Quotulatiousness

April 27, 2026

Tolerance

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort explains why tolerating people who want to kill you is a fatal mistake:

There is no such thing as coexistence in a scenario where people want to murder you.

The side that is the least tolerant of the other, wins. Every time.

Intolerance is the mindset of the victor.

Therefore the leftist ideologue will win in this scenario, barring some renewed resolve.

You see the signs every day.

> Their “politicians” dog whistle for murder and jail
> Their “media” dog whistles for murder and jail
> Their “protestors” will scream DEATH TO TYRANTS at you while you’re fleeing an active assassination attempt against you

You forget, we all seem to forget, that THIS ideology during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, caused people to dig up the bodies of dead nuns for very public desecration.

You can’t comprehend the level of hate that it takes to do something like that. None of us can. But they can.

So they will win, because we tolerate it.

And tolerance is a poisonous virtue when intolerance is pointing a gun at your head.

Tolerance is a noble thing among the civilized. Against the butcher, it is only a prettier name for death. When violence enters the room, tolerance becomes surrender.

We get what we tolerate. And we tolerate everything.

He’s quite right about the exhumation and desecration of the bodies of nuns during the Red Terror in Spain:

Pillaging and desecration of Catholic church institutions by supporters of the Republicans; the corpses of nuns from a monastery in Barcelona were ripped out of graves and displayed on a wall.

Celina wrote about the Red Terror recently.

April 26, 2026

Rightists think leftists are stupid and leftists think rightists are evil

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

Lorenzo Warby discusses political categories and explains why they aren’t the same as moral categories:

A lot of people who class themselves as being on the Left clearly feel that there is some automatic moral kudos from being on the Left. As a direct implication of this sense of moral kudos, they also clearly think that there is some moral deficiency from being on the Right.

Yes, there are difficulties in defining Left and Right. Nevertheless, even without that difficulty, any such claim of moral kudos is ridiculous. The Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il-Sung, Pol Pot, Mengistu … Indeed, by far the most important historical impact of Left politics on world history is precisely the actions of this succession of mass-murdering tyrants and their regimes.

If you think that somehow the Left does not include said mass-murdering tyrants, you are simply wrong. It is very revealing that there are clearly many folk on the Left who somehow edit out this history. They are not looking at the Left as it is in history, but as some set of noble aspirations that morally ennoble themselves.

Folk not of the Left absolutely associate the Left with those mass-murdering tyrants. Moreover, if you edit out that history, you are editing out how the political tradition you identify with can go horribly wrong. That is not a reassuring pattern. On the contrary, it is a deeply worrying pattern.

Of course, if you are happy to be associated with some or all of those mass-murdering tyrants, that is even more of a worry.

Clearly, Left is not a moral category. It is a political category, not a moral one.

The same point applies, of course, about the Right. After all, the Right includes Hitler.

Thus, neither Left nor Right are moral categories. They are political categories, and political categories that people can get very tribal about. But they are not moral categories.

This point applies to other political categories: Socialist, for example. Hitler was a socialist. He called himself a socialist, he did socialist things, intended to do more socialist things after the war. In his writings, he argued in socialist ways.

The aforementioned mass-murdering tyrants were all socialists. They were implementing socialism on the way to communism, except for Hitler, who was using socialism as a tool to forge an Aryan super race worthy and able to dominate others. So, Socialist is not a moral category.

If you stop regarding broad political categories as also being moral categories, a lot of silly arguments go away. Such as, for example, whether Hitler was a socialist. Or, whether Hitler was of the Right. Yes, Hitler was a both a socialist and of the Right—which points to how diverse a range of political traditions Right applies to.

Even when there are grounds to attaching moral valence to political categories, that is something to be done carefully and sparingly, otherwise it can seriously get in the way of understanding.

Thus, using Fascist as a boo! word but Communist as a neutral, or even hurrah! word, is ridiculous. It is even more so when Fascist is used to obscure Nazis being National Socialists.

QotD: College Town, USA

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

Everything human changes, but Nature does not change. That’s “conservatism”, I guess, and for lack of a better term. And that’s what causes Noticing, I’m coming to believe. It’s not that we dislike “change” — that would be as absurd as disliking the seasons. We dislike change qua change; change for change’s sake, and that instinctive distaste for change qua change is why we Notice. We have that sense of Impermanent Permanence, so we can’t help but Notice that today’s Current Thing is the exact opposite of yesterday’s.

It’s not “change” in the sense we understand, and instinctively accept — it’s not “change” in the way the seasons change. It’s directed change — somebody decided to do it. And if it’s not immediately apparent who, or why, we are naturally suspicious. We are “based”, if you will, in the Permanent, so we are acutely aware of the deliberate aspects of the Impermanent.

City life gives you the opposite, indeed overwhelming, sense of Permanent Impermanence. Nothing stays the same; the only constant is change. I remember seeing it in College Town, which was not particularly large, population-wise, but had almost all the “amenities” you’d expect from a major metro. Bearing in mind, as always, that “College Town” is a composite of several different places … but they’re all basically the same, and that’s the point.

The first thing that struck me about College Town — that you see in every College Town, coast to coast — was how shabby it was. Even the brand-new apartment complexes (of which there were many, Higher Ed being a growth industry at that time) all looked dilapidated. The next thing I Noticed was the lack of institutions. College Town had every imaginable “amenity” — exotic cuisine, 24 hour everything — but no playgrounds, no ball fields, no churches. Hardly any schools, despite being pretty good size relative to the surrounding area, because why would there be? All that stuff is for people who actually live there, as opposed to the transients, or even the “permanent residents”, if you will, on the faculty (what an unconsciously telling phrase that is!).

Nobody’s from there, and nobody stays there. Not even the faculty — they always have one foot out the door, no matter if they’re Department Chairs with 30+ years’ seniority. It is crucial to their amour-propre to believe that they’re always about to get the call from Harvard, which in part explains the weird phenomenon of the “faculty ghetto”. They’ll spend a zillion dollars “restoring” a frankly tiny house in the “historic” district, by which is meant “gutting it, and making it as close to a Current Year McMansion as the physical infrastructure can bear”. Then they’ll spend a zillion more on yearly maintenance, when they could’ve gotten twice the house, with the latest and greatest everything, built to spec on the outskirts of town …

… which is five minutes away; it’s not like they’re facing some huge commute (and it’s not like they walk or even bike to campus, and God forbid they take the bus. No, they’d much rather gut or knock down another old building, just to have a garage in which to park the huge gas-guzzling SUV they drive the 45 linear feet to “work”, because how else would they show off how important they are, without parking in their designated space in the one fucking lot in the entire town?).

In other words, they don’t want to admit that they live there — they are, at most, “permanent residents”. There are no public playgrounds, because their one designer baby isn’t going to rub elbows with the children of the few greasy proles they grudgingly tolerate in the absolutely necessary service industries — you know, the mechanics and plumbers and snow plow drivers and such. There are no churches, just one or two Temples of the Current Thing, and only to the extent that a few of them have paraphilias involving clerical vestments. No ball fields, no Cub Scout packs or Elks Lodges or American Legion posts, because c’mon man. A town that size anywhere else would have a Walmart and a Minor League team and a big rivalry game between the local high schools; College Town has head shops and Egyptian-Thai fusion cuisine and DoorDash.

Permanent Impermanence, in other words. Deliberate impermanence. Nothing lasts, nothing can last, nothing should last. There are some people who find that attitude — which I would call straight-out, shit-flinging nihilism — deeply appealing, and … well … there it is.

Severian, “Transience”, Founding Questions, 2026-01-19.

April 23, 2026

The SPLC in the news

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

The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) is in the news this week for unusual reasons — not SPLC lawyers levelling accusations against individuals, elected officials, or corporate leaders, but the SPLC itself being hit with very serious charges from the US DoJ:

For nearly a decade, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville has been portrayed as a defining moral crisis of the Trump era. Across the media and in political speeches, Charlottesville became shorthand for “Trump-era” hate. In his 2019 campaign launch, Joe Biden called Charlottesville “a defining moment for this nation”, describing how “Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis” marched bearing “the fangs of racism”.1

He condemned President Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment. In Biden’s words, the president’s equivocation “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it”, and thus signalled a threat “unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime”.2 Polling at the time showed the public broadly agreed, nearly 60% of voters said Trump had “encouraged” white supremacists by his response, and a majority disapproved of how he handled Charlottesville.3 In short, Democrats and sympathetic media used Charlottesville as a concrete proof-point that Trump had unleashed a racial crisis, and that the country was in “a battle for the soul of this nation”.4 This narrative was presented earnestly by them: far-right violence in Charlottesville would be a national wake-up call about racial hatred that, in their telling, demanded urgent political action.

The Indictment: SPLC Charged

Last week, a new development has upended that narrative. On April 21, 2026, the Department of Justice announced that an Alabama grand jury returned an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the prominent civil-rights nonprofit best known for its “hate group” lists, charging it with wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.5 The indictment alleges that from 2014 to 2023 the SPLC secretly funnelled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals in violent extremist groups.6 For example, DOJ spokesmen say SPLC paid large sums to figures associated with the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, the Aryan Nations and others. Crucially, prosecutors claim SPLC used covert methods: it opened bank accounts in the names of “fictitious entities” (with names like “Center Investigative Agency”, “Fox Photography”, and “Rare Books Warehouse”) to disguise payments to its paid informants. By routing donations through these shell accounts, SPLC allegedly hid the true destination of the funds. In effect, donors were told their money was helping to “dismantle” hate groups, but a portion of it was instead being diverted back to the leaders and organisers of those very groups, all while SPLC publicly denounced them.7

The indictment lays out telling examples. One SPLC “field source” reportedly received over $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance.8 Another informant was actually in the inner online circle that planned the Charlottesville rally itself: prosecutors say he “made racist postings” in that chat group and even “helped coordinate transportation” to the August 2017 march, all while being paid by SPLC.9 The DOJ press release quotes FBI Director Kash Patel, who bluntly said SPLC “lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups” while “paying the leaders of these very extremist groups”.10 Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche similarly charged that “the SPLC is manufacturing extremism to justify its existence”, using donor money not to combat but to “stoke racial hatred”.11 DOJ officials argue that, if proven, SPLC’s actions amounted to an elaborate fraud: donors were intentionally misled, and false statements were made to banks to conceal the program. In sum, the indictment portrays SPLC as doing “the exact opposite” of its claimed mission, funding racial hate rather than fighting it. All of these details are, of course, allegations. The legal question at this stage is whether prosecutors can prove intent to defraud, but the charges alone lay bare a startling claim: that an organisation central to defining and fighting extremism may have been materially involved with it.

  1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/25/joe-biden-charlottesville-defines-trump-presidency/
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid
  4. https://www.jta.org/2019/04/25/politics/biden-makes-trumps-charlottesville-reaction-the-center-of-his-campaign-launch/
  5. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and/
  6. https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/g-s1-118275/southern-poverty-law-center-indicted-on-federal-fraud-charges/
  7. https://abcnews.com/US/southern-poverty-law-center-facing-justice-department-probe/story/
  8. https://www.wunc.org/2026-04-21/southern-poverty-law-center-indicted-on-federal-fraud-charges/
  9. Ibid
  10. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and/
  11. https://abcnews.com/US/southern-poverty-law-center-facing-justice-department-probe/story/

On a lighter note, The Babylon Bee asks you to donate to the SPLC today to support a needy racist in your community.

April 18, 2026

“The whole thing was one giant attempt to gaslight both young men and the public at large”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens responds to a cover story in The New Statesman:

We were subjected to years of “young men are becoming radicalized, what’s driving this and how do we stop it?” discourse when in reality the typical young man saw practically zero change in his political outlook over the last 30 years.

The whole thing was one giant attempt to gaslight both young men and the public at large that they had suddenly moved well outside the Overton window and were either self-radicalizing or falling for extremist propaganda.

In reality, the problem was that young men were staying put rather than adopting increasingly radical progressive views. The real issue was that young women were flying off the rails, espousing views that would lead to the complete dissolution of civilization itself while acting like these were basic normal positions that completely sane people should hold.

That disconnect between what was being said and what was being done became so off kilter with reality that something finally began to break after 2020.

The problem isn’t with young men. The problem is that young women have gone certifiably insane. They’ve made radical progressivism their religion. They’re acting out on the perfectly healthy female tendency to act to uphold and preserve the existing social order.

Young women are trying to conserve an ideology they see as the stable bedrock of society, even if it’s actually an acidic collection of delusions that will inevitably destroy society itself. And they’re upset that young men aren’t doing what they see as their role to uphold that order as well.

In short, women are natural conservatives. They’re trying to conserve progressivism because it’s the reigning social order and theological governing system of Western civilization. And they’re upset and confused as to why young men aren’t stepping up to uphold it as well.

On Substack Notes, John Carter commented on the same New Republic The New Statesman cover story:

Women have never had it better than they do in modern Western countries. They are affluent, thanks to being given every advantage in education and employment; young women now hold more degrees, and make more money, than young men. They can marry whoever they want, from anywhere in the world, or they can marry no one at all. They can sleep with whoever they want, with however many people they want, with no risk of pregnancy, and if they get the ick later they can decide that it was rape and their abuser will be punished. Any opposition to their cultural or political preferences is automatically classified as hate, and every institution acts to denounce and punish this unacceptable hatred on their behalf … in no small part because they have taken over these institutions.

Women have never had it better, and they are absolutely incandescent with fury about that.

April 16, 2026

Never say that teachers have no influence

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Of course, that influence isn’t always benign:

It’s true, every halfway intelligent right winger I know irl had a massive conflict with at least one elementary teacher over things like: reading ahead, reading too difficult books, not showing enough work, etc etc. it’s the first time we experience the uncaring tyranny of state bureaucracy and it sucks.

April 15, 2026

MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is “a case study in progressive linguistic self-sabotage”

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay highlights how NDP politician Leah Gazan’s freshly coined replacement for our already over-long initialism for other-than-cis-gendered individuals has been a boon to online commentators and comedians across the internet:

While the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was announced in 2015, its final report wasn’t published until mid-2019. The three-and-a-half year period in between overlapped with Justin Trudeau’s manic campaign to replace the idea of biological “women” in public discourse with faddish gender-inclusive terms that describe female-identified men. The initialism he eventually came up with is “2SLGBTQI+” (whose “2S” component signifies a special — albeit ill-defined — “two-spirited” LGBT category that Indigenous people can opt into).

And so, channelling the state-of-the-art in Canadian gender jargon, the Inquiry’s commissioners duly expanded references to Indigenous “women” by addition of the words “… and 2SLGBTQQIA people” — i.e. Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual.

The term “2SLGBTQQIA” appears in the final report 1,197 times. Agglomerating that with the original “MMIWG” mandate yields “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA”.

Detail from page 229 of The Final Report Of The National Inquiry Into Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women And Girls.

If this unbreakable wi-fi code sounds familiar, it’s because a Canadian MP named Leah Gazan just became an international laughingstock for using it at a televised 8 April news conference. (Indeed, she lengthened it even further by adding a plus sign to the end — suggesting that yet more letters, numbers, and/or symbols are on their way.) This unintentional comedy routine was made all the more meme-worthy by the casual, deadpan, en passant way the sixteen-character term rolled off Gazan’s tongue, as if it were a set of ASCII characters that ordinary Canadians ran together all the time in normal day-to-day discussions.

As some Canadians (including me) tried to explain on social media, “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” is not a commonly used term outside of activist circles. I also let people know that Gazan is not a Canadian government representative (as was being claimed), but rather a member of a small and increasingly radicalised hard-left federal party known as the New Democrats.

But by then, no one was in the mood for such nuances. Elon Musk‘s three-word tweet on the subject — “Canada is cooked” — has, as of this writing, garnered more than half a million likes and 77 million views. Thanks to Gazan, millions of people around the world now believe that ordinary Canadians talk in this ridiculous fashion. We don’t.

Gazan told CBC News that the whole episode only goes to show that “bigots are offended by my positions around equality”. A more useful lesson she might take away from this experience is that the use of cultish ideological jargon can turn discussion of even the most serious issue into a farce. This is especially true when terms such as “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” (or “menstruators”, or “uterus-havers”, or “people with a vagina”) are used to soothe the sensitivities of men who demand the right to be called women.

April 4, 2026

If we think that “ordinary criticism and disagreement are bullying, then we have an infantilized and feminized culture”

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

Chris Bray finds a highly accurate label for the pearl-clutching “elites” who — to a persyn — believe that your words are violence, but their violence (delivered through third parties, of course) is merely emphatic communication to the distasteful lower orders:

Donald Trump is a mean man. He’s a bully!

Oh no SCARY, he’s trying to BULLY the Supreme Court! I wrote at the Federalist this week about the stupidity of this argument — what is he implying he can do to the life-tenured justices, for crying out loud? — but I suspect I undersold the underlying sickness. Adults don’t use the word “bully” to talk about other adults, arguably outside of a few very narrow spaces involving things like domestic violence. It’s a preschool word. The easy recourse to toddler language at the New York Times is a sign of cultural regression. But it’s also a sign of habitual and persistent dishonesty. They’re pretending. I suspect they’ve pretended so much that they’ve forgotten they’re pretending, and the mask has become the face, but at root, they’re pretending.

We have fictional characters like Willie Stark and Frank Underwood because no one on the planet is dumb enough to think that politics is nice. The federal government spends $7 trillion a year, and the lure of that bucket of money brings out a bunch of throatcutters. This is possibly one of the most obvious realities of human existence. Politics is a knife fight. […]

Quite famously, members of Congress who suggested that they would oppose the legislative priorities of President Lyndon Johnson would get phone calls in the middle night from the man himself, waking them up and letting them know that they were dead men. He’s supposed to have said things like, “I’m gonna cut your balls off, you cocksucker”, though it’s not like anyone had a stenographer on the calls to nail the quotes. He was threatening and nasty on all days ending in -y, and got bills passed by, among other things, actually, physically intimidating people who didn’t roll over. He was a leaner. He got in faces, constantly and openly.

You gonna pass my bill [insert string of highly personal threats and profanity], or is your political career over? Pressure, threats, and horsetrading are the default behaviors, the normal stuff. Andrew Jackson got the Indian Removal Act through Congress by handing out government sinecures. The premise that I can take care of you or I can go to war with you, and it’s your choice which one happens is … politics. The make-believe story about Mean Donald Trump bullying the Supreme Court by tweeting at them or sitting in a chair where they could see him is playtime, clutching at Fisher-Price pearls. Somewhat remarkably, Trump appears to bully institutional opponents quite a bit less than the historical norm, and Lisa Murkowski can do whatever she wants without consequence. I am personally calling for Donald Trump to start actually bullying some people who have it coming, but be sure to have a fainting couch ready in the newsroom at Times Square.

Update, 6 March: 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.

April 1, 2026

QotD: “Colour-blind” casting

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

Is noticing somebody’s skin colour an important factor in addressing your privilege, or is noticing race itself racist? And should white actors ever play a character whose historical and/or geographical context suggests that they should be played by people of colour? I ask, because people who have been watching the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall have noticed that there are lots of global majority actors playing roles that — back in the distant past of Series 1 — would have been played by white actors. Should people have noticed that? And should historical accuracy have a part to play? It certainly used to be the case that only racists noticed race, but then racists started trying to disguise themselves by not noticing race, which made not noticing race racist again.

As a regular reader of this column, I have no doubt that you want to remain on the right side of history, and I imagine your instincts are to applaud anything that is annoying for conservatives, like diverse casting in historical dramas. Sometimes being an anti-racist can be hard work, but we don’t tell people to “do the work” for nothing.

First, we need to dispense with the “historical accuracy” argument. There are two ways to do this and the first is to say accuracy should play second fiddle to representation. This is apparently the Hilary Mantel argument. The Times says the Wolf Hall author blessed colour-blind casting before she died, saying that although it was difficult: “you’re in the realm of representation. I think we have to take on board the new thinking.” Everything in 21st Century Britain should reflect 21st Century Britain. We’re in year zero, and hence not employing non-white actors in a production made today, even though there were very few non-white people in sixteenth century England, is simply racist.

The second option is to straightforwardly argue that there were lots of Black and Brown people pottering around the court of Henry VIII, so the production is historically accurate. This is the BBC Horrible History approach. Were you there? Can you prove that it wasn’t full of People of Colour? And is it worth losing your job to do so?

I prefer to hold both of these arguments in my head at the same time. Too much consistency seems a bit right-wing.

Next we need to look at specifically who is being played. Thankfully, the “colour-blind casting” didn’t select any PoGMSTs (People of Global Majority Skin Tones) to play bad guys. This was both on purpose, because oppressed people cannot be bad, and it was also not on purpose, because otherwise it wouldn’t be colour-blind casting. Whichever one it was — and it was both — without PoGMSTs actors playing historic fictionalised evil people, we can avoid the completely random casting process being labelled as racist.

David Scullion, “People of Colour television”, The Critic, 2024-11-12.

March 30, 2026

Net Zero or mass immigration, pick one (or better, pick neither)

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

Lorenzo Warby points out the blindingly obvious (to anyone with common sense) fact that the top two pet projects of western transnationalist elites — Net Zero and mass third-world immigration — are in direct conflict with one another. But rather than choosing one form of societal suicide over the other, the healthy alternative is to absolutely reject both:

Culturally more homogeneous democracies are happier than more culturally diverse democracies. Also, in the Anglophone countries, where the centre-right won the most recent national election, happiness went up slightly. Where the centre-left won the most recent national election, happiness went down noticeably.

Australia is the latest developed democracy to experience conventional centre-right politics being threatened by a national populist surge. Just as country-club Republicans were Trumped, Gaullists were Le Penned, Forza Italia was Melonied, and the Tories are being Faraged, so the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.

What Australia has in common with the pattern in the UK, and the rise of AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, is the combination of Net Zero (or equivalent) with mass immigration leading to a national populist surge.

National populism well predates Net Zero. It does not predate the adoption of policies of elite display and elite benefit, particularly regarding immigration. The combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is, however, particularly conducive to surges electoral support for national populism, as we can see in the UK, Germany and now Australia.

It is not hard to see why. Mass prosperity rests on cheap energy: that is much more important than, for instance, free trade. The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.

As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:

    by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.

Net Zero means raising the price of energy, thereby narrowing access to it, and, in particular, narrowing the range of economic activity that is commercially sustainable. Even without increasing the population, that will increase contestation over resources.

Add mass immigration to the mix, and that contestation becomes much worse. All the experienced costs of mass immigration — higher rents and house prices; increased congestion; downward pressure on wages and increased fiscal stress (if importing significant numbers of low-capital/skill immigrants); downward pressure on social trust and corrosive effects on the norms and rules that underpin institutions (if importing lots of people from very different cultures); increased crime (if importing significant numbers of people from higher crime cultures) — are then magnified.

March 24, 2026

More political and philosophical illusions, left and right

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

Tom Kratman continues his discussion of the illusions that distort how people on the left and people on the right view reality:

There is an illusion – yes, on both sides – of guilt by association. This is related to, but not exactly the same as, the illusion of indistinguishability. How many nail-bomb-building moral sons of Bill Ayers are over on the modern American left? Can’t be too many, I think, based on the serious dearth of Earth-shattering kabooms we hear, or rather don’t hear, lately. How many hair-shirted and sandwich board clad – with said boards reading, “Repent! The end is near!” – folks are there on the religious right? Based on how the typical Christian lives, and those being by no means a particularly bad set of men and women, there aren’t all that many. How many Christians do you really think, given a button that would make the Westboro Baptist Church and all its members go poof, wouldn’t push that button twice, the first time slowly, for the emotional satisfaction (well, that and to savor the screaming1), and the second time, quickly, to make sure. How many leftists and liberals are dead set against gun control? More than a few.

Then there’s the illusion brought on by willful blindness. For example, “No enemies to the left!” said Alexander Kerenski, Prime Minister of Russia, in 1917. Pity Kerenski wasn’t able to see that the people to his left were largely intellectual idiots and dogmatic homicidal maniacs, and that there may have been people to his right who were considerably more reasonable and sane. He said that not too long before being tossed out on his ear by the Bolsheviks, who, interestingly enough, were to his left.

You don’t see as much of this – the notion that there are no enemies to the right – on the conservative side, by the way, though there is some. Still, the next time I see an actual conservative lining up with the American National Socialist Party,2 the KKK, or Stormfront will be the first.

Part of the problem here, I think, is that we take something – civilization, actually – so much for granted that we forget how hard it is to build or to hold onto, and so forget that we have something important in common with our more moderate political opponents. Thus, taking it for granted, we forget that common ground, see the opposition, and so line up with those more extreme sorts for whom civilization is probably just a burden they’d as soon be done with.

  1. Okay, maybe some would just push it the once.
  2. Which seems to have many trivial manifestations. You can find your own links, but why bother?

March 20, 2026

It’s okay to hate …

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

On his Substack, Frank Furedi defends the right to hate:

In recent decades hate has become thoroughly politicised to the point that the mere mention of the word serves as a prelude to discrediting, delegitimating and criminalizing its target. In public life the charge of practising the politics of hate is frequently deployed by leftist promoters of identity ideology against their opponents. The claim promoted by The Guardian that states that “a Tory party that stokes hatred is the real threat to our democracy” is illustrative of the attempt to associate conservatives and other critics of identity ideology with the politics of hate.1

The project of transforming hate into a malevolent ideological standpoint is underpinned by the assumption that all displays of the emotion hate are potentially malevolent. In effect the very human emotion of hate is now frequently demonised as a pathology.

In recent decades hate has been transformed into a stand-alone cultural stigma. According to dominant cultural conventions it is sufficient to use the word hate without any reference to the object of this emotion. It is now common to use the word, Haters. It is not necessary to indicate who the Haters hate. The term Hater serves as a negative identity. As one study acknowledged, “persons branded as ‘haters’ are effectively excommunicated from the polity”.2 The use of the term hater morally contaminates its target.

According to the cultural script that prevails in the West, hate serves as a secular form of moral evil. One expression that captures this evil is that of “The Hate”. By placing a definitive article in front of hate a permanent threat to society is invented. This reified public threat demands vigilance and willingness to mobilise to defeat its manifestations. For example, this is the approach of the campaigning group Stop The Hate.3 The content of The Hate is deliberately left vague so that it can serve as the target of a variety of different campaigns.

The politically motivated designation of hate to describe the behaviour of an individual or a group is not simply an act of description but also a boundary-setting manoeuvre. It basically works as a warning that signals the claim that The Hater cannot be included within the confines of a democratically governed public space. The Hater exists on the wrong sides of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate politics. This sentiment is frequently communicated by the slogan “Hope Not Hate”, which establishes a moral boundary between legitimate and illegitimate politics. From this perspective hate serves as a diagnostic label for illegitimate public life. Imposing a moral quarantine on those branded as haters is regarded is necessary for the maintenance of a just democratic society.

The frequent use of the slogan “Hope not Hate” smuggles a moralising ethos into public discourse. Through the drawing of a moral contrast between the secular evil of hate, hope emerges as a progressive political virtue. The transformation of hate into a morally toxic antithesis of hope assists the political polarisation that afflicts society. Since haters are regarded as beyond redemption dialogue with them is pointless. The only appropriate response to their words is to criminalise it. Hence the proliferation of rules and laws criminalising Hate Speech.

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/04/a-tory-party-that-stokes-hatred-is-the-real-threat-to-our-democracy
  2. Post, Robert, “Concluding Thoughts: The Legality and Politics of Hatred”, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Epilogue, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Hate, Politics, Law: Critical Perspectives on Combating Hate, Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy (New York, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 June 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190465544.003.0013, accessed 12 Mar. 2026.
  3. https://www.stopthehate.uk

Update, 21 March: 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.

March 19, 2026

QotD: From the fall of the Soviets to the rise of the Wokerati

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

… for 50 years the Soviet nuclear threat provided […] an Armageddon to fear, and a reason to rally round the state in the free countries of the West. It provided an unexpected bonus, which protected us all though we did not realise it at the time. Since the USSR was the arsenal of repression, political liberty in the Western lands was under special protection as long as the Kremlin was our enemy. Freedom was, supposedly, what we fought and stood for. Governments claiming to be guarding us from Soviet tyranny could not go very far in limiting liberty on their own territory, however much they may have wanted to.

That protection ended when the Berlin Wall fell. In the same extraordinary moment, the collapse of Russian communism liberated revolutionary radicals across the Western world. The ghastly, failed Brezhnev state could not be hung round their necks like a putrid albatross any more. They were no longer considered as potential traitors simply because they were on the left. Eric Hobsbawm, and those like him, could at last join the establishment. Indeed, fortresses of the establishment such as the BBC now welcomed political as well as cultural leftists onto their upper decks.

Antonio Gramsci’s rethinking of the revolution — seize the university, the school, the TV station, the newspaper, the church, the theatre, rather than the barracks, the railway station and the post office — could at last get under way. At that moment, the long march of 1960s leftists through the institutions began to reach its objective, as they moved into the important jobs for the first time. And so one of the main protections of liberty and reason vanished, exactly when it was most needed.

The BBC’s simpering coverage of the Blair regime’s arrival in Downing Street, with its North-Korean-style fake crowd waving Union Jacks they despised, and new dawn atmosphere was not as ridiculous as it looked. May 1997 truly was a regime change. Illiberal utopians really were increasingly in charge, and the Cultural Revolution at last had political muscle.

Then came the new enemy, the shapeless ever-shifting menace of terrorism, against which almost any means were justified. To combat this, we willingly gave up Habeas Corpus and the real presumption of innocence, and allowed ourselves to be treated as if we were newly-convicted prisoners every time we passed through an airport.

Those who think the era of the face-mask will soon be over might like to recall that the irrational precautions of airport “security” (almost wholly futile once the simple precaution of refusing to open the door to the flight deck has been introduced) have not only remained in place since September 2001: they have been intensified. Yet, by and large, they are almost popular. Those who mutter against them, as I sometimes do, face stern lectures from our fellow-citizens implying that we are irresponsible and heedless.

Now a new fear, even more shapeless, invisible, perpetual (and hard to defeat — how can you ever eliminate a virus?) than al-Qaeda or Isis, has arrived in our midst. There is almost no bad action it cannot be used to excuse, including the strangling of an already shaky economy for which those eccentric or lucky enough to still be working will pay for decades. Millions have greeted this new peril as an excuse to abandon a liberty they did not really care much about anyway.

As a nation, we now produce more fear than we can consume locally, hiding in our homes as civil society evaporates. We queue up happily to hand in our freedom and to collect our muzzles and our digital IDs. And those of us who cry out, until we are hoarse, to say that this is a catastrophe, are met with shrugs from the chattering classes, and snarls of “just put on the frigging mask” from the mob. If I hadn’t despaired long ago, I would be despairing now.

Peter Hitchens, “Democracy muzzled”, The Critic, 2020-09-25.

March 18, 2026

Viewing-with-alarm “the highly lucrative, hyper-masculine ecosystem of online ‘red pill’ influencers”

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

I first heard of Louis Theroux and his Inside the Manosphere documentary through it being mentioned a few times on a recent podcast, but I’m hardly the one to provide any insight into contemporary political culture, so this is probably not very surprising. To provide some context, I found Celina’s summary to be quite useful:

When the liberal establishment is suddenly forced to confront the grotesque downstream consequences of its own social engineering, its first and most reliable instinct is to pathologise the individual rather than to interrogate the civilisation that produced him. This predictable dynamic is perfectly encapsulated in the critical reaction to the March 2026 release of the Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere.1 The feature-length film, which follows the veteran British broadcaster as he immerses himself in the highly lucrative, hyper-masculine ecosystem of online “red pill” influencers, has been received by the chattering classes as a horrifying, alien glimpse into a shadowy digital underworld of unbridled misogyny, toxic behaviour, and financial grift.2 Commentators, critics, and worried parents have wrung their hands over the crude language, the explicit hostility directed toward women, and the ruthless exploitation of vulnerable, disaffected young boys who flock to these figures for guidance.3 They will undoubtedly draw the conclusion that these internet personalities are a bizarre aberration, a reactionary glitch in the otherwise progressive march of modern Western society that must be heavily censored, de-platformed, or psychologically rehabilitated.

This conclusion is not only incomplete, it is entirely, fundamentally wrong. The true significance of Theroux’s latest documentary is not that it uncovers an isolated network of digital deviants operating on the fringes of acceptable discourse. Rather, the film unintentionally functions as a bleak, unrelenting autopsy of late-stage Western cultural decline. The figures profiled by Theroux, men who monetise male grievance, openly commodify female sexuality, and preach a gospel of ruthless, transactional dominance are in no way rebels against the modern liberal order. They are, in fact, its purest, most distilled, and most logical products.

Through its exploration of this digital underworld, from the sun-drenched hedonism of Miami to the expatriate enclaves of Marbella, the documentary inadvertently exposes a significant and terrifying civilisational breakdown. It reveals a society suffering from the total collapse of traditional gender norms, the complete disappearance of honour, duty, and social trust, and the total ascendancy of a vulgar materialism where attention and capital are the only remaining arbiters of human value. The manosphere is not an alternative to modern Western ideology, it is the inevitable, putrid consequence of a culture that has spent the last half-century systematically dismantling its own moral, religious, and social infrastructure. To understand the phenomenon captured by Theroux, one must look past the superficial liberal moral outrage and recognise the manosphere for what it truly is: a favela culture operating seamlessly inside a wealthy Western economy.

[…]

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is undeniably a compelling piece of television, featuring moments of sharp journalistic insight and necessary confrontation with deeply unsavoury characters. But as a piece of cultural criticism, it ultimately fails because it refuses to look beyond the immediate vulgarity of its subjects. Theroux, and the liberal audiences who will consume his documentary, will walk away from the film comforted by their own moral superiority, convinced that the problem lies entirely with a few toxic men in Marbella and Miami who simply need to be censored, de-platformed, or re-educated.

They will draw entirely the wrong lesson. The manosphere influencers are not an invading force corrupting a healthy society; they are the native flora of the wasteland we have purposefully created. They are the warlords of the digital favela, thriving in the ruins of a civilisation that has actively, joyfully destroyed its own moral and social foundations. The documentary unintentionally captures the catastrophic, unavoidable consequences of modern Western ideology: a low-trust, hyper-materialistic culture where honour is dead, transactional exploitation is the accepted norm, and the relations between men and women have devolved into a state of algorithmic trench warfare.

Until the West is willing to confront the structural causes of this decay, the destructive failures of modern feminism, the atomisation inherent in mass democracy, the fraying of social capital brought about by multiculturalism, and the vast spiritual void of secular materialism, it will continue to produce generations of lost, angry men. And the e-pimps will always be there, waiting in the digital shadows, ready to sell them a monthly subscription to the abyss.

  1. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/louis-theroux-inside-the-manosphere
  2. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/mar/11/louis-theroux-inside-the-manosphere-review-why-doesnt-he-focus-more-on-the-impact-on-women
  3. Ibid

Update: Rob Henderson’s Wall Street Journal article on Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere has also been posted on their free Substack – https://wsjfreeexpression.substack.com/p/louis-theroux-exposes-the-manosphere

A new Netflix documentary takes viewers into “the manosphere,” a loose network of YouTubers, podcasters, live-streamers and online pranksters. Those interviewed in Louis Theroux’s documentary, Inside the Manosphere, claim to teach young men how to become dominant, wealthy and irresistible to women. They pitch a specific idea about male worth. Women enter the world with innate value, they say, though they often contradict this by telling their followers to mistreat women. A man must earn his value, the logic goes, through money, sex and status. Otherwise, he is worthless.

This is a bleak message. It is also a brilliant sales strategy. First you convince young men that they are nothing. Then you charge them to become something. It’s one of the oldest cons in the world, updated for the age of the algorithm.

At first glance, the documentary seems to confirm what critics already suspect. The manosphere is toxic and extreme. But the film reveals the gap between persona and reality. The influencers selling this lifestyle often don’t live it themselves.

Early in the film, Mr. Theroux asks influencer Justin Waller a simple question: How many kids do you have? The man hesitates. Later, we learn he lives with his two children and their mother — he describes her as his “wife” though they are not legally married — who is pregnant with their third child. The man leads a fairly conventional family life, yet he spends much of his online career telling followers that men should dominate women, avoid commitment and establish a rotation of multiple partners.

One influencer known as Myron Gaines brags privately to Mr. Theroux that he plans to have multiple wives. But when Mr. Theroux raises this idea of “one-way monogamy” in front of Gaines’s girlfriend, his facial expression immediately changes. He then says, “Who knows? Maybe I’ll only wanna be with one girl after all.” The credits of the documentary reveal that the girlfriend eventually left him.

March 14, 2026

QotD: “Bludgeonspeak”

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

I’m coining a term today: “bludgeonspeak”.

Bludgeonspeak is the use of invented terminology, or historical terminology that has been hijacked and corrupted, and then emptied of all meaning except as an attempt at moral blackmail.

Here are some notable bludgeonspeak items in 2025: “racist”, “fascist”, “homophobe”, “transphobe”, “islamophobe”, “far-right”. Also, the term “genocide” might not be quite there yet, but it’s being pushed in that direction pretty hard.

Some bludgeonspeak terms, like “fascist” and “racist” and “genocide”, used to have substantive meanings which have been destroyed by persistent abuse. It may be appropriate to recognize and use those meanings if you are reading or writing or speaking about history.

Others, like “homophobe”, “transphobe”, and “islamophobe”, were bludgeonspeak from birth. There are no circumstances in which these have substantive meaning, and it is unwise to treat them as though they do.

The only way to win is not to play. When somebody throws bludgeonspeak at you, call it out. State that you will not be controlled by their language, and you refuse to be assigned to a category you reject.

The key thing that people who employ bludgeonspeak don’t want you to grasp is that these words only have the power over you that you allow them.

Once a term has been generally recognized as bludgeonspeak, it not only loses its power as direct moral blackmail, it can no longer be used as a social attack.

So: learn to recognize bludgeonspeak. Shut down the people who use it by refusing to give it power. And educate other people about this manipulation tactic, so that they too can reject it.

You can prevent semantic manipulation. All it takes is the will to do so.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-04.

Update, Ides of March, 2026: 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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