Quotulatiousness

April 24, 2026

Defending Heinlein and his most controversial novel – Farnham’s Freehold

Filed under: Books, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Grammaticus Books
Published 21 Nov 2025

An indepth review of Robert A. Heinlein’s most controversial novel. A novel sometimes referred to as Science Fiction’s most controversial novel, Farnham’s Freehold.

00:00 Intro
02:30 Why I Read Farnham’s Freehold
04:33 The Plot (Spoilers)
12:48 The Critics’ Complaints
21:40 Is it A Fun Read?

My Video on Time Enough for Love:
• Heinlein’s MOST CONTROVERSIAL Novel – Time…

Update, 25 April: 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 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 9, 2026

The NFL’s “Rooney Rule”

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

As the NFL in its modern incarnation exists as an exception to the normal rules governing corporate structure under US law, you can readily imagine that the NFL’s legal teams are extremely sensitive to the changing winds at the federal level. At a time that the federal government was emphasizing providing employment equity, the NFL scrambled to implement a hiring solution that gave black coaches a better chance of being hired for head coaching opportunities. The winds have shifted recently and the NFL risks being caught on the wrong side of evolving legal decision-making:

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles said he “absolutely” believed that he was sometimes brought in by NFL teams just to check the “Rooney Rule” box.

The Rooney Rule is an NFL policy instituted more than two decades ago that requires teams to interview — though not to hire — at least one minority candidate when hiring new coaches.

The rule was designed to increase the number of minority head coaches in the NFL, a goal it has failed to achieve. For years, it has been a source of moral controversy, but new developments suggest it may now be a legal issue for the league.

Last week, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) sent a letter to the NFL calling the Rooney Rule “blatant race discrimination“, adding that hiring decisions should be based solely on merit.

Though the NFL says it believes its policy “is consistent with the law” and promotes fairness, others have indicated the Rooney Rule may be on the chopping block, given recent legal challenges to other forms of racial preferences.

“There’s no question that the environment has changed in recent years“, said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the son of Dan Rooney, for whom the rule is named. “We do have an obligation to make sure that our policies comply with the laws, whatever the law is, and whatever the changes in law might be.”

Art Rooney didn’t specify the laws the NFL may not be in compliance with, but he might have been referring to last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services. In that decision, the court unanimously ruled that separate standards for minority and majority plaintiffs seeking redress for racial discrimination were illegal.

The ruling undercut the ability of organizations to use race or sex in hiring decisions — even for ostensibly benign or diversity-promoting purposes — because majority-group plaintiffs are now allowed to sue under the same legal standard as minority groups.

As I wrote at the time, the Ames decision was likely to be a wrecking ball to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which employers had used for years to discriminate against majority ethnic groups (and non-focus minorities, such as Asians), in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

April 7, 2026

Alberta is the only province moving in the right direction

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Martyupnorth responds to Tristin Hopper’s post about Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, which he published a year ago:

Here is a one-line summary of each of Tristin’s 8 points:

Housing crisis: Canada pioneered turning entire cities into over-leveraged real estate bubbles, driving home ownership out of reach for ordinary people because prices detached from wages.

Crime and justice: Soft-on-crime policies, catch-and-release bail, and activist courts created a revolving door for repeat offenders, leaving our streets unsafe.

Harm reduction & drugs: “Safe supply” and decriminalization experiments escalated addiction and public drug use, worsening overdoses, tent cities, and societal harm instead of reducing it.

Euthanasia (MAiD): Canada rapidly expanded medical assistance in dying into one of the world’s most aggressive programs, with soaring death numbers and cases pushing it as a tratement for poverty and disability.

Healthcare system: Despite high spending, Canada’s “free” system ranks near the bottom in performance among developed nations, with deadly wait times and dysfunction.

Transgender policies: Canada went further than most countries with permissive rules on youth transitions, pronouns, biological males in female spaces, and related ideology in schools and institutions.

Identity politics and “anti-racism”: Canada outdid even the U.S. in embracing divisive oppressed frameworks, including declaring itself guilty of an ongoing “genocide” against Indigenous people with little accountability.

Censorship and speech laws: Expansive hate speech rules, online content takedowns, and bills like the Online Harms Act pushed Canada toward Orwellian restrictions, chilling expression and drawing international warnings.

Canada took progressive ideas further and faster than peers, almost always with cascading negative consequences, turning a once-stable nation into a totally dysfunctional one.

He’s right in saying that Danielle Smith is the only one finally acknowledging that things aren’t working, and is trying to reverse some of these pad idea.

It’s still not enough to save Alberta, we need to divorce ourselves from the rest of Canada and their bad ideas.

April 6, 2026

Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election … it just happened to him”

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

While I wouldn’t agree with the statement in the title of this post, it has been a common enough reading of the US 1924 presidential election — that it wasn’t an endorsement of Coolidge and his policies but merely a reflection of voters’ overall satisfaction with the economy. The editors of the Coolidge Review would beg to differ:

From the distance of more than a century, a political scientist has taken a fresh look at the 1924 presidential election.

In an article published last year in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Christopher Devine questions the conventional wisdom about how and why the incumbent, Calvin Coolidge, won that election in a landslide. Coolidge had assumed the presidency little more than a year earlier, after the unexpected death of Warren Harding. In 1924’s three-way race, he received more votes than the other two candidates combined and carried thirty-five of the forty-eight states.

As Devine points out, most historians say that a robust economy was by far the biggest reason Coolidge won. Strong economic conditions did work in the president’s favor. But Devine notes that many historians adopt a form of economic “determinism”. In this very common view, Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election”. Rather, “thanks mostly to the economy, it just happened to him”.

That argument is too simplistic, Devine suggests. He presents both qualitative and quantitative evidence to challenge the standard narrative of the 1924 campaign.

Old Assumptions, New Data

For his empirical analysis, Devine examines “county-level political, economic, and demographic data” alongside county-by-county voting results. Using these data, he tests three common explanations for the election’s outcome:

Did Coolidge win primarily because of the economy? Scraping the data, Devine concludes that the answer is largely yes. And he shows it’s misleading to claim that — as one history textbook put it — Coolidge merely rode “the crest of a wave of economic prosperity for which he was given undeserved credit”. Devine demonstrates that from behind the scenes, Coolidge “took an active role in coordinating campaign messaging” that showcased the administration’s and Republicans’ achievements. For example, Coolidge worked closely with his running mate, Charles Dawes, to keep the famously free-range vice-presidential candidate focused on the economic message. “In the matter of economy and tax reduction”, Dawes declared, “the Federal Government is headed in the right direction”. Moreover, as Devine reports, Dawes argued that the administration’s work to stabilize Europe via the Dawes Plan spared America from “the depths of an inevitable and great depression” while also ensuring that “the whole world enters upon a period of peace and prosperity”.

Did third-party candidate Robert M. La Follette hurt Democratic nominee John W. Davis more than Coolidge? Devine concludes that this effect appeared only in the Great Plains and the Mountain West. It probably wasn’t large enough to change the election’s outcome.

Did internal divisions cost the Democratic Party votes in 1924? The Democrats were so fractured that they needed 103 ballots to choose a nominee at their convention. Devine says it would be hard to imagine that such disarray did not hurt Democrats in the election. Yet he notes that quantitative evidence on the reasons for Democratic losses in 1924 is hard to find because “scientific polling did not exist in the 1920s”.

Seeking an alternative approach, Devine looks at patterns of defection from the Democratic Party by state. He finds that northern states that voted to defeat the anti-Ku-Klux-Klan plank at that year’s Democratic National Convention — in other words, states whose delegations supported the Klan — saw heavier defections in the general election. From that, Devine extrapolates to suggest that Coolidge “benefited from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan — or, perhaps one might say, Democrats lost ground because of it”.

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 20, 2026

When pursuit of knowledge shifts to sharing of feelings instead

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

Institutes of higher learning were once places where academic careers involved research, analysis, and logical pursuits to advance human knowledge (in theory, at least, and mostly in practice). Today’s groves of academe are apparently much more about “the feels” than the facts:

An expected and obvious consequence of the Great Effeminization of the Academy is that a great deal of academic output is now about the feelings of academics.

From the peer-reviewed paper “What’s Racial About Matter? A Conversation on Race and ‘New’ Materialism Past, Present, and Future” in Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. (They mean matter in the same sense as a physicist, only they are much vaguer.) My emphasis:

    What follows is an informal, at times undisciplined, conversation about Asian American racial matters between interlocutors who have been in generative dialogue for several years now. This roundtable is the constellation of many other discussions from conference panels to shared meals, reflecting the relational nature of our inquiry. We hope this roundtable can open entry points for those exploring intersections of feminist new materialisms, STS, and studies of race — from its genealogies to its animating new directions. How did we get here, and where do we go from here?

The text itself reads like it was produced by one of those postmodern text generators that were passed around as jokes in the late 1990s.

From the Abstract of “After Hybridity: The Biological Life of the Mixed Race Child” (same journal):

    I argue that renderings of the mixed race child as a metaphor for assimilation and multicultural progress obscure how racial science continues to shape the very definition of mixed raceness. Instead, I frame the mixed race Asian American child as hybrid matter to explore the slippages between their figuration and other abnormally reproduced objects: the genetically modified food organism and cancer.

From the Abstract of “Racial Atmospherics: Greenhouses, Terrariums, and Empire’s Pneumatics” (same journal):

    What happens when we understand air as racial matter? This paper takes up this question by tracking the political, architectural, and artistic genealogies of Cold War phytotrons, or computer-controlled climatic laboratories.

From the Abstract of “Disrupting the Whitened Lemur: Reading Black Trans* Considerations in Feminist Primatology” (same journal):

    In this article, I trace the evolution of female dominance studies in lemurs to explore how logics of cis-heterosexuality and whiteness are embedded in the study of the nonhuman … Following recent theories of trans* and the nonhuman, this essay argues that such critiques illustrate the trans* potential of the nonhuman, which was prefigured by decades of critique in feminist primatology. However, by engaging with recent Black trans scholarship, this essay suggests that such trans* critiques of the nonhuman have stopped short by ignoring the racialized nature of the dyad as a social unit. I thus propose a feminist science studies that attends to Black trans* theory to work against colonial taxonomies and the forced assimilation of the nonhuman world into rigid ontologies for material gain — or what I refer to as whitening processes.

The punchline is that not only are these all from the same journal, but they are all from the same issue of that organ. And that this is only one of many such diaries (the proper word) — funded largely by you via our great benevolent government.

March 19, 2026

District 9 and the Story of “Race”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 14 Nov 2025

Modern society has become a bit obsessed with the idea of race. District 9 subverts some of these assumptions and points at some of the ways that the entire concept of race is a product of the modern era. This one meanders a bit, but I suppose there’s no way around that.

00:00 Intro
02:45 Meet Wikus
05:42 Subverting Race
08:35 Bacon’s Rebellion and Trans-Racial Wikus
12:32 Let’s Talk About Rhodesia
14:48 Perspectives and Narratives
(more…)

March 1, 2026

Demythologizing the Windrush story

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

The Empire Windrush was a British ship that brought the first batch of many, many Caribbean people to Britain in 1948. This has been hailed as the foundation of a modern, multicultural Britain by many pop historians and, weirdly, also the moral equivalent of the Jim Crow era of US racial relations. It’s a Two-fer, allowing progressives to celebrate the multicultural aspects and also to declaim and performatively protest against the racist aspects. Celina101 discusses the Windrush myths:

HMT Empire Windrush in harbour. Originally launched as the Hamburg Süd line’s Monte Rosa in 1930, seized for use as a British troopship in 1947 after WW2. She was lost after an engine room explosion and catastrophic fire in 1954 and sank in the Mediterranean.

In June 1948 the HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury carrying over 800 Caribbean passengers. Today this moment is often hailed beginning of modern multicultural Britain, the founding “origin story” of a tolerant, diverse cosmopolitan nation. Yet a deep dive into the archives shows a very different picture. The British Nationality Act of 1948 (passed just weeks after Windrush set sail) did create a universal status (“Citizen of the UK and Colonies”) that legally allowed colonial subjects to live in Britain. But as one colonial minister emphasised, this was meant to reaffirm an older imperial principle, that a subject could declare Civis Britannicus sum (“I am a British citizen”) regardless of colour and was not expected to trigger mass non-white immigration.1 In fact, Attlee’s government and senior civil servants were privately anxious about non-white migration, seeing Windrush as an “incursion” to be managed. Contemporary cabinet papers and correspondence reveal that Windrush was essentially an accident of imperial law and circumstance.

Imperial Citizenship and the 1948 Act

The post-war British state’s conception of citizenship was still shaped by empire. In theory, as Lord Palmerston had put it, every British subject “in whatever land he may be” could count on England’s protection.2 The 1948 British Nationality Act (BNA) codified this idea by creating two categories: Citizens of the UK & Colonies (CUKC) for the “non white” Commonwealth and Citizens of Independent Commonwealth Countries (CICC) for the white Dominions. As a Home Office historian notes, the Act was largely a reaction to Canada’s new Citizenship Act and was intended to preserve loyalty to the Crown and the Commonwealth.3 In practice, BNA 1948 did not fundamentally alter migration rules: colonial subjects remained British subjects with the right to enter the UK, as they had before. Critics at the time even pointed out that this laid the groundwork for subjects of a newly independent non-white India, Pakistan and African colonies to become CUKCs, but that eventuality was not central to the legislators’ intent.4 As David Olusoga and others have observed, no one in 1948 “imagined that black and brown people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies would use their rights under this act to come and settle in Britain”. The law was conceived primarily for white Commonwealth citizens like the populations of Canada and Australia, with the assumption that the British Empire’s non-white subjects, without the resources or need would not make the journey.5 In short, the legal framework of imperial citizenship was nominally open, but the political expectation was that few colonials would exercise the right to relocate.

[…]

Inventing the Myth: Windrush in National Memory

How, then, did Windrush attain the status of a proud national genesis myth? Over the ensuing decades the episode was reimagined and commemorated in ways that the original participants surely did not anticipate. As historian Simon Peplow notes, “the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 has been cemented as a mythical central symbol for immigration in histories of modern Britain”.6 Newspaper narratives and politics in the 21st century cast the Windrush as the symbolic genesis of multicultural Britain. For example, literature and media (like Andrea Levy’s Small Island, 2004) linked the founding of a “shared history” to 1948, treating the Windrush landing as the first wave of a mass migration that made Britain what it is today.7 Over time this narrative was bolstered by public ceremonies: 50th- and 60th-anniversary events, the 1998 renaming of Brixton’s Windrush Square, and in 2018 the formal creation of a national Windrush Day (22 June) to “pay tribute” to the generation. Politicians and curriculum materials alike have repeated the line that Windrush marked the inception of modern Britain’s diversity.8

This retrospective framing treats the Windrush episode as a foundational myth, an origin story, and invoked to legitimise contemporary values of tolerance and diversity. In this constructed memory, loyal Caribbean war veterans returned to Mother Country to rebuild Britain, and British society (in hindsight) embraced them with open arms. Newsreel footage from 1948, often screened today, reinforces this sentimental image, the smiling Windrush passengers, calypso music, and patriotic commentary suggest an organised welcome.9 The reality was much, much more ambivalent.

  1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal-independent-research-report-accessible#about-this-report
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid
  4. Ibid
  5. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/24/the-unwanted-the-secret-windrush-files-review-who-could-feel-proud-of-britain-after-this
  6. https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/139720/1/WRAP-1997-Windrush-newspapers-Peplow-2020.pdf#:~:text=Abstract%3A%20The%20arrival%20of%20the,the%20manufactured%20centrality%20of%20this
  7. Ibid
  8. Ibid
  9. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/22/windrush-story-not-a-rosy-one-even-before-ship-arrived

February 10, 2026

Dispatch from the UK: Beatings will continue until morale improves

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

On his Substack, Ed West shares some of the highlights, lowlights, and WTFites of the last week’s stories from formerly Great, now Mediocre Britain, including the case of an American asylum-seeker, the state of the jury system, and Birmingham among others:

Image from the Foundation for Economic Education

The quintessential UK news story mixes the sinister and comical. As I put it last time: the “Yookay” has elements of authoritarian menace with total farce and incompetence, a slapstick comedy in which WPCs turn up at your house to arrest you over Facebook posts while your son sits in a classroom next to a 30-year-old Iranian man pretending to be a child asylum seeker. All the internet mockery of Britain in the past few years focusses on the theme of a bizarrely mismanaged country, run by people whose priorities are totally upside down.

In her recent Wall St Journal column, Louise Perry wrote about what she described as “Mr Bean Authoritarianism … after the comic character played by Rowan Atkinson, one of Britain’s most successful comedy exports. Mr. Bean is childish and incompetent. He constantly gets things wrong. He can’t understand the most basic facts about everyday life, which results in various slapstick disasters. The British government frequently manifests Mr. Bean-style incompetence but without his genial manner.” She wrote:

    “Pathways” isn’t the first example of government messaging that treats the British public like naughty children. In 2023, Police Scotland came up with another, much-mocked cartoon character called “the hate monster”. “Before ye know it, ye’ve committed a hate crime,” announced the voice-over, with an effect that was simultaneously sinister and risible. “You are constantly on the brink of criminalization,” the ad implicitly told us. “Now look at this silly cartoon.”

    Incompetence and authoritarianism are often bedfellows. Governments that frequently make mistakes will feel compelled to hide those mistakes, for fear of the public’s response.

[…]

Take a hike

“The British countryside will be made into a less ‘white environment’ under nationwide diversity plans. Officials in rural areas, including the Chilterns and the Cotswolds, have pledged to attract more minorities under plans drawn up by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). The plans follow Defra-commissioned reports that claimed the countryside would become ‘irrelevant’ in a multicultural society, as it was a ‘white environment’ principally enjoyed by the ‘white middle class’.

“More diverse staff will be recruited, marketing material will be produced featuring people visibly from ethnic minorities, and written in ‘community languages’.”

Isn’t English a “community language”? I’ve written about the War on the Countryside before; the powers-that-be are obsessed with getting Muslims to hike, for some reason. Just recently, a woman received an MBE for walking up hills while wearing a hijab. It all seems so counter-productive, increasing a sense of paranoia among everyone, when no one is stopping anyone from taking a walk in the countryside, and no one is going to give you a hard time. As Alexandra Wilson explains, some of this is downstream of the incentive systems within academia.

[…]

Official secrecy

One of the characteristics of the UK state, and which differentiates it from the US, is a tendency towards secrecy. I think it’s in the English character, which is why we basically invented spying, and are very good at it, give or take the odd communist traitor. This was most egregiously displayed by the government’s secret plan to airlift huge numbers of Afghans into the country, without telling the public, and it has become a regular feature of the criminal justice system.

Just last month it was revealed that a “reporting restriction was put in place at Nottingham Crown Court in September last year, preventing any mention of the defendant’s immigration status”. The man in question was from Pakistan and the authorities were worried about the risk of disorder, but he was unmasked by local Reform MP Lee Anderson.

This is the second time in a month where a British court has deliberately withheld the nationality of a rapist: “Last May in Leamington Spa, a girl was abducted and raped by two Afghan asylum seekers who had arrived by small boat just months before. Initially, Warwickshire Police described the rapists as ‘two 17-year-old boys from Leamington’, while referring to their 15-year-old victim as a ‘young woman’. It was not until the case went to sentencing in December that their backgrounds could be reported, after a legal challenge by the Daily Mail was granted. Meanwhile, the ‘horrific footage’ played at the trial has still not seen the light of day, with their barrister saying: ‘I have no doubt that if the general public were exposed to that, we would have disorder on our hands’.”

I don’t think the press habit of referring to foreign offenders as “Newcastle man” or “Burnley man” really helps the situation. All the details are immediately shared on social media anyway; it’s not the 90s any more.

February 5, 2026

“It was not fear of the crime that silenced authorities, but fear of a word: racist“

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

On Substack, Celina101 outlines the long and sordid history of official deliberate blindness to a widespread and horrific crime wave in Britain, all for fear that if they paid proper attention they’d be labelled as “racists”:

There are crimes so extreme that the mind instinctively rejects them, not because they are implausible, but because accepting them would require acknowledging a collapse of morality too large to comprehend. Child sexual abuse is one such crime.

Child sexual abuse does not arrive in a single form. It ranges from isolated abductions, to organised pornography networks, to violence carried out by parents or those entrusted with care. Every one of these crimes is horrific, and none should ever be minimised or ignored.

But there is one form of abuse that stands apart, not because it is worse in kind, but because it was allowed to flourish unchecked. The organised targeting of schoolgirls by groups of men who lingered outside schools, fast-food outlets, and transport hubs, grooming children into addiction, sexual exploitation, and prostitution, constituted a distinct and recognisable pattern of abuse.

This pattern was not hidden. It was not unknowable. And yet for longer than a quarter of a century, British authorities chose not to act. Despite the issue being raised at a national level as early as 2003, and despite its presence being well understood in certain towns since at least the late 1980s, it was deliberately sidelined, minimised, and left to metastasise.1

For decades, these gangs were allowed to congregate openly around school gates without consequence. What shielded them was not ignorance or lack of evidence, but an institutional terror of confronting anything that carried racial implications; the shade of their skin protected them.

By 2011, the long-standing silence surrounding the issue began to break. Once the initial barrier was breached, the extent of the abuse became increasingly difficult to suppress.2 Over the following years, British media outlets published a succession of detailed investigations that brought the scale of the crimes into public view.

In September 2012, The Times published an extensive overview of the phenomenon.3 The paper reported that for more than a decade, organised groups of men had been able to groom, exploit, and traffic girls across multiple towns and cities in Britain, often operating with minimal interference from authorities.

Yet, event The Times underestimated the scale of this. By early 2015, senior police figures were publicly acknowledging the scale of the crisis. One officer spoke of “tens of thousands” of current victims of grooming gangs. A Member of Parliament, representing a constituency widely associated with the problem, went further, suggesting that the total number of victims nationwide, past and present, could reach as high as one million.4

These figures are almost impossible to comprehend. They refer to school-aged girls systematically identified, isolated, and exploited over many years. And yet, despite the magnitude of the harm, perpetrators were able to operate with remarkable impunity.

By the end of 2014, the Association of Chief Police Officers confirmed that the number of victims each year ran into the tens of thousands.5 Even on the most conservative interpretation, this would place the number of victims over a twenty-year period well into six figures. Against this backdrop, the number of successful convictions, under 200, stands as a staggering indictment of the system meant to protect the vulnerable and enforce the law.

There is no comparable serious crime in modern Britain where the disparity between victims and convictions is so extreme.

  1. https://web.archive.org/web/20100620042427/http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/law_order/Asian%2Brape%2Ballegations/256893
  2. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/944206/Group-based_CSE_Paper.pdf
  3. Andrew Norfolk, “Police Files Reveal Vast Child Protection Scandal”, The Times, 24 Sep 2012.
  4. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/grooming-gangs-ethnicities-how-many-statistics-data-dpx2bfrts#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Cone%20million%E2%80%9D%20figure%20comes,over%20a%2070%2Dyear%20period.
  5. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-files-reveal-vast-child-protection-scandal-ffrpdr09vrv

February 2, 2026

Amelia continues to annoy and scare the UK establishment

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Leo Kearse mocks the establishment media folks who are just wetting themselves over Amelia’s malign influence on English youth, pushing such hateful themes as loving England, having a pint at the pub, loving dogs, eating bacon, etc.

Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism is a computer game created in collaboration with Prevent, the agency tasked with stopping radicalisation that could lead to terrorism.

It’s your usual state funded dopey social engineering, You play a non-binary college student called Charlie. You have to make it through college without being radicalised. Parents in the United Arab Emirates will no longer send their kids to London because they’re worried about them being radicalised by Islamists. So do you think that’s what this game looks at?

No, this is dealing with white Brits. The radicalised actions are things like “looking up immigration statistics” or “talking about English identity”.

Amelia is a character in the game. A purple-haired girl who tries to radicalise you into eating bacon because, like all young purple-haired girls, she’s a fascist.

This being Britain, people have taken the piss out of the game, because that’s what Brits do. The establishment is not taking the pisstakes well.

There are many people on the social media site formerly known as Twitter sharing Amelia memes and stories, including @Amelia, sharing bits of English and British history in bite-sized morsels:

GM Britain ☕

In 1696, England’s currency was in crisis. Coin clippers were shaving silver off the edges of coins, melting it down, and spending the debased coins at full face value. Around 10% of the nation’s currency was counterfeit. Riots broke out 🔥

Britain’s solution? Put Sir Isaac Newton in charge of the Royal Mint 🪙

Not just gravity, you see.

Newton recalled every coin in the country. Melted them all down. Reminted them with a reeded edge – ridges along the rim that made clipping instantly visible.

Before Newton arrived, the Mint produced 15,000 coins a week.

He had them turning out 50,000.

Then he went undercover. Disguised himself. Visited taverns and dens. Built networks of informants. Prosecuted over 100 counterfeiters.

At least two dozen were hanged at Tyburn.

The man who gave us gravity also saved the British economy.

That’s British ingenuity. 🇬🇧

One of the many variations of this image (original by John Carter, I think) amused me:

And another snippet of history via @Amelia:

GM Britain ☕️

In India, the practice of Sati was a custom that saw widows burned alive on their husbands funeral pyres. This awful tradition continued for centuries until Britain banned it in 1829. 🔥

Hindu priests protested: “It’s our religion!”

The British commander in India, General Charles Napier, replied;

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

The practice stopped.

🇬🇧

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.

January 30, 2026

“… now that the legend is fully established, good luck trying to convince people of the facts”

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

On Substack, The Scuttlebutt looks at an iconic photo, a sculpture based on the photo, and shows that the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is still quite true: “When Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend”

In an old black and white John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart movie called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper man tells the hero of the piece “When Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend”. Meaning; tell the people what you want them to know, even if it’s not true. We’re going to talk about that today; but first, Get in out of the cold damn it! Seven degrees is cold even by my standards. Grab a cup of coffee, or cocoa, tea if you must, pollute it as you will, and have a seat, Dinner is Chili, please remember the tip jar where we collect for the mess. Let’s begin!

I referred to the picture above last week, though I didn’t include it. I’m going to include it now, because of something that a reader and good friend of some four decades sent me, in regard to it. See, she lives in Birmingham, where there is a statue commemorating this event, titled Foot Soldier. This is it:

Notice any differences from the photo of the event? Yeah, the cop is the one grabbing the kid, and the dog is threatening, the kid is defiant, and the cop looks like they pulled him out of a Soviet or Nazi recruiting poster. (The article I will reference also calls out the fact that the kid in the sculpture has emphasized black racial features. The kid it happened to, is so Anglo in feature he could be a white guy in “blackface”. Oh and the kid in real life is every bit as big as the cop.) Those are just the initial things, there’s more, but I’ve made my point.

Yeah, you in the back, with the purple hair and the septum ring? What’s that? “But that’s art” you say? “Putting artistic license on the sculpture is reasonable” you say?

Well, Ma’am? I think you’re a Ma’am? Yes, it is. It’s propaganda, but “Art” is allowed to be propaganda, and in fact most art is just that. From the formal paintings of Kings and Heads of State, to Andy Warhol’s stuff, images are altered to make a point. Maybe to emphasize a chin that’s pretty weak in the real guy, making him look “tougher” or putting more jewelry on the woman than the family owns to make them look richer … Most art that isn’t just “an exercise for the student” has some sort of statement. (Note, I consider “still life with fruit”, and such things to be an exercise, teaching proportion and play with light.) Political caricatures are the ultimate expression of this point, and that cop is a political caricature.

Ah, but here’s the thing. While the “art” is reasonably a political statement, the news story, and the photograph are supposed to be news, and we have been told that “News is facts, not Op-ed”.

Well, we all know that lately, that’s just not so, but here’s the thing: It never was!

It’s not that the Media is lying to you today, it’s that the media has NEVER told the truth. It’s just that by the time the truth comes out, usually, it’s decades later, and no one cares.

But you SHOULD care. Take this event enshrined in legend (Remember that quote “print the legend”?) There’s a gentleman named Malcom Gladwell. He does a podcast called Revisionist History. The transcript of the relevant show is HERE as done by Emily Maina. The whole piece is really well done, and worth your time, but it’s about twenty minutes worth of reading, so I’m pulling out a couple of points to help make my point.

Mr. Gladwell was invited by the widow of the cop, to learn, as the late Great Paul Harvey used to put it, “The Rest of the Story”. This drove him to track down the artist that did the sculpture, the actual kid that was involved, friends of the cop in question, caused him to listen to the interviews done when the statue was commemorated, and so on. It seems the legend is far different from the truth. The kid in the picture wasn’t even part of the damn protest. He was a lookie-loo who had skipped school to come see “the great man” Martin Luther King.

The protests had at this point been going on for months. Constantly getting bigger, constantly drawing more spectators. The cops, specifically “the Birmingham Chief of Police, a troglodyte named Bull Connor”, in the words of Gladwell, have been tasked with keeping the spectators separated from the protesters. There was, after all, a legitimate fear that someone in the spectators might just be a Klansman, and might be aiming to take out some of MLK’s folks.

Well, that gets harder and harder to do, and the protester numbers keep growing, the spectators keep growing, until finally, Conner decides to use the K9 units to keep the peace. This is all a part of “the plan”. The protestors are trying to get the cops to do something that can be blown up and make international headlines. Finally, they succeeded.

The third of May, 1963. A photographer, Bill Hudson, gets a picture of a kid with a cop dog on him. White officer, black victim, mean dog. That’s what the narrative is. The New York Times runs it, three columns above the fold, and makes up a story to go along with it. The trouble is, no one talked to the cop, or to the kid.

The cop was Richard Middleton, his last gig had been escorting black kids to school, to keep them from being killed by whites. He’s been assigned now, to keep the separation line between the protesters and the populace. The kid’s name is Walter Gadsden, according to the person that interviewed him at the dedication of the statue, he’s now “a grumpy old man still wedded to some of the oldest and most awkward of Black prejudices”. She sees him as Stockholmed basically.

Walter, he sees himself as a dumb kid who skipped school, went where he wasn’t supposed to, and damn near got bit by a K9 because of it. Middleton was trying to pull the dog off, you can see it in the photo, if you actually look. But that’s not the legend, and the media prints “the legend”. The artist admits:

    Well, I saw that the boy was being about 6’4, the officer was maybe 5’10, 5’9. And I said, “This is a movement about power”. So I made the little boy younger and smaller, and the officer taller and stronger. The arm of the law is so strong, that’s why his arm is almost, like, straight. And the dog is more like a wolf than a real dog. Because if I’m a little boy, that’s what I would see. I would see like this superman hovering over me, putting this big old giant monster of a dog in my groin area, in my private area. And so, that’s what I envisioned when I first saw the photograph.

Of course, the artist is a black man. He continues: “So he’s almost like a blind officer. He doesn’t even see the kid, because he’s so far beyond that. ‘Killed this nigger. Attack this nigger.’ He saw past the reality of this is a hu-, innocent chi-, human child, a human being, that’s why he was wearing blind people glasses like that.”

Well, it’s art, the artist wasn’t there, never talked to anyone involved, and he told the story he wanted to tell. OK, that’s what art does. The trouble is, that’s also what the news media did.

And they got away with it, until July 6 2017, which is when the article in question came out. Actually, they are still getting away with it, because now that the legend is fully established, good luck trying to convince people of the facts.

QotD: Slavery in the Islamic world

Filed under: Africa, Books, History, Middle East, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As one recent study of the 19th century slave Fezzeh Khanom puts it, “The history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written”. A general history of slavery in the wider Islamic world had yet to be written, too — until Justin Marozzi took up the task.

The widespread neglect of the history of slavery in North Africa and the Middle East, which Captives and Companions seeks to redress, partly reflects a culture of American exceptionalism; slavery in other parts of the Americas (it was abolished in Brazil only in 1888) also receives little attention.

Partly, too, it reflects a tradition of denial in the Islamic world itself. Marozzi recalls a professor at Bilkent University in Turkey admonishing a younger historian not to dig too deep: “Our ancestors treated their slaves very well; don’t waste your time”.

In the West, meanwhile, Islamic slavery is an unfashionable — and often suspect — subject: one is reminded of West Germany in the 1980s, when any overemphasis on Soviet crimes against humanity could appear as an attempt to whitewash or relativise the Holocaust. Marozzi is careful not to dwell too much on comparisons between Islamic and Atlantic slavery, except as regards the scholarly attention which they have received. Still, many readers will pick up his book hungry for such comparisons. So here they are.

In both Islamic and Atlantic slavery there was a marked racial — anti-black — component. Slavery was sustained by similar religious and philosophical justifications: the biblical “curse of Ham”, for example, and the idea that geography and climate made sub-Saharan Africans naturally suited for servitude. “Chattel slavery”, Marozzi emphasises, existed in the Islamic world too. Both involved horrific violence and displacement. Both were complex and sophisticated enterprises, often with serious money at stake.

People have always been hesitant to draw any comparisons between Islamic and Atlantic slavery, albeit often for entirely opposite reasons to historians today. Whereas the Jewish-American writer Mordecai Manuel Noah was a vocal supporter of the enslavement of Africans in America, he was also bitterly opposed to the enslavement of Americans in North Africa — and therefore a strong supporter of America’s involvement in the Barbary wars.

Gladstone, meanwhile, thought that Turks killing and enslaving Europeans was far worse than “negro slavery”, which had at least involved “a race of higher capacities ruling over a race of lower capacities”. However dubious his family connections, Gladstone was born after Britain had abolished the slave trade.

The lack of attention given to Islamic slavery is all the more dismaying when one considers just how much longer it survived.

Most of slavery’s 20th century holdouts were in the Islamic world. Iran abolished slavery in 1928; Yemen and Saudi Arabia in 1962; Turkey — which we like to consider more “Western” than the others — in 1964. Mauritania half-heartedly abolished slavery in 1981. Slavery was still a feature of elite life in Zanzibar as late as 1970. When 64-year-old President Karume took an underage Asian concubine, he justified it by declaring that “in colonial times the Arabs took African concubines … now the shoe is on the other foot”.

The Royal Harem in Morocco, meanwhile, was only dissolved on the death of Hassan II in 1999. In the Islamic world, human beings were bought and sold, and forced to do demeaning and painstaking labour, within living memory; some people languish there still.

The key difference between Atlantic and Islamic slavery concerned status. Slaves in the Islamic world could rise to high places: 35 of the 37 Abbasid caliphs were born to enslaved concubine mothers; the slave eunuch Abu al Misk Kafur was regent over Egypt from 946 to 968. Slave dynasties, most notably the Mamluks, were amongst the most powerful in the Islamic world.

The polyglot governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, when he inveighed against “slavery in the Mohamedan states”, had no choice but to acknowledge that a slave in the East could attain the “highest social elevation” — a far cry from the black slaves of the West Indies. Some slaves, too, were amongst the worthies of Islam, such as the first Muslim martyr, Sumayya bint Khabat.

Slavery occupied a complex place in Islamic law. The Quran, on the one hand, permits men to have sex with female slaves. But on the other, the emancipation of slaves is smiled upon as one of the noblest things a Muslim can do. The Abyssinian slave Bilal ibn Rabah was freed by Abu Bakr and became the first caller to prayer; another freed slave, Zayd ibn Haritha, was briefly the Prophet’s adopted son.

The Quran also expressly forbids Muslims from enslaving fellow Muslims. Nonetheless, as Marozzi shows, this prohibition has not always been strictly observed. The Mahdi (of General Gordon fame) claimed to represent pure, Islamic orthodoxy, but he had no qualms about enslaving Muslim Turks.

Likewise, it mattered little that the Prophet Muhammad had explicitly forbidden castration of male slaves. For over a millennium his tomb in Medina was guarded by a corps of eunuchs. This, too, was an institution which survived into living memory: in 2022 a Saudi newspaper reported that there remained one living eunuch guardian.

Samuel Rubinstein, “The dirty secret of the Muslim world”, The Critic, 2025-10-17.

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