White Female Liberal part. Conspicuously missing is the first part of the acronym: affluent.

This is par for the course for an NYT Opinion piece: play into the identity politics aspect while simultaneously downplaying class. This is, of course, a big reason why the Democrats lost ground with working class people during the 2024 election.

[…]

Rob Henderson popularized the term luxury beliefs …

And if it was ever one group of people who embody the most luxury beliefs per capita it would be the AWFL’s.

What makes them uniquely annoying is their persistent refusal to acknowledge how sanctimonious they come across to the rest of the world. As far as they’re concerned, they are the only intelligent and moral group of people, and they will eventually get what they want by scolding everybody else into submission.

People hate this, because people would actually prefer bigotry to infantilization — but the affluent white woman, by virtue of being affluent, never has to reality test her beliefs against the real world.

QotD: The rise of Eugenics

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

The term “eugenics” only entered the lexicon in the 1870s. I want to say it was Francis Galton who coined it. Galton was one of those guys like T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) who made “Darwinism” into a substitute religion. “Eugenics”, then, was another scheme of secular salvation — the “scientific management” of the human population, no different, really, from Marxism in politics or Taylorism in business. That was the Gilded Age for you, but the point is, even though the term “eugenics” was new in 1870-ish, eugenic-type arguments were being made decades before. Antebellum defenders of the “Peculiar Institution”, for instance, made more-Galton-than-Galton arguments all the time: As modern life is inevitably trending towards greater mechanization, financialization, and integration, the human subtypes that can’t biologically handle those conditions will inevitably die out, unless …1

But then a funny thing happened. Twice, actually. The first one was the triumph of the Puritan fanatics in the Unpleasantness of 1861-5. Because they were certified Goodpeople (certified by themselves it goes without saying), and because their worldview triumphed through force of arms, they gave themselves a blanket indulgence to peddle the most repulsive kind of “scientific racism”. They just dropped the “racism” part and doubled down on the “scientific”. They called it first “Darwinism”, then “eugenics”, but the upshot of both was that they gave themselves the right, duty, and of course pleasure of pruning the human garden (to use one of their favorite metaphors).

All those mandatory sterilization laws, the kind of “three strikes and you’re permanently out” crime reduction measures we can only dream of? It wasn’t conservatives pushing those. It was Proggies. Sane deal with the “Fitter Family Contests” that proliferated in the US right up to WWII.

We didn’t get that stuff from [Hitler; he] got it from us.

And that was the second thing, of course — all the Nazis’ nonsense about a “master race” […] They would, could, and did point out that what they were doing was in no way different from the stuff agonizingly self-righteous American Proggies were pushing every single day — as the Nazis saw it, they […] merely had the courage of their convictions. St. Margaret Sanger of the Holy Coat Hook, for instance, looked forward to blacks dying out thanks to her abortion activism. As the Nazis saw it, they were just cutting out the middleman.

Severian, “On Duties”, Founding Questions, 2022-04-07.

  1. Many people made this argument, but Josiah Clark Nott defended it at greatest length, if you’re interested in that odd little branch of American intellectual history. Anthropologists try very hard to be the #wokest people on the planet (even other eggheads find them obnoxious, if you can imagine), so it’s fun to needle them with the history of their field — y’all know the so-called “American School” of anthropology was dedicated almost entirely to justifying slavery, right?

Update, 21 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 18, 2026

QotD: Having zero agency

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

I am not sure I remember too much from my high school philosophy class, other than the lesson that I probably would not be actively pursuing a career in philosophy. But I remember one discussion about displaying one’s rebellious nature by doing the exact opposite of whatever an unfavored person said. The teacher made the point that if you always did the exact opposite of what person X says, then you are just as much ruled by X as any of X’s most cultish followers. In such a case you have completely abdicated your agency to X.

I took the lesson from that, which I still try to follow to this day, that you have to process people’s actions and ideas one by one. Certainly this is not to say that there is no room for trust and reputation. If I have found myself agreeing with someone historically and they have been proved right on certain topics time and again, I am going to give their next statement a lot of credence — but I am still going to mentally challenge it to some extent. And for individuals, this sort of reputational trust can vary by topic. If my wife gives me a read on a person, I am going to assume she is correct; if she opines on navigation issues when we are walking around an unfamiliar city, I am going to treat that with a lot more skepticism.

Most will have guessed where I am going with this — the opposition to Trump has reached this point of zero agency. Smart people I know will mock everything Trump says, even if it is something they would normally agree with or at least entertain. People who are extraordinarily skeptical of all medication suddenly think that concerns about Tylenol during pregnancy are totally absurd. The whole Tylenol story is actually pretty interesting — a Harvard dean’s imprimatur seems to tick the credentialism box that was so prominent in COVID, but a look at the quality of the research and the money involved tends to make one very skeptical. And of course a lot of what RFK says makes me skeptical. The whole story is a really interesting, including appeals-to-authority issues we had during COVID, only with the parties reversed. But no one really looks because if Trump said it, it must be mocked.

Coyote, “On Having Zero Agency”, Coyote Blog, 2025-10-02.

January 15, 2026

“The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation”

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

At Always the Horizon, Copernican discusses the progressive mindset and its complete inability to cope with barbarians (literal and figurative):

In light of recent events, it is important to recognize that a rules-based system can exist only as long as there exists someone to enforce the rules. For a long time, White Westerners have been brow-beaten with an imagined consensus morality where those who are historically hierarchically powerful are also inherently evil. “Those misogynist White rednecks”, etc. That was, according to the rules, the acceptable position to hold.

The rules are enforced by consuming den-mothers who have built around themselves fortresses of bureaucracy and perceived cultural alignment. You have to follow the rules, or you’re a bad person.

Historically, Christianity managed these ideals through Europe and the Holy Roman Empire, where they were considered a moral standard. Enforced through the social order of the time. Having previously attacked Christianity in the late 20th century, the modern Left has proceeded to annihilate that moral grounding. Replacing it with a vague sense of moral relativism and platitudes:

“We think these behaviors and rules are good because everyone agrees, and everyone agrees because we’ve made them as these behaviors and rules are good.”

The tautology of liberal thought. Moral relativism with appeal-to-majority and appeal-to-consensus stacked atop one another. Recent events have demonstrated that even classically liberal political positions cannot be maintained without a strong underlying social and moral framework. Lacking that, liberalism (again, as recently demonstrated) defaults to meaningless tautologies and a feminine urge to “not harm” people who in many circumstances damn well need to be harmed.

The result of this social decay is, of course, a default to basics.

The Barbarians Veto

    Your village or apartment block has been put to flame. Your son is dead, your wife and daughter are being hauled off to god knows where, and a giant of a man with a bloody axe stands before you. Knowing that this is probably your last chance to do anything, you puff up your chest and pronounce: “YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PERSON”.

    The man looks at you like you’re retarded, and then messily separates your prefrontal cortex and cerebellum. The Barbarian doesn’t give a shit what you consider a “good person” to be. He couldn’t care less. What he knows is that the only thing separating the two of you is that he is strong and you are weak. The reason why it is he standing with a bloodied axe and not you, is simply a matter of prowess and luck. If you were strong, you would be doing the same thing to him.

    Do unto others before they do unto you. Do it fast. Do it first. And do it effectively.

The political Left has built its entire philosophical core on minimizing harm and playing the role of victim. The Left is thus completely blind to the barbarians veto. The Left believes there’s some inherent nobility in having your home burnt to the ground and your family murdered. That’s why they pursue with suicidal ideation the opportunity to die for their psychotic religion. Better yet, they zealously pursue the opportunity to get other people to die for their psychotic religion. Leftism is a cult that requires blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of its most zealous supporters.

They fear the strength of the Barbarian, uncompromising, not willing to sacrifice himself, but entirely willing to sacrifice hordes of his unthinking enemies. He does not see himself as a “good person”, but the barbarian sees himself as a “surviving person”. He survives by killing his enemies. His bloodline survives by impregnating his women, whether they want it or not. The Left has no answer to the barbarian, but to submit to his will, and then demand you do so as well.

That’s why they love murderers, cartels, and foreigners, but demand that their own men and sons die bloodily in self-sacrifice to their own cultural enemies. The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation.

Update, 16 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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