The hamburger is one of nature’s perfect foods, but people keep screwing them up. There are some clear burger rules that must be observed, like “A burger is made with ground beef and not some weird other meat or, worse, non-meat patty”. We’ll talk more about this in the future, as I care a lot about the subject of hamburgers, as opposed to, say, the harsh treatment of black-clad commie cretins in the Pacific Northwest.
Today, I want to share some real talk on the lesser lights of the burger family. Basically, hot dogs and Sloppy Joes are the Billy Carter and Mary Trump of burger-esque entrees. They are lesser relatives who should be at best ignored if not outright scorned.
Hot dogs are bad. They taste bad, they look bad – keep that icky cylinder away from me! – they are made of the best-left-forgotten bits and pieces of animals like snouts, hooves, and Ted Lieus. Perhaps their popularity is that they are easy to cook – throw them in water and you have both a soggy sausage and a gross broth. The kind of people who eat hot dogs by choice probably think like that.
Here’s the short version: Never speak of hot dogs to me.
And Sloppy Joes – what are they? What is that goop? It’s not chili, it’s not anything except ground beef with some sauce and I guess you can put mustard on it. A hamburger, which is food fit for an American, can also wield ketchup and mayo. But a Sloppy Joe? It’s just … nothing. I don’t know why they exist but they should stop doing so.
Kurt Schlichter, “Support Your Local Sheriff and Camouflaged Federal Officers”, Townhall.com, 2020-07-21.
March 17, 2026
QotD: The noble hamburger
February 20, 2026
QotD: The burden of “emotional labour”
Researchers at Stanford have finally given a name to something many women have been dealing with for years. It’s called mankeeping. And it’s helping explain why so many women are stepping away from dating altogether.
Yes, from the pages of Vice, it’s a men-are-the-problem-and-therefore-unnecessary article. Because we haven’t had one of those in weeks.
Mankeeping describes the emotional labour women end up doing in heterosexual relationships.
Lesbian relationships being entirely free of aggravation and disappointment, you see. With rates of failure and divorce twice that of heterosexuals, more than double that of gay male couples, and with high rates of alcoholism and spousal abuse. What one might infer from that, I leave to others.
[Mankeeping] goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress.
And,
Interpreting his moods.
At which point, readers may wish to share their favourite joke about female indirectness and the two dozen possible meanings of the words “I’m fine” when uttered by a woman, depending on the precise intonation and the current alignment of the planets.
Readers may also note the replacement of a once common but now seemingly unfashionable grievance – “Men don’t express their feelings” – with one of a much more modish kind – “Men are expressing their feelings and it’s exhausting and unfair”.
Holding his hand through feelings he won’t share with anyone else. All of it unpaid, unacknowledged, and often unreciprocated.
One more time:
All of it unpaid,
It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid”. As “emotional labour”. As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.
The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether”. Though possibly not in ways the author intended.
Before we go further, it’s perhaps worth pondering how the conceit of “emotional labour” is typically deployed by a certain type of woman. Say, the kind who complains, in print and at great length, about the “emotional labour” of hiring a servant to clean her multiple bathrooms. Or writing a shopping list. Or brushing her daughter’s hair.
And for whom explaining to her husband the concept of “emotional labour” is itself bemoaned as “emotional labour”. The final indignity.
The kind of woman who bitches in tremendous detail about her husband and his shortcomings – among which, an inability to receive instructions sent via telepathy – in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement. The kind of woman who tells the world about how hiring servants is just so “exhausting”, while professing some heroic reluctance to complain.
As I said, worth pondering.
But back to the pages of Vice, where Ms Ashley Fike is telling us how it is:
According to Pew Research, only 38 percent of single women in the US are currently looking for a relationship. Among single men, that number jumps to 61 percent. The gap says a lot. Women aren’t opting out of love. They’re opting out of being someone’s therapist with benefits.
Stoic, heroic women burdened by needy, emotional men. It’s a bold take.
And I can’t help but wonder what all of those single women, cited above, are doing instead of finding a suitable mate and building a happy life, perhaps even a family. Are they searching for a sense of purpose in causes, protests and political fashion, fuelled at least in part by envy and resentment? Just speculation, of course. But it would, I think, explain the tone and emotional convulsions of so many single, progressive women.
The Guardian calls mankeeping a modern extension of emotional labour, one that turns a partner into a life coach. This isn’t about avoiding vulnerability. It’s about refusing to carry someone else’s emotional weight while getting little to nothing in return. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling that way.
Again, the term “emotional labour” and its connotations of calculation, antagonism, and something vaguely inhuman. As if the concept of wanting to care, to help, to remember those birthdays, were somehow alien or offensive.
The reliance on this conceit – as the basis for an article, perhaps an entire worldview – doesn’t strike me as an obvious recipe for contentment, or indeed love. What with the endless cataloguing of shortcomings. All those reasons to resent.
Some men have started opening up more, which is good.
Ah, a glimmer of hope.
But too often, that openness lands in the lap of the person they’re sleeping with instead of a friend or a therapist. Vulnerability without boundaries can feel more like a burden than a breakthrough.
So, don’t bore your wife with your troubles, gentlemen. No, search out a therapist. Or, “Be vulnerable, like we asked, but somewhere else”.
David Thompson, “Let’s Be Alone And Unhappy”, Thompson, blog, 2025-11-16.
February 13, 2026
To be accepted as a true European, you must performatively hate Trump
In Spiked, Frank Furedi explains why European elites and the poseurs who aspire to be counted among the elites must now ostentatiously and performatively hate US President Donald Trump (even more than they hated George Bush, if possible). Comment on dit “eLbOwS uP”?
AI-generated image from AndrewSullivan.substack.com
In recent months, anti-Americanism has emerged yet again as a respectable prejudice in Europe. It is widely promoted through the mainstream media and enthusiastically endorsed by the continent’s cultural elites. There are now even numerous campaigns to boycott American goods – most respondents to a survey in France said they would support a boycott of US brands like Tesla, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. As a piece in Euractiv put it, anti-Americanism is “in vogue across Europe”.
This has become all too clear at the Winter Olympics, currently being held in northern Italy. At the opening ceremony for Milano Cortina 2026, Team USA and vice-president JD Vance were booed by a crowd of over 65,000 people. Someone I know who attended the event told me that the booing was spontaneous and quickly became widespread. According to the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, those booing were displaying “European pride“. It seems that for the Brussels elites, anti-Americanism bolsters Europe’s self-esteem.
The explicit target of this resurgent anti-American animus is, of course, US president Donald Trump. But it’s implicitly aimed at all those who voted for him, too. In a piece on boycotting American goods in the normally sober Financial Times, published last March, the author gave the game away. While saying it is “wrong to conflate Americans and their president”, he argued that “it’s [also] wrong to disentangle them entirely … Trump reflects half of America. He reflects a society where a democratic majority is prepared to tolerate mass shootings and a warped political system”.
Certain politicians are being boosted by this wave of anti-Americanism. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, in particular, has been turned into the unexpected hero of the European political establishment. His defiance of Washington has turned him into the posterboy for this new brand of anti-Americanism. “Europe has a lot to learn from Mark Carney”, was the verdict of the New Statesman. The Guardian echoed this sentiment: “Europe must heed Mark Carney – and embrace a painful emancipation from the US”.
Expressing anger against America appears to be the one emotion that binds the European political establishment. As one Financial Times commentator explained earlier this month, “Trump is Europe’s best enemy yet”. He has apparently provided Europe with the “common foe” it needs. It appears that anti-Americanism is now the glue holding together otherwise disoriented and divided European elites.
The reason usually given for this turn against the US is Trump’s behaviour towards Europe, specifically his threats to annex Greenland, impose tariffs and downgrade America’s NATO commitments. No doubt these policies have played an important role in putting Europe’s ruling classes on the defensive. However, they are not the leading cause of this wave of anti-Americanism. Rather, they have merely brought to the surface pre-existing prejudices deeply entrenched within Western Europe’s elite culture.
In his fascinating study, Anti-Americanism in Europe (2004), Russell Berman linked the growth of anti-Americanism during the 1990s and 2000s to the project of European unification. Berman claimed that, in the absence of an actual pan-European identity, anti-Americanism “proved to be a useful ideology for the definition of a new European identity”. He noted that the main way Europe defines itself as European is precisely by underscoring its difference from the United States.
January 20, 2026
Those awful AWFLs
On Substack, Rohan Ghostwind responds to a recent New York Times opinion from Michelle Goldberg pretending not to understand why “the right” is against Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFLs):
Michelle Goldberg recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times called “The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women”
Specifically, she talks about the rising contempt for the AWFL: Affluent white female liberal.
The first part of the opinion piece is a play-by-play of the Renee Good situation, pointing out that the right is freaking out about roving bands of Karens.
The part I find interesting is in the final paragraph:
It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like “White Fragility” seriously. So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy.
Here’s the interesting part: throughout the course of her opinion piece, she touches on White Female Liberal part. Conspicuously missing is the first part of the acronym: affluent.
This is par for the course for an NYT Opinion piece: play into the identity politics aspect while simultaneously downplaying class. This is, of course, a big reason why the Democrats lost ground with working class people during the 2024 election.
[…]
Rob Henderson popularized the term luxury beliefs …
And if it was ever one group of people who embody the most luxury beliefs per capita it would be the AWFL’s.
What makes them uniquely annoying is their persistent refusal to acknowledge how sanctimonious they come across to the rest of the world. As far as they’re concerned, they are the only intelligent and moral group of people, and they will eventually get what they want by scolding everybody else into submission.
People hate this, because people would actually prefer bigotry to infantilization — but the affluent white woman, by virtue of being affluent, never has to reality test her beliefs against the real world.
December 9, 2025
QotD: The development of army discipline and drill in pre-modern armies
The reason we cannot just call this “drill” is because while drill is the most common way agrarian societies produce this result, it is not the only way to this end. For instance as we’ve discussed before, steppe nomads could achieve a very high degree of coordination and synchronization without the same formal systems of drill because the training that produced that coordination was embedded in their culture (particularly in hunting methods) and so young steppe nomad males were acculturated into the synchronicity that way. That said for the rest of this we’re going to place those systems aside and mostly focus on synchronized discipline as a result of drill because for most armies that developed a great deal of synchronized discipline, that’s how they did it.
Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.
The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine. Roman commanders seemed to have thought somewhat better of their soldiers’ bravery, but assumed that harsh discipline was necessary to control, restrain and direct the native fiery virtus (“strength/bravery/valor”) of the common soldier who, unlike the aristocrat, could not be expected to control himself (again, in the snobbish view of the aristocrats).
In short, drill tends to appear in highly stratified agrarian societies, the very nature of which tends to mean that drill is instituted by a class of aristocrats who have at best a dim view of their common soldiers. Consequently, while the core of drill is to simply practice the actions of battle over and over again until they become natural, drill tends to also be encrusted with lots of corporal punishments and intense regulation as a product of those elite attitudes. And though it falls outside of our topic today it seems worth noting that our systems of drill to produce synchronized discipline have the same roots (deriving from early modern musket drill).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIa”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-17.
November 30, 2025
QotD: US illegal immigration, or, creating a new helot class
I see many comments to the effect that restricting illegal immigration will cause all sorts of shortages in agriculture and construction. I call bullshit on this for two simple reasons. Before the Great Replacement became enshrined into law in 1965 we had few immigrants of any sort and somehow we managed to pick our own cotton and build houses. We did it the old fashioned way – white and black Americans worked. High school kids would work the fields at harvest time. Black people didn’t have welfare so they did unskilled and even skilled work – bricklayers, lathe-and-plaster work, etc. Is there any reason we can’t do this today?
None whatsoever. The Democrats (which includes the Republicans) don’t know the word “helot“, of course, but that’s what all this boils down to: They’re importing a helot class. It’s probably futile, attempting to pinpoint the exact moment in time when America transformed into AINO, but my best guess is “The moment the phrase ‘jobs Americans won’t do’ was uttered for the first time”. Who the fuck are you, to declare that work, any work, is beneath you?
That’s probably the main reason America became a word-bestriding colossus: Our bone-deep belief in the fundamental dignity of labor. Well within my lifetime, “He’s a hard worker” was considered high praise, at least among people who were still Americans (as opposed to AINO-ites). He might not have anything else going for him, but he pulls his weight, and that’s enough.
What’s more, the LEFT understood this, well within my lifetime. I never tire of pointing out that you could read well-written, well-supported, logically airtight articles against illegal immigration in the pages of The Nation and Mother Jones, right up to the very end of the 20th century. The poor negroes, for instance, can’t “break the cycle of poverty” — a phrase never heard anymore — because all the jobs once available to them have been taken from them by illegals.
But somehow, the Left convinced themselves that the only “jobs” worth having involve clicking a mouse; everything else is an insult to their special wonderfulness. And since the Left control everything, that became one of the defining assumptions of AINO culture — if you can’t do it with a laptop, it’s for peons. Compared to “the laptop class”, the Ancien Regime were kind, tolerant social reformers.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2025-01-31.
Update, 1 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
September 22, 2025
Materially well-off but downwardly mobile
Rob Henderson considers the plight of an entire generation of kids raised in privilege, but economically incapable of improving or even barely maintaining their material condition … the downwardly mobile children of wealthy parents:
“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
.
For generations, Americans assumed that their children would live better than they did. Today, that assumption no longer holds. In fact, the higher your parents’ income, the less likely you are to match it.
According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there; more than one in 10 fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Similarly, a 2014 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that while 36.5 percent of children born to parents in the top income quintile remain there as adults, 10.9 percent fall to the bottom quintile.
Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke, argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. This may look like a trivial problem — the petty disappointments of a small slice of America — but the unhappiness of this group, raised to expect the world and denied it, has outsize consequences.
To be clear, this cohort has never faced genuine poverty. Still, they have experienced the sting of loss: They came of age after the Great Recession, watched job security fade as the digital economy made their skills obsolete, and learned that highly coveted jobs in academia, media, and politics were far fewer than promised. These disappointments, al-Gharbi writes, helped power the Great Awokening. Many disillusioned strivers aimed their anger at the system they believed had failed them, and at the lucky few who did manage to retain or enhance their class position.
Unlike the working classes they so often claim to represent, these downwardly mobile elites remain armed with the tools of their upbringing: degrees, contacts, cultural fluency. They may no longer have the bank accounts their parents did, but they retain platforms in media, academia, and politics through which to broadcast their grievances. Given these advantages — or perhaps the right word is privileges — it should come as no surprise that their concerns, which seem to the average American profoundly niche, have dominated the cultural conversation.
Some of this downward mobility is voluntary. Al-Gharbi notes that many young, college-educated people would prefer “to be a freelance writer or a part-time contingent faculty member rather than work as a manager at a Cheesecake Factory”. The dream is artistic freedom and flexible work. The reality is disillusionment when prosperity does not follow.
Such disappointment isn’t totally new. George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying follows a Cambridge-educated poet who abandons his advertising career, squanders his inheritance, and slides into genteel poverty. HBO’s Girls replayed the same theme for a new generation: Brooklynites with cultural capital but precarious incomes, simultaneously privileged and resentful. The details change, but the shape of the story remains the same — raised in affluence, buoyed by expectation, they discover too late that their choices and the system cannot sustain them.
What is different today, however, is how the disillusion now manifests itself. When reality disappoints those raised in privilege, the gap between expectation and outcome produces rage. Behavioral economics has long recognized this dynamic: Satisfaction depends less on objective conditions than on whether outcomes match or exceed expectations. And today, those expectations are far from being met.
Two years before Girls ended, sociologist Lauren Rivera, in her book Pedigree, found that graduates of lesser-ranked colleges who landed jobs at elite firms were far happier than Harvard and Stanford graduates who landed the same jobs. The reason was simple: Those jobs exceeded the expectations of the former, while for the latter they fell short. The higher the expectation, the sharper the disappointment. The harsh reality, then, is that privilege itself can encourage feelings of decline. When you’re born to — and surrounded by — overachievers, even respectable achievements can feel second-rate.
In a 2018 study, Duke sociologist Jessi Streib explored why many middle-class kids falter in school and work. Her finding was counterintuitive: Entitlement often dragged them down.
It’s not too hard to see why. Success in school requires showing up, meeting deadlines, and tolerating authority. Success at work requires completing projects on time, absorbing criticism, and cooperating with colleagues. Yet the downwardly mobile, Streib found, were often convinced such requirements were beneath them. Their grandiosity and defiance hastened their slide.
Elite overproduction is real, and has real world ramifications …
September 1, 2025
QotD: The Ivy League
The Ivies are now what they’ve pretty much always been — the equivalent of those Higher Party Academies in Moscow. They’re finishing schools for the Apparat. Oh sure, you can probably find a graduate of Ohio State or some such place at Quantico or Foggy Bottom … but I promise you, he hears about it every single day of his life. If they don’t actually teach classes called “How to be a Toady in the DOJ” and “Catching a Senator’s Farts” at Dartmouth, they might as well.
Take your Basic College Girl, make her unisex, crank her up way past eleven on meth and steroids, and that’s the typical Ivy League grad. And they all go directly into Government. Just in case you still cherished some vague hope we could vote our way out of this, remember that guys like Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were the absolute best the Ivy League has produced in the modern era. The Democratic People’s Republic of Vietnam says hi!
Severian, “First Mailbag of the New Year”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-07.
Update, 2 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
August 30, 2025
Flagging hopes
The English have been told by the transnational elites who happen to use London as one of their bases of operations that pride in the nation is, at best, old fashioned and at worst, racist/sexist/homophobic hate embodied. You could easily imagine Keir Starmer quoting Justin Trudeau that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada England” [and consequently that] “makes us the first post-national state”. I’m certain that’s very close to Starmer’s actual views, but it’s very far from the views of a lot of ordinary English people:
Suddenly flagging has become a big thing in England. Out of nowhere a social media driven grassroots movement of flaggers has emerged. Throughout England groups of newly emerging activist are hanging flag on lamp posts and painting red crosses on roundabouts.
Even in my sleepy town of Faversham, Kent the English flag of St. George could be seen one pole after another waving in the wind. One flagger tells me that “we want to make sure that our town becomes proud of its national heritage”. Another tells me, “raising the flag helps make us feel at home”,
There is little doubt the people supporting Operation Raise the Colours are not just in the business of confining their activities to one-off stunts. At the very least this grass roots movement is determined to challenge the nation’s local councils to value the English flag of St George and to cease being hostile to the flying of the Union Jack.
The movement of flaggers took off in Birmingham. Probably this movement would not have gained such prominence if it hadn’t been for the reaction of Birmingham’s Labour dominated Local Council to the sight of England’s flag flying of the city’s lamp post. The Council reacted by ordering the removal of the flags on the ground that they put the lives of pedestrians and motorists “at risk” despite being up to 25ft off the ground! It was evident to all that this Council applied a different standard of judgment in relation to the Palestinian flag, which are flown all over the City.
Birmingham’s flaggers, who call themselves the “Weoley Warriors” stated that their goal was to “show Birmingham and the rest of the country of how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements”. One local resident, Mrs Owens, a former police officer told the media; “I think there will be trouble, even riots if they take them down”. She added: “We are sick of having to apologise for being British. The flags have had such a positive impact on the community – people love them. There is nothing political about it.”
There is little doubt that Mrs Owens message has resonated with wide sections of the public. Supporters of the movement indicated that they were fed up with the situation where local councils were happy to fly the Palestinian and LGBTQ flags but not that of their nation. The movement of flaggers quickly spread from Birmingham to towns and cities throughout England. “Let’s bring back patriotism once and for all”, stated the Facebook page of Operation Raise the Colours, It urged members to post images of the assorted national flags of the four British nations “being raised around our great towns and cities”. In response groups individuals decided to form groups who took it upon themselves go out and do what they call “flagging” around their town.
There is also no doubt that the flaggers have provoked a hostile reaction from large sections of the British Elite, who regard the flaggers with contempt and never use an opportunity to issue warnings about the threat post by far-right conspirators lurking in the background. This alarmist rection was personified by Nick Ireland, the Liberal Democrat leader of Dorset Council who insisted that some residents found the sudden appearance St George’s and union flags “intimidating”. He added that it was “naïve” to suggest that these emblems had not been “hijacked” by some far-right groups.
August 27, 2025
Operation Raise the Colours
Gawain Towler on the groundswell of quiet patriotic display in England, against the active attempts by local governments to suppress any and all flag-waving or even flag-flying by the plebs:
It was a seemingly innocuous tweet during the 2014 Rochester and Strood by-election that exposed a deep cultural rift. Emily Thornberry, then Labour’s shadow attorney general, a paragon of establishment elite thought, posted a photo of a terraced house in Strood adorned with multiple St George’s Cross flags, a white van parked outside.
No caption, just “Image from #Rochester”. To Thornberry, the image spoke for itself: a symbol of backward, flag-waving patriotism, the domain of the “white van man” she and her metropolitan peers presumably viewed with quiet derision. She expected her audience to share the contempt, to chuckle at the vulgarity of overt Englishness. But the backlash was ferocious. The public saw snobbery, a sneering dismissal of ordinary lives. Thornberry resigned from the shadow cabinet that day, rebuked by Ed Miliband for disrespecting hardworking families. I played a modest role in that storm, forwarding the tweet to Guido Fawkes and The Sun, which amplified the outrage and forced the reckoning.
That episode, now over a decade old, feels eerily prescient as I contemplate the “raising the flag” phenomenon sweeping Britain in recent weeks. What began as scattered acts of defiance has blossomed into a nationwide movement: St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks hoisted on lampposts, motorway bridges, and public spaces from Birmingham’s Shard End to Tower Hamlets in east London, Southampton to Brighton, and even Cannock. Roundabouts painted red and white, zebra crossings marked with the cross, symbols of England asserting themselves in the urban landscape. Last night I cycled through London’s Labour stronghold of Lambeth, and road markings have been transformed with the St George’s Cross, a quiet but bold reclamation in one of London’s most diverse boroughs. Dubbed “Operation Raise the Colours” by organisers (though it is hard to describe the phenomenon as organised), it has seen thousands of flags raised, with fundraising efforts like Birmingham’s £16,000 drive sustaining the effort. I support this gentle uprising, for it breathes life into symbols long marginalised. Yet I acknowledge the disquiet it stirs: in a polarised society, such displays can evoke unease, linked in some minds to far-right agitation or the riots of summer 2024, that and deeper darker memories of NF marches in the 1970s.
Why is this happening now? The timing aligns with the anniversary of last year’s Southport tragedy and ensuing unrest, where misinformation, both from the state and other bad actors, fuelled anti-immigration protests that spiralled into violence. Many participants frame it as a response to “two-tier policing”, swift crackdowns on native demonstrations while pro-Palestinian marches proceed with apparent leniency. It’s a broader reclamation of national pride amid economic stagnation, unchecked migration, and a sense of cultural dilution. For the overlooked, those Thornberry’s tweet mocked, this is a way to say, “We belong here”. and stronger yet, but uncontroversial in any other land than our own, “This is our land”.
It’s contemplative defiance: not riots, but ribbons of red and white asserting identity in a nation where Englishness often feels like an afterthought.
August 17, 2025
To replace a people, first you need to induce guilt and self-hate
On his Substack, Frank Furedi discusses just how negatively the British establishment views the national flag and those uncultured boors who display it:
“Union Jacks and crosses of St George” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .
First a confession. I am not a serial flag-waver. In fact, one of the features of British history that I always appreciate is that its people possessed so much confidence about itself that it did not see the need for ostentatious displays of patriotism and flag waving. However, today matters are different. The nation’s cultural and political elites regard the Union Jack and the St George’s Cross — the flag of England — with embarrassment and studied contempt. Today many British institutions would rather fly the Palestinian flag or the LGBTQ+ or of Ukraine than flags that bear the nation’s symbols. Outwardly pride in Britain is in danger of being displaced by the sentiment of self-loathing.
Foreign observers are often surprised by the relative absence of Britain’s flag in public spaces. As one such observer noted recently, in Oxford Pride flags are outnumbered the Union Jack “by at least fifty to one”. He noted that the “next day in London, I saw Pride flags all about, with the Union Jack reserved for tourist sites like the Tower of London, which also sported Pride flags”.
In fact, the British Establishment’s reaction towards England’s flag is often communicated through the sentiment of ridicule and hatred. This sentiment has been embraced by local councils, particularly ones that are under the influence of Labour and the Lib Dems. Many of them feel entitled to prevent these flags from being displayed. Most recently the Birmingham’s Labour dominated council has ordered the removal of Union and St George’s flags from lamp posts in this city. The Council announced its decision to remove the flag on the ground that they put the lives of pedestrians and motorists “at risk” despite being up to 25ft off the ground! Needless to say, the Council applies a different standard of judgment when it comes flying the Palestinian flag, which are flown all over the City. Presumably this flag does not constitute a danger to motorists and pedestrians.
In Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city flying the flag of the nation is regarded by local officialdom as a risk to safety.
The British Establishment feels contempt towards not only Britain’s flags but also towards the people who enthusiastically identify with them with patriotic pride. An incident involving Emily Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South, in November 2014 captures well the contempt that significant sections of the British political class have towards the symbolic displays of patriotism. During a by-election campaign in Rochester, she posted a photo of a house displaying three St George’s flags, with a white van parked outside, and accompanied it with the arch caption, “Image from #Rochester”. The implication of her post was that those who decorated their house with the flags of England were a legitimate target of disdain. Since they were obviously morally inferior to her superior kind there was no need for a caption explaining this on her post.
Millennial Woes discusses how the contempt of the elites for the British people is leading to increasing possibility of civil unrest … or worse:
The short answer as to “why?” is that, even in mid 2025 when many people are sensing a mood developing, the government is still doing all the things that are bringing that mood about. They have no reverse gear. Despite their rhetoric, they are not reducing immigration and are certainly not doing mass deportation. In addition we have learned that, for years, they have been covertly propagandising us. Meantime the hate speech laws which muzzle us are still in force and being strengthened. Recently, the Online Safety Act came into force and the very next day numerous internet platforms had to start censoring content. We can literally see our oppression increasing in real-time. And even now, they want more. Always, we feel the government trying to stop us talking about its abuse of us. (Even as I type these words, I am aware that they could get the police raiding my home and seizing my devices.)
Image from Millennial Woes
The same is true in the media. This morning I heard that the BBC are making a high-profile drama about 11th Century Britain in which a key historical figure will be played by a Black actor. Our news media is still biased in favour of mass immigration at any cost. Adverts are still full of black-man-white-woman couples. It is relentless.
In business, White people are handicapped by preferential treatment for non-whites in employment, business loans and career opportunities. A few days ago I got an advert on YouTube featuring a business consultant woman who defiantly said “at the end of the day, diversity is the key to success”. Middle-class White people habitually work against each other and their group interests, causing personal failure and burning resentment for many of their ethnic kin.
It doesn’t actually matter whether the people who perpetuate all of this truly “believe” in it. What matters is that they are prepared to behave as if they do. The incentives have taken on a life of their own, become self-perpetuating, making alternatives almost illegal and certainly a guarantor of “social death” and “professional death”. Even with all the evidence that diversity is bad, nobody in the professional class will dare to speak against it because, even now, that would be the end of their career. And so the poisoning continues.
In short, I feel that my country’s mainstream is working constantly against my ethnic group surviving. Furthermore I see no end in sight for this ethnic sabotage.
And many other people think the same – more and more all the time, in fact. This is why they are getting ever more angry.
Among young people there are more reasons still, economic pressures which mean they can’t get on the property ladder and build the security to start a family. That is immensely frustrating for a lot of energetic young adults, and they haven’t got (haven’t been able to get) much to lose. When a society doesn’t facilitate this most basic desire in people, it should expect upheaval.
However, against this backdrop of oppression, dysfunction and madness, the main catalyst for civil unrest will be something much more concrete: refugees sexually assaulting White women and children. Such crimes are now occurring every day. Unfortunately, there is no reason why they will lessen in frequency. (I will not endanger myself further by explaining why. Everyone knows.)
And it is the fact that, indeed, “everyone knows” which makes civil unrest inevitable. It isn’t just spergs, theorycels, doomers, basement-dwellers and politics or race science obsessives any more; it’s the apolitical working-class who just want a decent chance at life. When they believe their own government is denying them that, it is inevitable that they will “rise up”. It is only a question of when, where, how and how many.
It has been pointed out that, during covid, the public didn’t “rise up”. But I say this was because, despite the restrictions and the perversity of that situation, throughout it people were still comfortable. Most importantly, they didn’t feel their children were in danger. That is the key thing. Dangers that never attended raising a child in Britain thirty years ago are now ubiquitous, even if you live in a nice middle-class town.
Update, 18 August: Welcome, visitors from Instapundit. Please do have a look around at 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.
May 23, 2025
QotD: The decline of the photography business
There are playful souls among them but they tend to be more than averagely earnest. There’s an historical reason for that. In the early days of photography it was derided by fine artists as mere mechanical trickery. Painters and sculptors thought of photographers as the Church had once thought of them — as low class artisans unworthy of respect and to be cheated of their pay wherever possible. In consequence photographic pioneers longed to be seen as artists too and paid a lot of attention to “serious” subjects and “social” issues.
[…]
In amateur photography, the comfortable pensions of teachers and university lecturers mean there are far too many of them in a leisure field that requires a certain amount of investment in kit — adding further layers of pseudo-intellectual pomposity, musty from a lifetime of never being challenged. I am a member of the Royal Photographic Society, but though I enjoy a few of its workshops from time to time, mostly find its members smug and insufferable. I hesitate every year before renewing. Its beautifully produced magazine, for example, unquestioningly peddles the conventional thinking of the BBC class. I have learned to appreciate the images while ignoring the priggish text around them.
Tom Paine, “Where we are and what we see”, The Last Ditch, 2020-05-20.
April 15, 2025
QotD: PhD delusions of (universal) competence
And the delusion of competence is truly a thing to behold. They expend enormous effort in maintaining it. Just as the “gender is just a social construction” feminist somehow retains her belief in this every time she has to call the stock boy over to help her lift the can of economy-sized kitty litter, so the other eggheads shrug it off when they have to call in tradesmen to perform the simplest household maintenance. I think I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth repeating as an illustration:
Back in grad school, I was invited to a back-to-school shindig at the Department Chair’s house. She made sure to tell us that the only toilet in the house (she lived in a breathtakingly restored Victorian; it must’ve cost close to a million all in) wouldn’t work unless you followed the elaborate five-step process she and her “domestic partner” had worked out over months of trial and error. Said process was helpfully taped on the tank lid for us. They were on the plumber’s list, she said, but it would be a while (“you know how those people are,” wasn’t stated outright, but very clearly, sneeringly implied).
I had few beers, the inevitable happened, and so I meandered upstairs to throw a whiz. After zipping up, I followed the elaborate handle-jiggling procedure … and, well, look, y’all, I’m far closer to those helpless eggheads than I am to Mr. Fix-it. I have ten thumbs, and thank god I never had to do one of those “spatial rotation” tasks for real back in grade school, or they’d have stuck me on the short bus. But even I know when a toilet float bobber is stuck. So I lifted the lid, turned the little screw, flushed twice more to double-check my handiwork, and went back downstairs to report my success …
They looked at me like I’d just contracted leprosy, y’all. Instead of being happy that I’d saved them a lot of effort, not to mention a fair amount of money, they were disgusted. I mean, I’d done a menial’s job. With my hands. On the one hand, I suppose it was proof that people with PhDs can master very, very, very basic plumbing. But on the other … eeeeewwww. I was a class traitor!
Severian, “Gettin’ Jiggy in College Town”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-08.
April 2, 2025
QotD: Restaurant wine etiquette
For extra points: if it’s a dark red like a cabernet or burgundy, wince slightly, then tell the sommelier to let it breathe for ten or so minutes before he serves it to the table. (That’s a cheat, by the way; all reds need to breathe a little after uncorking.)
The wine world is full of phonies who like to show off. The way to make people think you know what you’re talking about is to say less, not more. What you do (see above) is more impressive than what you say.
Kim du Toit, “Busted”, Splendid Isolation, 2019-11-25.
March 21, 2025
QotD: Gordon Brown and the “Gillian Duffy affair”
The linguistic chasm between Duffy and Brown spoke volumes about Labour’s turn away from its traditional working-class base. Yes, there was the word “bigot”, but, strikingly, that wasn’t the word that most offended Mrs Duffy. No, she was most horrified by Brown’s description of her as “that woman”. “The thing that upset me was the way he said ‘that woman'”, she said. “I come from the north and when you say ‘that woman’, it’s really not very nice. Why couldn’t he have just said ‘that lady’?”
One reason Brown probably didn’t say “lady” is because in the starched, aloof, technocratic world New Labour inhabited, and helped to create, the word “lady” had all but been banned as archaic and offensive in the early 2000s. Since the millennium, various public-sector bodies had made moves to prevent people from saying lady to refer to a woman. One college advised against using the word lady, as it is “no longer appropriate in the new century”. An NHS Trust instructed its workers that “lady” is “not universally accepted” and should thus be avoided. In saying “that woman”, Brown was unquestionably being dismissive — “that piece of trash” is what he really meant — but he was also speaking in the clipped, watchful, PC tones of an elite that might have only been 170 miles from Rochdale (take note, Guardian) but which was in another world entirely in terms of values, outlook, culture and language.
“I’m not ‘that woman'”, said Duffy, and in many ways this became the rebellious cry of the People’s Decade. She was pushing back against the elite’s denigration of her. Against its denigration of her identity (as a lady), of her right to express herself publicly (“it’s just ridiculous”, as Brown said of that very public encounter), and most importantly of her concerns, in particular on the issue of immigration and its relationship to the welfare state.
The Brown-Duffy stand-off at the start of the People’s Decade exposed the colossal clash of values that existed between the new political oligarchy represented by Brown, Blair and other New Labour / New Conservative machine politicians and the working-class heartlands of the country. To Duffy and millions of other people, the relationship between welfare and nationhood was of critical importance. That is fundamentally what she collared Brown about. There are “too many people now who are not vulnerable but they can claim [welfare]”, she said, before asking about immigration. Her suggestion, her focus on the issue of health, education and welfare and the question of who has access to these things and why, was a statement about citizenship, and about the role of welfare as a benefit of citizenship. But to Brown, as to virtually the entire political class, it was just bigotry. Concern about community, nationhood and the impact of immigration is just xenophobic Little Englandism in the minds of the new elites. This was the key achievement of 13 years of New Labour’s censorious, technocratic and highly middle-class rule — the reduction of fealty to the nation to a species of bigotry.
Brendan O’Neill, “The People’s Decade”, Spiked, 2019-12-27.
